Playing better at different rooms

Hey guys. Can anyone explain why a person might play better at certain poker rooms than others?

I do well at Poker Stars (I think, I make more money there),

OK at Ultiamate Bet (my first poker room),

Not so well at Full Tilt (play a lot of CC'ers there, could 'splain it, u guys are tough).

If there are some inherant differences in the look and feel or customer base, this could go a long way to explain why.

At PS I usually watch the "Status" tab, paying very close attention to my place in the tourney, ignoring chat almost all together. But that doesn't explain why I do better in Sit-n-go's ...

Any ideas?

Pokerstars has one of the toughest fields of poker players of all the networks so its kind of awkward you do well there. I do not know which limits you play tho, low limits could be easy there (no experience for me there). I think boss and ongame have doable fields of players. The software does not play a role in how good you play in my opinion. I do however think that you could get annoyed by the software if its really bad, but then i would play on another network altogether...

my thinking is maybe structures and blinds are better for you at pokerstars than Full Tilt.. i know the blinds at FT are not as good as PS....

if you are not playing many tournament and just playing cash games maybe you just run into a little more bad luck at full tilt?? also has this been an issue for a few years or only a few weeks... cause you could have limited data you are basing your play on...

That is pretty interesting. I wouldn't think it would have too much to do with the software, although I don't really get too into the psychological aspect too much(I'm sure someone would be able to explain why the color red on PS would make your brain think a different way that the yellow on UB and the blue on FT). And as far as the players go, at the micro/low limits, I find a lot of the players being very very similar, both in how I interpret them first hand, but also how HEM shows me they are. I think it might be in your head, or those colors are messing you up

I think people that play on one site tend to start playing like each other. At least they start to see what works and what doesn't, so a sort of group think influences the way they play. Then you switch to another site, and a different dynamic is going on, and people have developed a somewhat different way of playing. It takes awhile for you to adjust and get into the flow. At least this is what I've noticed when playing on other sites -- people don't do what you're used to them doing.

I think it's all sociology and helps explain why people in different parts of the world can have such different ways of life.

I could be out of line here, but I think it very well could have to do with the random count generators on each site. I dont have the statistics to prove it but I've noticed little things like for instance, pocket pairs on Full Tilt hold alot better than on Bodog...IE I feel much more comfortable pushing pre flop with decent pockets on FT than Bodog, my pairs always seem to get cracked on BD even KK AA. Also flushes, I've noticed that flushes hit more frequently on BD, its really odd but I really have noticed this time after time. I do think it is odd though that you would play best at pokerstars because I have also heard the field is very seasoned there. Maybe it is pyschological?

I have to agree here ive noticed that there are more paint cards on the flop on fulltilt than other sites. thought it was just me.

I wonder why poker tables are usually green. If I'm not mistaken green promotes being calm, collected, and improves eyesight. any takers on that one lol?

I think that is all in your head. The random number generators are definitely different(the programming itself is going to be different at every network), but they are still going to come up with random outputs, just different, and no more likely than the other to hit certain hands for certain players. The problem that you guys are having is one that many beginner players have, and that is that your biggest losses stick out to you more than all of your small wins.

Example: You win $0.75 10 times in one .05/.10 ring game when you've had premium hands(lets say AA/KK/QQ/AK). Not very large pots for the table. But then you get dealt AA again and the pot ends up getting to the point where all of your chips are in and you lose to a guys made flush draw... you're going to remember that because it was a huge pot and you lost, but you're forgetting about all of the small pots that you won with the hand, because they didn't have a big impact on your stack. This example has nothing to do with why you are thinking one site works better for you than others, just why people think the internet is against them, lol.

Thanks for the great replies guys.

I play mostly large low stakes tourneys at PS, and medium sized Freerolls and micro stakes at FT. PS seems to have tourneys with MUCH larger fields than FT, that might explain a bit.

What I've been noticing is that if I play "by the book" I can't get to the money on FT, but can in the large tourneys at PS.

I'm going to go look at my stats at the web site that tells you how you do... if I can remember the name

Thanks again.

PJ

Well, turns out that I don't have a ranking for FT at "officialpokerrankings", so maybe I'm ONLY playing free rolls there... hmmm... I smell a 50 something having a "Secior Moment".

