Good poker players need a good deal of skill and expertise. To win at poker you need to have a really good memory and the ability to accurately read other people whilst all the while maintaining your own unfailing ‘poker face’. Given all this, you have to wonder how online poker rooms can work – if the main skill involved in poker is reading other players’ expressions and body language, surely playing online against unseen opponents would make it impossible to win? But this could work both ways, and being invisible to your opponents could make it easier to keep that poker face even if things are going really badly.
Either way, playing poker online is a very different game. If nothing else, poker sites like Full Tilt Poker have brought the game to a much wider audience and give them the chance to bet as much or as little as they like. Playing online it’s much easier to bluff and take risks, as the other players can’t see you so won’t be able to tell if you’re telling the truth. The downside to this is that you can’t see them either and have no way of telling if they have been dealt a good hand. You have to rely a lot more on memory alone but after a few games you can become just as skilled at online poker as the real game.
The biggest risk of online poker is that an inexperienced player who lost money on a poker site could find themselves going back again and again trying to win until they have nothing left. But provided you limit yourself to betting only what you can afford to lose then playing poker online could be a great chance to have some fun, make some money and learn something new. The only disadvantage to playing on popular sites like Party, Betfair and Absolute Poker is that they make their money by taking a cut of every pot, called the rake, as commission. It’s worth looking around for a good online poker deal before signing up to a poker room, sites like raketherake.com offer good rakeback deals for most of the main online poker rooms.
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