Every Online Players Worst Nightmare

I have seen it literally dozens of times and heard it more times than I can care to remember. That is an online player speaking about how they would really like to try their hand inside a real card room. The advent of online poker has brought untold numbers of new players into the game but the experience that many of these new players have has been solely in online poker and nothing else.

Sure you can have a great time playing live and it is a far better all round poker experience than playing online that’s for sure. But there are hidden dangers when playing live that may not be overly apparent to our online hero. Depending on where you are playing of course and against whom then the level of danger can differ substantially but rest assured that there is danger there all the same.

You may be up against players who are very experienced and streetwise who will stop at nothing when attempting to try and get your money. In this article we will be taking a look at some of the underhanded tricks and gamesmanship that the online player could potentially face.

Overbetting the Pot

Online players do tend to get soft in certain key areas of the game simply because they get used to the online poker sites software doing everything for them. The software deals the cards, shuffles the cards better than any human could, keeps track of the pot and any spilt pots and a whole host of other things. If you are playing pot limit poker online then you really cannot go wrong. Most sites have a “Pot” button that will automatically bet the pot for you and it will also not allow anyone to overbet the pot in pot limit as well.

But this kind of luxury is not afforded to live players in many games, most of who have to keep track of the pot size themselves. Most poker players tend to police the games that they are in very well and in many cases better than even the very best dealers can do simply because they tend to know best when it comes to knowing what to look for.

But in cash games where cash is being used instead of chips or a combination of cash and chips then keeping track of the pot is not always easy and the other players may not be so quick to point out any “deliberate” error when another savvy player “accidentally” bets £740 when the pot is only £620. Imagine the scenario where they have the nuts to your second nut. This tactic of overbetting the pot has escalated the next betting round substantially.

Imagine if this was done on the turn and your opponent bet and you called him. Instead of there only being £1860 in the pot there would now be £2100. Then on the river they bet the pot and you called with your second nut (or even raised), instead of the pot being £5580 it is now £6300. A difference of £720 all because you failed to notice that the pot was being overbet.

Disguising their actions

Whenever a player is playing poker online then has already been mentioned, the software does basically everything for you except make your decisions. But there are other areas that need to be attended to in a live game that many online players simply take for granted. For instance, because you can see all of the cards on the screen at any one time then you are always aware of just who is exactly in the hand at all times. You also know whose turn it is to act, how long that player has left to act and how much they have on the table in terms of money.

But the sheer lack of this built in facility in a live poker game opens up all kind of avenues for unscrupulous players to exploit it and believe me when I say that certain players would not think twice about doing such things. Certain players will try and disguise the fact that they have any cards on the table, either by obscuring them with their hands or possibly with chips.

They do this to try and prompt a reaction from someone (either betting or checking) that they otherwise would not have got had they realised that they were still active in the pot. Some players deliberately attempt to cause ambiguity by checking in a manner that could easily be mis-interpreted. Then if you check after they “check”, they can then claim that they never checked at all and had intended to bet themselves.

There are all types of possible angles for the opportunist to exploit and it only takes the novice and inexperienced player to be the victim of one such trick on only one occasion to be on the receiving end of a serious financial loss. It is for a similar reason why certain players like to disguise how much money that they have on the table either in cash or chips or both. Imagine for a minute how destructive it would be if a player who was playing No Limit Hold’em tried to bully what he thought was a short stack out of the pot with a big all in bet of say $1000 only to then find that his opponent had four one thousand dollar chips concealed at the back of his stack.

 If the all in player had declared himself “all in” then his bet is binding but he only made that bet because he believed that his opponent only had a further $1000 on the table.

Concealing your hand

This might seem very obvious but it is surprising just how many players in card rooms are careless when it comes to exposing their own hand. Once again this is something that the online player never has to worry about because the software does this for him. But there is a certain amount of technique involved when attempting to look at your own hand and doing this badly or perhaps carelessly can end up costing the novice live game player an awful lot of money.

At the end of the day, it is your responsibility to look at your cards in the securest way possible and any information that you carelessly give away to the other players is even more ammunition for them to use against you. While most poker players do not go out of their way to get a sneaky peek at an opponents hole cards, others do and the card room rookie needs to keep a keen eye out for this.

