After playing poker for a long time, both online and offline, I have to tell you – I love online poker! When I started out playing back in the days, Internet didn’t even exist and if someone would have told me that in ten years you will be able to play poker on your computer with players from all over the world I would have laughed and called them crazy.
The Internet revolution
But the Internet revolution came and changed poker forever. In the beginning I was skeptic and couldn’t really see how you could play poker against someone who wasn’t sitting across the table. I mean what happens to tells, social interaction and so on?

Still I realized that I had to see what all the fuzz was about and once I tried online poker I was hooked. The first site I played at was the classic True Poker a poker room that was using realistic avatars, movements and sound, ages before PKR came along. But it wasnt until I found Party Poker that I got my real online schooling. The action at Party Poker was fast and loose – and still is. Man I loved the sit n’ gos, even at the $100 level, which was pretty high back then, the action was crazy. Before two rounds were over half the field was usually busted – and a solid player like me could make some serious money. But it wasn’t only the great action that hooked me; I also realized that online poker had some big advantages that could be exploited.

The advantages of playing online
You could take notes of your opponents and their style of play. This was before the poker rooms incorporated the note taking option in the poker software. At first I was using a notebook where I wrote down the information by hand, but it was hard to organize and I started using Excel instead. That the detailed recollections of my opponents’ actions had a great impact on my bankroll is an understatement.

Another novelty online was the speed. I could play more than twice as many hands per hour online as I could at my local poker room – and this was only at one table! This together with the possibility of multi-table play fundamentally changed the way poker was played.

Multi-tabling
Multi-table play is different in many ways, and there are both advantages and disadvantages. The major disadvantage, as I see it, is that it is impossible to have the same level of knowledge of how your opponents play. But even though this affects your winnings at the table, the fact that you can play several at the same time more than makes up for it. The major advantage is that you won’t get bored playing tight, solid poker, which is good news for a rock like me.

So all that I can say is that I am glad that I was wrong – I fell in love with online poker once I tried it and have never looked back since.

Mike G.