It’s true.

The Surgeon General recently reported that playing live poker reduces your life expectancy by one week for every lame bad beat story you hear from a grizzled casino veteran. By sitting at a real, live, poker table you are subjecting yourself to a barrage off mis-, dis-, and pis-information. I dunno what pis-information is, but it sounds pretty bad.

Don’t Do What Donny Don’t Does: Play live poker. It’s certain death, as this graph proves:

In addition to all the viruses and diseases on the cards you get dealt at the poker tables, here are other reasons why playing live poker is killing you:

Cashing Out at the End of a Session

Playing live poker necessitates the need to buy-in and cash-out every session. While cashing-out is better than, uh, just heading home with an empty wallet, it affects you and reinforces results-oriented thinking.

Having to cash out at the end of every session forces the focus onto having a winning session instead of playing to maximize your profit. Ask yourself honestly, have you ever played a hand DIFFERENTLY near the end of a session than you would normally because of how much you are up or down that session? For example, you may have flopped a big draw that normally you raise with the plan of getting all-in, but because you are up and want to protect a win – you play much more passively. Or you are in a final hand with a mediocre pair, and you just give up because you want to book a winning session – and this hand threatens to turn a winning session into a losing one.

Maybe you are up a lot that session, so you spew on the last hand, maybe straddling when you normally don’t, or make a low percentage bluff in a desperate bid to win the pot because if you are called and lose, you still are booking a winning session.

Or how about the opposite? You have lot a few big pots, and are down to your last $87… instead of quitting, you just wait for a mediocre hand and disgustingly shove all-in in the desperate hope of doubling-up a few times to get back to even or to finally bust so you can go home?

The necessity of cashing out at the end of a session, forces you to focus on the session’s results, and not necessarily how well you played.

What’s the first question you get from a friend after cashing out? Isn’t it always, “So how much were you up today?” How come it’s never, “So did you play well today?”

Tip: Bring plenty of money (count it up so you know how much you are bringing) when playing live, and don’t keep track of how much you rebuy or top up your stack with. Cash out and add it to the stack you brought, and only when at home, after you’ve reviewed your play, count up your cash and figure out the results.

Lower Skill Level of Opponents

It takes a lot of perseverance to get money onto an online poker site. Either you have to fight your way through freerolls to win a small amount of cash or you have to jump through financial hoops to deposit money onto an online site. The effect is that generally you get a more dedicated poker player online than you do live.

If you are a casual poker player, you are much more likely to play a home game or a casino game than you are to try and find a way to play for real money online. Also, a significant reason for playing live is for the social, “fun” atmosphere of live poker.

This means that players playing live are generally more casual than online players. Casual usually means worse.

Additionally, when a poker newbie wants to sit at a casino and play poker, he’s forced to play some minimum stakes, generally $1/$2 No Limit or $2/$4 Limit, because smaller limits would just simply be unprofitable for a poker room to run. Even the worst players are forced to play these limits, since it’s either that or not play.

However, online, $1/$2 NL is on the edge of the transition from low-limits to mid-limits. It is nowhere near the bottom. There are not only levels for lower limits, but micro-stakes below it. This means unskilled players have a variety of lower stakes to find a game they are comfortable with. The bad players get spread out amongst the lowest stakes, instead of all being forced to play $1/$2 NL.

These factors mean that at equivalent limits, there is on average a lower skill level amongst live play.

I’ll never forget how bluntly this was made obvious to me, when I was playing $10/$25 No Limit game at the River Rock during last fall’s B.C. Poker Championships. It was the highest stakes game there that night. I played a combo-draw hand very aggressively, and it went to showdown. I revealed my hand, and it started a discussion about how many outs I had to beat the made hand. Three or 4 players at the table involved themselves in this discussion, and they all mis-counted my outs. Now, I can give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they didn’t see what my exact hand was, or what the flop consisted of specifically – but it was certainly an indication of a lack of technical fundamentals that would be extremely unusual at an online $10/$25 NL table.

Tip: Look to alternate sources, such as books and online forums, to improve your play.

Small Number of Hands

You receive only 30-35 hands per hour when playing live, sometimes much less. Even if you play for 7 hours, you can expect to only see pocket aces about once in that entire session. If you are playing NL, or even a Kill game in Limit, one single big pot whether won or lost, will have a huge effect on your net result for the session.