I notice i play better at Pokerstars and on the merge network than anywhere else. I for one think mostly that i dont like the setup at UB, the tables are too big, even with resizing in relation to the chips on there. I feel like im playing at a gigantic dinner table, not a poker table. I really enjoy the minimalistic view on bodog, but id say i prefer merge network tables over any. The cards are very nice, they show odds on all in situations, and it just runs much smoother for me there than anywhere else. I like Pokerstars because of the image enhancement and the visibility even when the tables are sized to very small

i play better at full-tilt then other sites i find that the layout of how the room is set out seems to keep me interested and more focused on the game i am playing in

I also concur that different sites seem to have characteristics unique unto them selves. I always seem to get sucked out on the river on Bodog when a considerable favorite. The one outer is quite common. I also notice that when someone flops a flush draw and goes all in they seem to hit it with surprising consistency. As a result your Bodog regular plays a style more suited to these trends.

Pokerstars I have noticed seems to put people into Card Coma for extended periods. I have played entire SnGs without getting one premium starting hand. Like 60 straight junk hands in a row is not uncommon. Therefore the plays has evolved to a more tight philosophy than FT or Bodog. Just some of my observations.```

I've noticed differences between some of the sites in the lower buyin SNG's, ie. at Titan in the $5's there are many players on the table who obviously are very new to the game with little or no clue as to what they're doing (this has actually made it more difficult for me... although this too probably doesn't make sense to some).

Surely this makes sense, because it is hard too adjust your style of play to loose cannons. Unpredictable players are harder to play then ABC players.

To the OP...
Isn't it just variance...

I don't know your samples, but it's possible if you played a small sample...

Its part psychological - you might remember better situations from a software you like. Also as said there are some differences in blind structure, buy-ins, players (amount, skills and the way they play) and other factors of the site.

I tend to play cash games best at Full tilt and tournaments at either pokerstars or ipoker.

And if you play better at one site, then keep playing there. The problem is figuring are you playing better or just running better in the short run...

And don't forget that you are likely to play better on a upswing which will further complicate a objective analysis as why you seem to be playing better on one site.

Hey, I am beginning to think you nailed it Just. I am now sucking badly every where. I guess my PS ITM was the fluke.

I absolutely agree with that post. I like playing on full tilt and pokerstars because I like playing with more professional poker players, rather then donkeys. When I play other poker rooms, there seems to be a lot more loose play. Which I am not a big fan of because I don't like pushing my chips with mediocre hands.

I prefer FR on PokerStars and tourneys on FT. Not sure why that is, it's just always worked out for me that way. So I keep a FR bankroll on Stars and a tourney roll on FT. I prefer the Stars software client, although with the last update FT has almost caught up. I also have accounts on SportsBook (Cake) and UB, but haven't really played them enough to know what works better for me there -- I don't really care for the software on either though.

As a software engineer myself who has done quite a bit of RNG work, I can attest that the RNGs used by these major sites are not going to result in one flopping more paint, or whatever, than another. That's just another beginner's perception and fuels the "rigged" conspiracies that so many players have -- typically new, mediocre and/or downright bad players. You never hear the solid players whining about RNG's and sites being rigged. They understand that the variance is magnified when playing many many times more hands online than they would ever see live.

Theoretically, science tells us there is no such thing as "truly random" machine-generated numbers, and some beginning players who have heard this try and use it as the basis of their rigged arguments. Practically, however, even the simplest RNG built into the core runtime library of most programming languages is sufficiently random to pass any test of human perception of "randomness," particularly when compared to a human manually shuffling a deck of 52 cards. And to my knowledge, the sites don't depend strictly on a canned RNG built into a library, they develop their own variations and extensions to make it even more "random." For example, one key factor in the distribution of random numbers is the value used to seed the RNG. This starting value needs to be as random as possible -- if you seed an RNG with an identical value, you will generally get identical results. So most sites use a mix of "noise" data gathered from clients (date/time down to the millisecond, mouse movements captured by the client, etc.) to constantly shuffle and reseed their RNG. This type of data is virtually never repeatable and therefore never going to result in the same seed values, which makes their RNGs non-deterministic and non-repeatable.

Sorry for channeling my inner geek, I just get frustrated by the frequent suggestions and false information about how sites are rigged or that their RNGs are being compromised somehow.

One thing that is different between sites, however, (besides the varying quality of players) is how/when they shuffle the deck. Some, like Stars, use a set deck that is only shuffled between hands. Others, like FT, reshuffle the remaining deck between every deal of the cards. To me, this makes no difference as far as random distribution if you believe the deck was truly randomized to begin with, you're just taking an already randomized sequence and re-randomizing it. But some will still try and argue one way or the other that it makes a difference. The only difference it makes is when you're trying to second-guess your fold because you see that the board would have hit you if you stayed in the pot. With a reshuffled deck, you would have seen different cards had you stayed in so you can never really know what would have happened.