What’s the current status of professional poker?
I gather that various scandals have put the game under something of a cloud, but it’s hard to sort out the details or likely long-term implications.
How do certain people succeed spectacularly at online poker?
It’s always seemed to me that a big part of poker skill is “reading” your opponents, their subtle mannerisms and tendencies. How is this possible when playing online? Are there other skill that are more important?
Isn’t online poker amenable to various forms of cheating?
I’m not talking here about things like the Absolute poker scandal, but more mundane chicanery, like two players secretly colluding with each other.
(I realize I could probably have found some useful info by means of more searching than I’ve done. Please excuse a measure of laziness here.)
I would imagine it varies by player. There are still rooms and local games you can play in, as well as casinos in many states. It probably hurt the person who played online primarily, but the skills still translate. All they would lose is the leverage you can have online by playing at multiple tables.
From people I know casually, who used to play often, a lot of it seemed to boil down to them playing smart, and doing their best to profile their opponents based on bets and non-bets. Even without seeing someone, you can determine a lot about their risk tolerance and decision making. Knowing those things tell you just as much as some physical tell they have.
Yes, it can be. That said, it probably doesn’t happen as much as one would think. Poker players are often pretty math savvy, and anyone who is winning far more than one would expect, or never takes any bad beats, would arouse suspicion pretty quickly. But in general, the systems, as they were, were pretty easy to game.
Regarding #3, when I used to play online poker (like 10 years ago), I would often sit with a friend at low-stakes tables and we would share our hand info via an instant messenger program. This wouldn’t really help us win against the rest of the table, but it would avoid getting slaughtered by the other person unnecessarily, plus you would have a little extra info as to what cards were available.
I think I stopped doing this when I had QQ and he had KK and I didn’t get to see his hand at the end of the hand. I trusted him, but man, what a buzzkill.
Mildly. It was definitely wrong, but we weren’t playing for high stakes, only did it a few times, and it really reduced my enjoyment of poker because I had to steer clear of another player. Also, it might have hurt my EV overall since that was one less seat that could be taken by a bad player.