Has the boom in online poker made it easier or harder to be a winning player???

Hi guys.

I`m back playing and just taken one of my regular bad beats.

MTT $4.00 buy in, blinds 50/100. (Sry, can`t show the hand history.)

I`ve played few hands, have about 3,600 in chips. sb/bb/fold/fold/call/call/call/call.
Delt QQ. I raise 800 (should I have pushed all in and left it to chance?). Get one caller, one of the initial limpers. (he has about 6200) Pot now about 2150.

(I`m in 9 th position, one place from the button.)

flop, 2c6c2d. He checks. I`m obviosly not concerned about him having a 2, only concern I have is flush draw with an outside possibility he had 66.

Anyway, I push all in, he shows A4c and he catches flush on turn. Technically it was a poor call by him preflop but I suppose he had odds to call with nut flush draw.

So, is it harder?

I know a lot of ppl will say `u want this kind of player against you`

If you were playing your local game in town I can understand this. But you might never see the same ppl twice online.

Your pocket ace reraise all in becomes nothing more than a pot sweetner to Mr. J8s, Mr. A3, etc, so your good, strong play loses its strength, your hand that would normally be a 80/20 fav pre flop becomes a 45% fav against 4 others.

I know we don`t want ppl to play by the book, because if they did poker would be down purley to the cards, nothing else.

The best analogy I can use is soccer (sorry to our American friends) Arsenal, in the Premier League, like to play slick, passing football - the way the game should be played. To combat this teams revert to bad play - high tackles, long ball play, flood the midfield, etc. This is the way some ppl play poker.

I`ve suffered a beat I did not like. The reason I did not like it is because I would never have made the same call. I feel a bit better getting it off my chest, but it has made me think of my poll question.

Comments guys...

Harder because players are worse?

Hardly. If anything, poker (NLHE specifically) seems to be drying up some.

I know you don't want to hear it, but these are the players we make money off of. Long-term, your expectation is better than his, and you'll make money. Had you won that QQ hand, you would be a big stack in the tourney and wouldn't bother considering whether online poker is beatable or not.

I have the feeling this is just a spur of the moment thread written directly after a beat...

I'd say it's easier, because 90% of these new players (including my mom) are donks. Take their stacks and move on.

I think the boom has made the game that much harder. anytime the game gets that popular, every field you play in is that much bigger. even though it does attract a lot of fish, those fish suck out a lot, and that is just frustrating. I think the same set of skills would have gotten you mush furhter in years past. maybe theses skills are easier to acquire though

Overall it's easier in the long run. The problem that I run into, is when some really bad calls catch, and catch, and catch for a string of bad beats. Then I go on tilt and turn into a maniac fish.

I had a few weeks there that I got it in good most of the time and people were calling with junk like gutshot straight draws and hitting. Recently though those hands are not hitting and I'm building my BR back up. It sure was difficult to deal with though.

Yes and no Chuck.

It did come after a beat, so yes there is some anger in the post.

But no for this reason. I don`t want to start the `folding pocket Aces pre flop` debate again, but that is as near as I can think to an extreme case.

1st hand of a big $2 buyin MTT, u r delt AA UTG. You raise 6 times BB. you get a reraise, a re reraise and a re re reraise. At this point you probably have little choice but to push all in, because if you don`t, one of the other guys with AJs will.

Anyway, you end up where you do not want to be, in a pot with all of your cash in preflop with AA v AJs, KQ and some clown who has read 98s performs well against AA and has taken this to mean 98s is the best preflop hand in poker.

So instead of isolating one player and being about 80%, u now have 3 players for company (I don`t know what your odds have reduced to)

I`m not saying this is a bad position to be in - u will be the fav to win, but I`m sure this is not the way you want to try to accumilate chips Chuck?

If you want to look at it that way, then the equity we lose in the pot translates into the advantage we gain by tripling up instead of doubling up.

The looser the players, the better. Probably the more frustrating too (at times), but such is poker.

If poker had been full of players as good as you and I and better, then we'd have a much harder time winning tournaments.