Watch those tells

Your aces have just been cracked by an opponents J-9, the very next hand and that very same player hits an inside straight draw on the river to beat your flopped top set. You scream and shout at your computer screen and in the comfort of your own home then there is no real harm done as long as it does not lead to tilt of course. But revealing your emotions during a hand can get to become a habit.

It can be a release from certain negative emotions like anger, disappointment, despair etc etc. We can go through a whole range of emotions in online poker and no one ever gets to see us. You may say that it is rather obvious that those same emotions cannot be repeated in a live poker game but just how easy is it to conceal the subtle emotions that we all exhibit from time to time.

Would you be fully aware that when you looked at your hand and saw aces that your face did not register excitement even if only briefly. Could you say for certain that when that dream flop that you had hoped for failed to materialise that your face did not have a picture of disappointment written all over it. Or turn that around and you did in fact hit that dream card and suddenly your entire bodily posture altered as a result. You suddenly sat forward and grabbed your chips in anticipation of action, would you be aware of this.

Non of these tells involves speaking and yet they give almost as much away as if you had turned your hand on its back and showed it to the entire table. Concealing your body language is a serious problem for many online players who are new to the live game arena. It would not be such a terrible idea to actually sit with a mirror facing you and a tape recorder taping what you say the next time that you play online, you may just be shocked by what you find.

Watch that Tilt

Most people agree that tilting is much more of an issue online simply because you can do it with anonymity and nobody ever gets to find out that it was you. Players tend to put more of a front on in live game play simply because they do not want to look foolish. But in online play when another player becomes abusive then all they can do is type something into the chat box. In many cases, you may even have your chat box function turned off and would not in a position to see it anyway.

But live game play is different…very different! If you outdraw someone and they get upset and become abusive then they could be sitting right next to you and shouting into your ear. Many people find this type of behaviour very intimidating and it is common in card rooms. At least with online play you do not have to endure the vulgarities of a particular persons personality.

But certain individuals will abuse you in various ways just to see how you react. This can cause tilt with certain people because after all, tilt is caused not when a person is happy but when they are upset. This is something that all online players need to be aware of whenever they play live poker. It is certainly not a place for the timid and the shy and sensitive types.

Propositions

Let’s face it, despite the vast efforts to make poker respectable and clean, it is still populated by many shady characters and individuals. I don’t tend to play live poker anymore and concentrate exclusively online these days simply because I can earn more money that way. But I have played in countless live games both in casinos and in private cash games and I have lost count of the number of times that I have been propositioned or been asked for money.

Having worked in the gambling industry for twenty years and inside casinos for nearly ten then I am fully aware of some of the utter low life that can inhabit them. There are people constantly looking for some soft touch to borrow money from or some excited winner to tip them all because they happened to tell them the winning number on a particular spin at roulette.

I have had all kinds of propositions down the years from being asked to collude to being asked to get involved with cheating teams to insurance scams….I have been approached more times than I can care to remember. The online player needs to be prepared for any such approach and to decline whatever gets proposed.

If you happen to be winning money or just happen to have a substantial amount of money on the table then you will be targeted even more. More often it will be someone just simply asking to borrow money. Simply do not do this unless you happen to know the person very well. Don’t take my word for it, there are thousands of people up and down the country who have loaned money out to people only to then never see them again or struggle to get it back. Most people in casinos are gamblers by nature and these are hardly the types that you want to be lending money to anyway.

Collusion

Collusion of course happens in online play as well but the major sites take substantial steps to detect this and have sophisticated software to back that up. Collusion online can be easier to detect in many ways because it leaves a highly traceable footprint by way of hand histories which can be carefully examined to see if anything out of the ordinary is going off. But in live play, collusion is much more easily carried off by the perpetrators as the cards and hands cannot be checked afterwards. I have been on the receiving end of collusion in several card rooms in the past so I am perfectly aware of just how rife it is. It can be especially the case when you are playing for sizeable amounts of money and outsiders and new faces can be especially vulnerable and even more so when they are not perceived as being part of the “clan”.

Many locals who know each other involve in simple things like soft playing which is the process of not playing a strong hand aggressively right the way through to the river if necessary. This also happens frequently as well and especially by people who know each other. I would strongly advise anyone who had never played in a live game before to either do one of two things or both for that matter.

One of them is to make sure that they know the players around the table very well and if that is not possible then do not play for stakes that are too high until you find your feet and get to know the players it is as simple as that. Poker knowledge and skills count for nothing if you are up against a stacked deck.