If you’re an online poker fan, it may strike you as odd the first time you go to play a live game and more importantly, you’ll most likely find yourself frustrated.
Not frustrated because you can’t beat the game you’re playing, but frustrated mostly at the speed. Playing poker online you can look at the table you’re joining and see how many hands are playing per hour. You can even join turbo games where the time to make decisions are limited more so than they would be regularly.
In a live game however, you don’t get the same treatment. You get nearly as much time as you want to make decisions (and so do the other players), and you don’t have an option of a turbo dealer. Even the fastest dealers in the casinos, can’t keep up with the mind numbing speed of the computer algorithm that has the cards shuffled, cut, and dealt in less than a second.
But there are some distinct advantages to live games that you won’t find online. In many casinos, there are your regulars who play daily and your tourists. The majority of the poker players you’ll find, especially at the lower stakes will be these tourists, so the competition will be pretty soft. Compare this with online play where through the week many of the players are regulars at even the lower stakes, and the competition of a .25/.50 game is as intense as a 5/10 game at a live casino.
So if you do decide to try your hand at a live game, just remember, patience will be even more important when selecting which hands to play, and your reads will be more important too, since you won’t have an automated system or the help of any software to give you information about the players’ stats. But play your cards right and you can make a live game very profitable. Perhaps even more profitable than an online game if you know how to approach the game.