Nowadays many brick-and-mortar players play online too, and these players had to make some big adjustments, going from live poker to online poker, to be successful.  When online poker was in its infancy -- just a few years ago -- no one was migrating the other way.  When Kathleen Watterson and I wrote Internet Poker: How to Play and Beat Online Poker Games in 2003, our book did not discuss the issue of online players moving to brick and mortar games.  It just didn’t happen back then.

When Chris Moneymaker won the main event at the 2003 World Series of Poker, it marked the very first time he'd played in a traditional card room.  That watershed event changed everything, and introduced scads of new players to internet poker.  As internet play continues to grow in popularity, players are learning poker online before ever sitting in a live game.  Online games are easily

PLAY POKER ONLINE WITH REAL PEOPLE

Charity events, such as the College Poker Championship -- completely free tournaments that provide scholarship money for students -- saw 40,000 students worldwide participate in the 2005 event.  Although many of these students have never been in a casino, a card game is no further away than their laptop.  The players you’ll find every Sunday during the academic year at www.collegepoker.com represent an entire generation who learned poker online.

The transition from online poker to casino play is just as tough as moving from a live casino to the internet.  Some adjustments are psychological while others are more technical in nature.

Tells

When playing in person, online players are prone to give away the store.  And why not?  If all your play has been online, you never had to learn to keep your emotions in check and not give away the strength of your hand or the outrageous character of your bluff through tells that online players are blind to, but brick and mortar players see every day.

When you play online you can jump for joy when the card you need pops out of the deck, and you can scream to your heart’s content when your opponent lays down a better hand to your bluff.  But when you make that maiden foray into a cardroom, nine pairs of eyes are watching to see if your hands tremble when you bet, or if your eyes dart furtively down to your chips before you act, or if you act overly weak or outrageously strong. ... Do you feel that vein pulsating in your neck which you can’t control regardless of what you do? Still think those uber-cool sunglasses are masking your moves? You are giving off signals in a big way.

You can learn to mask tells.  You can work to reduce them, and you may even learn to broadcast false tells if your opponent is particularly attuned to this kind of information, but you will have to work at it.

Buy Mike Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, learn the basic tells, and begin watching for them in your opponents.  But more importantly, watch for them in yourself.  At the beginning, when you are a cardroom newbie but an experienced online player, you can take it for granted that you will be broadcasting a lot more tells than you’re able to pick up.

Job #1 for anyone playing in a cardroom after playing poker exclusively on the internet is to reduce the signals you broadcast.  You no longer have the anonymity of the online poker room, and that’s a two-edged sword.  If you’re a middle-aged, 260-lb. truck driver, your online screen persona of “HotBlonde21” just won’t work in a casino.  That’s the disadvantage of coming out of the closet to play live poker.  But you’ll be able to read your opponents too, and that can be a real edge.  If you develop your skills and play against savvy opponents -- the kind who pride themselves on their ability to pick up tells -- you can work up a campaign of disinformation that leaves them distrusting their own instincts, as least where you’re concerned.

The Pace

You’ll find the pace of live poker much slower than online.  After all, dealers have to gather cards, shuffle the deck, and pitch them, as well as move chips into the pot and create side pots when necessary.  This takes time when done by human beings.  You might see 100 holdem hands per hour online; but if you see 35 hands per hour in a traditional poker room, consider yourself fortunate.

You see three times as many hands online -- more if you’re

PLAY HOLDEM WITH LOU KRIEGER

. So while the frustration level over perceived bad beats may be generally greater online, the fact that you see fewer hands in person over the same period of time means that your results will cluster around far fewer hands.  While you might have a good hand cracked online, you have a better chance of compensating for it because you’ll see more hands during playing sessions of similar length, and your results will tend more to fall in line with whatever expectation, positive or negative, your skill level yields.

But in person, one or two bad hands can make for a losing session, while one or two big hands can turn a mediocre session into a winning day.

Manners

When you play in a live casino game, you’ll also have to cope with your opponents and exhibit more courteous behavior than many online players do.  It’s very easy to diss online opponents with profanity because your anonymity is protected.  It’s an altogether different thing when your opponent is sitting across the table from you and you have to stand accountable for what you say.

When told that his opponent, a very slick boxer with no real punching power, planned to dance away from him and jab his way to the title, the late, great Joe Lewis responded, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” And you can say the same thing in a casino poker game.

Once you separate all the issues related to how the game is delivered -- things are faster online, you get more hands every hour, you can represent yourself any way you want to, but picking up tells is limited -- the vital issue remaining is that when you move from the privacy and convenience of your computer to a real casino, you are no longer invisible and you’re anything but anonymous.  Even if astute players never know your name, they will associate your play with your appearance and mannerisms and remember all of it.

If you don’t want to be an open book to your opponents, you’ll have to control your persona in a casino in ways you never had to when you played online.