Being card dead can happen for hours, and that induces looseness and undisciplined play. One of my leaks when playing live was when I hadn’t played a hand for a while, it would make me want to win the pot when I finally did get involved in one. For example, I had raised pre-flop with AK and had missed the flop. Now I hadn’t played a significant pot in a long time, and when I got played back at, I decided to run a complicated bluff - which was a symptom of folding for an hour or two and simply being bored. But being bored cost me a lot of money in an unsuccessful bluff.

Online you not only get dealt hands much faster, but you can play more than one table at a time. Now when you lose a pot it’s not as big a deal, as you can often get dealt a big hand again with minutes. It’s much easier to be patient and way for the right spot.

As most regular online players know, the variance in this game can be staggering. While playing live it’s true that your edge can be much larger, the swings are still massive and can take tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of hands to even out.

This means that a live player that you always seem to see to be winning for months on end can easily simply be a mediocre player on a hot rush that’s nothing unusual from a statistical standpoint.

The small numbers of hands you get live makes individual hands much more important. Whether you get lucky or unlucky in those particular hands can shape your play style to your detriment.

Tip: Play both online and live to expand your knowledge base.

The Card Order - Rabbit Hunting

How many times have you seen a fellow playing at your table make an excruciating fold, and then immediately demand that the dealer show him the turn or river? Or BOTH?

Or how about the guy that folds pre-flop, sees the flop, and then turns to you and exclaims, “Man I knew I should have played that K3 offsuit, look at the flop – K33!”

The fact that the deck is ordered, and the cards “pre-determined” affects live players’ abilities to make rational decisions regarding their hands. It is simply bad reinforcement, incorrect feedback, and is results-oriented thinking.

Results-oriented thinking is bad, mmkay? Except when it’s good. Wait… it is good sometimes and bad other times. Did I lose you? Okay, here’s the deal – results-oriented thinking is not this but is a way of thinking about a poker hand with an over-emphasis on the results of the hand. The epitome of this type of thinking is “I won the hand, therefore I played it perfectly” or “I lost the hand, therefore I must have played it badly”.

This is because you have to make your decision BEFORE you know the future cards. Once you make your decision, hopefully the correct one, it doesn’t matter what the future cards are. Online this is much easier to accept, as the future cards are just images, and the river card might be pulled randomly from the remaining deck AFTER you make the decision – but mostly because of the sheer volume of hands you can play. It’s much easier to get a feel for what percentage of the time the flush draw hits that faster you get dealt flush draws.

Tip: Never, ever ask to rabbit-hunt, and when the cards are revealed anyway focus on the information you had AT THE TIME of your decision to review your choice.

No Tracking Hands and No Accurate Review

There is no record of any hand you play live. This means it’s up to you and your flawed memory to remember all the important details of a hand you played in the past. This means it’s much harder to review and improve your play. Often review is just limited to sitting there in your seat stewing after losing a big pot, thinking about what you should have done differently while waiting for the next playable hand.

And don’t get me started when you relay a hand you played to a friend. Very, very often details get lost, exaggerated, or minimized because of either mis-remembering or wanting to save face. You can find examples of this every time at a live tournament when people discuss the hand they busted out on. People will recount their hand under the pre-text of a strategy discussion but really all they want is sympathy for the “bad beat” they think they took.

However, online, it’s all recorded in black and white. You can review you hand history, which shows you exactly how the hand went down. Yes, there are things that can get lost – like your read, timing tells, or Poker Tracker stats – but online play allows you an infinitely better tool for reviewing your previous play, which is a crucial tool for improving your game.

Tip: Work on your memory – maybe develop a system to remember important factors, record hands in a notebook away from the table as soon as you can afterwards.

Thinking You Can Read Souls

We’ve all been there as a live game grinds to a halt as a player stares down his opponent for seemingly an hour, trying to get a “tell”. Reading physical tells are perhaps the most over-rated facet of playing poker. The majority of the information about another player’s hand comes from their range, betting patterns, pot and stack sizes. However, when you make a call because your opponent’s left ear is pulsing and the call happens to be right, it gives you that inaccurate feedback that I talked about above, and now suddenly you think you are Phil Ivey.

