Love you Live

  
When I first started writing this blog I fully expected that it would be mostly about playing online poker. At the time I had just started playing online and a vast smorgasbord of poker games had been opened up to me. I expected that I would be playing online poker far into the future. I had been previously playing in a regular live tournament but that had dried up and there didn't seem to be any other reasonably priced live games available. So I launched myself into the online poker world, playing in tournaments, Sit and Gos, Texas Holdem  ring games (no limit and fixed limit), Omaha ring games and God knows what else.
   Then a couple of years ago I discovered a local live tournament and got back into the live poker scene. It was great to be back in a poker game sitting around a real table with real people. But I was still playing online regularly, so I had a good balance of game types going. Playing in this new game introduced me to a few other live games that were played at various Auckland clubs, so that increased my options even more. Now, a few years later, I'm playing in live tournaments twice a week, sometimes more, and I usually play in just one online session, sometimes not even that. Things have changed somewhat.
   A clue to this change in behaviour lies in my results over the last few years. For my first three years of online poker my bankroll balance was in the red almost all of the time, apart from a couple of minor peaks. In the fourth year I was playing Sit and Gos online and started playing in the live tournaments halfway through the year. My bankroll balance was positive throughout this year, climbing to an all-time high before dropping back down a bit. I made a profit in both game types, making the most money from the Sit and Gos and the highest Return On Investment from the live tourneys. In the following year (2014) live tournaments yielded the most cash and also the highest ROI. In 2015 live ring games yielded the best results, with live tourneys being the only other profitable game type. Finally, in the three years since I've been playing in live games my bankroll has shown a spectacular increase, then a sharp decline that lasted about 4 months, then back to a spectacular increase again, currently sitting at an all-time high.
   All of this is pointing to one inescapable conclusion: I can't beat online poker games. Ok, so let's qualify that slightly: I can't beat most online games. This is why I've been playing as many live games as I can and limiting my online play to one low buy-in tournament per week. All this is contrary to the conventional wisdom that online poker games are typically populated by poor poker players lining up to throw their chips away. That may have been true once but I don't think it is anymore. Maybe there are some super-fishy games at the very lowest micro levels, but I don't play at that level. Even though I now only play a few steps up from that, the games are just not that loose/passive, at least not in my experience.
   I'm not saying that the lower level games are swarming with poker geniuses; just that the standard of play is significantly higher than might otherwise be expected, and certainly higher than that at a typical pub or club tournament. The way I see it, even the simple act of downloading a poker site's software is a sign of an interest in poker that goes beyond just buying in to a game at the local pub. And once a player is online there is a huge volume of information on poker play that is no more than a mouse click away. Add to that the many tools that are available online and the gap between online and live games widens further. Online players can review their hand histories, check out other players on Sharkscope and use poker tracking software that provides heads-up displays detailing each player's game stats. And on top of that, because the games are faster, online players are probably playing twice as many hands as they might be in a live game, and thus accumulating poker experience faster.
   I know from my own experiences playing online that there are many people playing multiple tables. This is especially true of the ring games where there are many 'grinders' playing in multiple games and moving from table to table trying to take chips from the inexperienced players. But it also happens to some extent in tournaments. Even at the micro levels there are grinders playing many tables and basically just playing by the numbers.
   I guess what it boils down to is this. On a typical online table you might see 3 'fishy' players, 4 competent players and maybe 2 good players. On a typical live table there's more likely to be 5 fish, 3 competent players and 1 good player. Obviously this is a wild generalisation but what I'm getting at is that the standard of play is generally higher online. So if I consider myself to be a competent player, I want to be playing with the little fish and, as far as possible, avoiding the sharks. In other words, I want to maximise any advantage I might have.
   I've come to the conclusion that the best place to play is the real world because it is potentially much more profitable. If I play in a live game I have a much greater win expectation than I would playing online. And live games have other advantages. Playing around a real table with people who are physically there in the room is a much more enjoyable experience. Because the games I play in are usually at clubs, they are fun social events, where I get to interact with other people. The pace of the games may be glacial compared to playing online, but that doesn't actually bother me. Maybe that's because I started out playing in live games and then moved into the online world later. And the one major advantage that online games used to have, that of being inexpensive, is no longer a factor I need to consider. My poker bankroll has now reached a level where I can comfortably afford to play in the currently available live games. In fact I'm about to change my regular Friday night game because I want to play at a higher buy-in level.
   Having said all that, I'm not abandoning online play altogether. I still play once a week in a $5 tournament on 888 poker. My summer season results for this tournament were encouraging, showing a 55% ROI. So the plan is to continue playing at this level and if I show a significant profit in the autumn season then I'll consider moving up a level. But I'm definitely proceeding with caution. The last thing I want to do is find myself swimming with the sharks.
   I think that if I wanted to, I could become a grinder. I could get all the fancy software, learn, about the Independent Chip Model, watch all the YouTube tutorials and brush up on probability theory. But that's too much like hard work. The main reason that I play poker is because I enjoy it. Sure I want to win. But not if that means becoming a multi-tabling percentage player. Where's the fun in that? Playing live, I can win a decent amount of the time and still have fun along the way. Sounds like a winning formula to me.