A cash game example to illustrate what I mean, Ron:

AA vs KK AIPF in a 100nl cash game:

EV = EV of winning - EV of losing

(.8*100)-(.2*100)
= $60

AA vs 98s vs AJo vs KQ in same game:

(.6*300)-(.23*100)-(.06*100)-(.11*100)
= $140

Big difference.

Ron, whatever will we do with you?

I'm going to be somewhat blunt and harsh here, not because I'm a nasty bastard (I am, but that's beside the point), but because I'm trying to help, so forgive me.

90% of your threads say pretty much the exact same thing, which can be summarized as "WAAAH I DUN LIEK BAD BEATZ".

Whether you view it in this way or not, this thread appears to me to be yet another bad beat whine thread, albeit under the cover of a separate question.

You've been told time and again that profit in poker comes from other people's mistakes. When someone calls your UTG raise with 93o, that is (99.9% of the time) a mistake. When someone calls your turn shove with a gutshot, that is a mistake. Whatever happens afterwards is completely irrelevant - let the statistics sort themselves out.

Okay, so four people call your raise with Aces. Yes, it's slightly harder for you because you have three ranges of hands to assign as opposed to one or two, but, assuming your opponents are weak, you still want to be playing pots with them because they are weak and will make more mistakes than you. You will make money in relation to your weaker opponents in your example by occasionally correctly folding AA after a lot of action postflop when a weaker player wouldn't fold, and by getting the weaker players to call either with draws given no odds or with weaker hands like TPDK (whereas you most likely wouldn't be involved in the hand in the first place given the same cards), or by your opponents just check-folding when their 95o misses the flop (again, given the same cards you wouldn't be involved in the hand and therefore you wouldn't have lost anything).

Yes, sometimes someone will get lucky and flop two pair with 84o and stack you, but stats dictate that the number of times this will happen is not sufficient to show a net loss in the long run (unless you're a really horrible postflop player and are playing very deepstacked, but seeing as neither of these apply this is irrelevant).

Yep, I can see the point.

If you check back in this post I said to Chuck `yes and no`

[/quote]Yes, sometimes someone will get lucky and flop two pair with 84o and stack you, but stats dictate that the number of times this will happen is not sufficient to show a net loss in the long run (unless you're a really horrible postflop player and are playing very deepstacked, but seeing as neither of these apply this is irrelevant).[/quote]

Due to other commitments I do not have the time to analize poker in the way some of the ppl here do.

I have not been playing long enough to see the long term effect of the statistics.

As a side issue, the poll shows almost and even split between ppl who think its harder to people who think its not. I was wanting to see if other people though the same way as I did or if not, came up with a good argument as to why its easier.

Reasons I think I might feel the bad beats more than say you do include...

1) I don`t play as much as you. Due to commitments I might play 10 hours a week max. Therefore one bad beat to me could have been the end of my tourny after 4 hours of perfect play. That hits harder.
2) I don`t multi table. So if I`m in a ring game, SNG, MTT I am focused on that game only. If u r playing 3 + games at a time I`m sure the bad beats are less noticable.
3) I only started playing poker less than 2 years ago - I have limited experience.

I can assure you that this is untrue, certainly over the last few months anyway.

yeah wtf you haven't played in ages, have you Chris.

Becoming a theory junkie instead?

So would I be correct in saying "If you can`t do it teach it"

lol I think the "boom" made it easier, the release of "Super System" made it harder.
But I think combining those 2 together, it's still easier. A lot of players who are very bad now play, but there's also way more good players too. Essentially, it could just be different extremes of what tables you play.
Ex: Lower limits are easier, higher limits are harder than their former selves.
lol but I'm no pro I have no idea just guessing. = )

I love it, more more give me more new players to play against that dont know what their doing.

I love the media hype, and all-round boom in poker, OFC I do. Who wouldnt? More players not understanding how their hands work, I dont play huge limits anyway, tons of donkeys in the $12 games because thats what they can afford like meee.

What makes you think he really wants help?!? I know I wont make that error again...

All I wanted to do was start a poll and see if I was right or wrong in my thoughts.

As it happens, after thinking things through and some good constructive advice throughout this post (Chuck, ty) I`m now with the `It`s easier` brigade (Don`t think I can change my vote now )

Next time I post anything I should probably not bother giving a background to the reason for the post ?