I remember a hand I played at a $5/$10 NL at the Bellagio. I had spent all day walking around Vegas outside in the insane heat, and thus was wearing only sandals, shorts and a T-shirt and now was spending the night playing poker.

There were 5-6 limpers and the SB completed. As I was in the BB, I thought this was a high percentage spot to make a big raise and take the pot. So I put in a raise to $120, and all the limpers folded. However, a good player in the SB paused a bit when the action got to him and just us two were left in the hand. He correctly determined that I was making a play, and he reraised me to $400. The action was on me. Now, I knew he was a good player, and I knew that my play of making a raise in the BB to take the limper’s money was fairly common amongst good players. I suspected he would figure this out, being a good player himself, and thus reraise me. However, I knew that if, with him being a good player, HE had a legitimate premium hand in the SB, facing those limpers, he would have made a big raise himself. No good player is going to just complete the SB with AA or AK after a bunch of limpers and let 6 people see the flop.

So I knew he was full of it. And I shoved all-in for $1,000.

He stared me down. After a minute or two, he confidently said to me loud enough so the whole table could hear how good a poker player he was, “It’s SO OBVIOUS what you have. I mean LOOK, your hands are shaking…you definitely have aces.” He folded.

He was right; my hands WERE shaking.

He didn’t realize two things: 1) that after sweating outside in the heat all day, I happened to get a seat directly under an air conditioning vent and was freezing my ass off in the cold casino and thus my hands were shaking from the cold, and 2) that I had 85 offsuit.

As I mucked, I laughed to myself, as this inaccurate feedback he had received was sure to make him look for shaking hands every time in the future when trying to figure out if his opponent had a good hand or not.

And I am proud to say I was able to withstand the urge to windmill the 85 offsuit face-up right onto the middle of the table the instant after he mucked while giving the big, brave, “I’m so awesome” speech.

Tip: Ignore tells, and work on your fundamentals first – a solid starting hand selection, a tight-aggressive style, hand ranges for opponents, and equity calculations.

Leaks Are Fine When Opponents Have Fissures

With the lower skill level of the opponents you play against live, it allows you to not fix problems with your own game and yet still be a significant winner. If you can beat a game even with significant leaks, where is your impetus to improve? How you do get practical advice from other players in the game, if you are already the best player? While adjusting to your opponent’s play is necessary and part of the game, it’s one thing to adjust to exploit their leaks, and to simply follow along and call a big pre-flop raise with 74 offsuit because you saw a fish win a big pot that way. Even though you may be one of the best players in your live game, you most certainly can still improve many areas of your game. Regardless of how good your results are, always keep looking for spot to work on your game.

Tip: Don’t let the inferior opponent’s play affect your own for the worse. Take pride in making good decisions, such as folding hands pre-flop that others may play.

Drinking, Fatty Foods, Environment

I hope I don’t need to go in depth into this one. Hey, if the most important reason you play live is for the fun and social aspects of it – fine – go nuts! But if you are trying to take it seriously, and play fairly often, try and minimize the amount of drinking and the amount of junk food you eat. Take frequent breaks and drink lots of water.

Spending 40+ hours a week in a casino eating fatty foods and drinking alcohol is literally killing you.

Tip: Make it a habit to work out or play a sport before heading to the casino for an 8-hour session. Minimise the amount of alcohol you drink at the table, and look for healthier alternatives in food.

Rake, Tips, Casino Games

Many winning poker player spew money in the pit playing table games like blackjack, craps, and slots. Don’t make it a habit when you are playing poker at a casino. Sure, occasionally with friends it’s fine, but if a part of your routine after playing poker is to hit the table games on the way to the cage, that’s now a bad habit. Less malicious are the large rake and the tips for food and drink. I’m not saying don’t tip the waitresses or dealers, but just realize that between rake and tips, it adds up to significant amounts – and you don’t have anywhere near these costs online.

Tip: Play more online.

Please, Save Yourselves!

Please, stop playing live! I have given you many reasons why it’s killing you, please save yourself while you still can! Don’t fall into the mandibles of casino poker rooms and $10 home-games!

See you online,

Pete

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