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How does online poker with real money differ from play money?
In terms of how you play, maybe even how good other players are, how good of an estimate of how you'll do in real money play is fake money play?
Public Comments
- Play is much, much, much looser at play money tables than real money tables. People are much more willing to just screw around when no money is at stake.
- i really dont think theres that much of a difference. the longer you play on a website like fulltilt or pokerstars, the more you realize how bad some people play. theres good players with fake money and theres terrible players with real money. its just a coin flip.
- I think it depends where you play. If you play for play money on a site like Facebook or MySpace, all you get is a bunch of kids playing badly. I call it slot machine poker. They just keep putting money in the pot and hope they get lucky and hit a winning hand, while ignoring the concepts of good play and math. My favorite site for play money is Poker Stars; the largest online poker site in the world. The play money on there is hard to come by. There are even web sites where you can sell play money chips for real money. They have various levels of play money, and certainly the 'high stakes' play money tournaments and 'cash' games involve some fairly decent play. After all if you are buying into a tournament for $200,000 in play money (you only started out with $1,000), then you have to have earned those chips somehow. As a result the standard of play is at least as good as a real money $10 tournament in my opinion. So clearly people do play looser on play money tables, but if you work your bank roll up to a few million, it is certainly a useful learning tool, and will prepare you for some low stakes real money games.
- Play money poker is a sick and twisted version of the actual game of poker. The players have a very wide range of ability. Many of the players on play money are just learning how to play the game and have no clue how to value hands. If their hole cards are seven deuce and the flop comes ace king deuce, they will not get out of the pot for anything. And why should they? As far as they are concerned they have flopped a pair and they are definitely interested in seeing how things will develop. I played a lot of play money online and a little bit of real money. Mainly I played one table sit & go tourneys with six players. In play money my return on investment was typically 100%. So if I bought into ten tournaments at $10,000 each, typically over the course of those ten tournaments I would make a $100,000 profit. When I moved to low stakes real money I still saw bad players but not as many as I did on the play money tables. So, it took longer for players to bust out of tournaments and it was a real struggle getting into the money. I had to overcome both the rake and the skill of my opponents. I still made a small profit on real money but my return on investment was nowhere near what it was on play money. It was around 20% on real money. This was on low stakes tourneys with buy ins of $10.00 or less. If you can run up your play money balance to over a million and can succeed at some of the higher stakes play money games, you are probably ready to get your feet wet at low stakes real money. Good luck!
- I usually agree with ZCT but no matter where you play in terms of play money it is too far removed from real money to be of any use other than teaching you very bad habits. On some sites like Poker Stars the free money players will play tighter but if you compare that to the real money play on the site there's still a huge difference. Even a little looser can throw you off and I've seen players who do well at looser real money sites do badly at the tighter ones like Poker Stars just because they are used to looser competition. Now with the play money games we're talking looser than this to a mind boggling degree. No matter how well you do at play money this means nothing in the real world so to speak. All you have to do is fold more often than the clowns you're against, who have no real reason to fold as they can get more chips for free anytime. There's less reason for you to fold as well though as the wild play actually makes chasing a lot of hands profitable where only an idiot would do this with real money. If you're looking for practice you can find real money games as cheap as 1c/2c limit and even at stakes this small there's a world of difference as these players guard their pennies closely as they don't want to have to make another deposit, as opposed to just clicking and getting a free rack of chips. Of course the competition gets stronger as you move up the levels but not as much as people think and these micro limits are excellent training grounds, and since you're going to lose for a while as you learn how to play, it makes sense to keep your losses small even if you have a lot of money to work with. The Ultimate in Poker Tips and Strategy http://kingcobrapoker.com
