I just dont get it!!!
I play a profitable game in the manchester casino's. Im top of my local pub league and I have invested years of my life reading,watching and learning the game as much as possible.
HOWEVER!
I must be the most unluckiest player ONLINE rite now! It seems that no matter which style of play i bring to the table it all results in the same 'bad beat' story!
Please dont think this is just a rant due to a bad night! No i mean its never ending at the min! Live im playing good/profitable pkr but online, No hands are holding strong for me!
You all know the story... AK against AJ, jack falls! #.... Set of K's crushed by river broadway ect ect. Im litterally bored of it now! I dont know what to do anymore? Please sky poker players, give me advise or a even better a sollution?
Comments
1) Playing live, people don't like to look a wally in front of others. That mean they play a far more narrow range of hands. This means showdowns tend to be between the stronger range of hands and are more attributable to coolers. These showdowns are also far less common live than online.
2) You play a greater number of hands per hour on an online table than a live table. That naturally means seeing more bad beats.
3) You probably play lower stakes online than you do live. If you're playing a 50p/£1 live table, people are obviously going to be less willing to put money in than they are on a 2p/4p table. So you see fewer raggy hands played and fewer dodgy calls. If you see fewer dodgy calls, there's less opportunity for bad beats.
Frankly, live games tend to be weaker than online games at equivalent stakes. People playing live tend to be doing so more as a social occasion, while there are many more semi-pro and pro players online at any one time. There also tends to be a bar in casinos. That does make it easier to beat the live games.
If you're not beating the lower stakes of online poker, it's likely to mean that the fundamentals of your game are not very good. It may just be that you're not adapting to your opponents' willingness to call down light and so are bluffing too much. It may of course be that you're just having a bad run, but this would not explain long-term losses.
We all need to be honest with ourselves about our ability and constantly work on our game. It's just the truth that only a small proportion of players can actually win in the long run. If we want to be one of those winning players, we need to put more effort into improving our game than the majority.
So with that I would like to apologise if I upset you and will gladly offer any advice I can. If it's cash games forget it as MTT's especially deepstacks are my area.
Edited to say: I've just seen your response to Borins post. That was not visible to me last night as we appear to have been posting at the same time. If I had seen your reply I would have known you weren't a newbie with 1 days experience of online poker. (Which I assumed you were)
Welcome to the community.
It can take a lot of time and hard work to become accustomed to playing online poker, there is big difference.....
Lets make a start with these few to begin with....
1. Starting Stacks online compared to live poker
Standard Sky Freezout £5.50 Entry is a 2K Starting stack @ Blind Levels 10/20 = 100 BB's -
Live we would be looking at 15-20K starting stack, some are 7.5K and the blind structures differ to the deeper stack tourneys.
2. Blind Levels online compared to live poker
Blind levels in a standard Sky Freezout are 10mins compared to 30-40min clocks live, so invariably the online format is much quicker. This leads to making quicker decisions and decisions which sometimes we would not ordinarily make live.
We can also see ouselves playing hands which we would normally fold live and I would say this is usually attributed to the quicker format and the need to accumulate chips at a faster rate.
3. Decision time online compared to live poker
We have just 15 seconds to decide if our hand is playable online, compared to a much more relaxed pace live. This can lead to poor decisions online even for the more experienced players imo, however, once we adjust to it our decision making will become much better over time.
4. Skill Factor/Level of players online compared to live poker
The skill set of online players at lower stakes can be different to what we would expect from live players. At the lower stakes we are going to see plenty of calling stations and calls with a wider variety of hands. Consequently this means if we are unable to get them off a pot, then we will see them get there more often, so we need to make adjustments and adapt our game to compensate for this.
5. Player Reads
Its much harder to get a read on players online compared to live. First of all we only have their betting patterns to go on, but over time if we come accross the same players we can add notes. The structure is also much quicker online and before you know it, you have been moved to a different table with different players and we have to start the whole process all over again.
When we are playing live the structure is much slower and we spend much more time with the same players at our table and this can make our reads a whole lot easier.
Playing cash online rather than MTTs is a much closer comparison to live poker as we will spend a lot more time with the same players at our table. So I would advice anyone who is just starting online poker to get accustomed to beating the cash tables before moving onto MTTs.
These are all factors & exmples which have affected my game online over the years compared to live poker. Sometimes its best to go back to using the ABC of poker to start with and gradually add all the fancy stuff like 3 barreling etc back into your game at a later date when you are much more comfortable with the online format.
Best of Luck at the Tables
always bad beats on here just had one myself, had AA and went all in, 1 caller he had 8c 6d, i hit ace on the flop, but gues what came out???????? 4 club cards gave him a 2flush.
and ime ripped off again.
fchd
you say try training sites but really the ones I've been on even they have got the problem in that they normally based upon play at full ring table I find very few that really have much on 6 max which is the only size tables on sky.
I've seen it quoted on here loads of times over the last few years that between 5-10% of players win so I went with the conservative 10% as it's still a big minority.
I'd imagine the vast majority of players online lose money, I don't know what the exact %s are.
Variance can suck at times, but the way you get through it is by putting the volume in ( assumin that you're playing a long term profitable game). If its over just a few weeks you're talking about then its too small a sample to gage anything really. If you're still losing after 250,000 ring game hands or over a sample of 1000 MTT/STT then it's probably because you're rubbish but you're just using the beats as an excuse as to why you're losing.
Obviously only you know that.
+1 @borinloner