I’ve been reading all the responses here, and resisting temptation to say anything back, so I could get a range of opinions.
I’m not sure what I expected to hear, which is after all why I was asking. Some of the responses weren’t very helpful, while others I think were very well-intentioned.
I’ll try to map out a bit of what I was trying to look for, without offering an answer to the question myself.
When you talk about “real money” poker, there’s two types: online, and live.
When it comes to online, the experience of using the user interface is probably pretty much the same wherever you go, so if you’re playing a lot of free online poker, moving to a money online poker game should be fairly comfortable, at least as compared to moving to a money live poker game. The difference in play that I would expect would be from players psychologically taking the game more seriously, trying to win money, not just screw around. How seriously players would take the game would vary depending on their risk tolerance level, so you never know. You could be at a table with a billionaire who literally doesn’t care if they lose $10k a hand for the next 100 years, or you could be at a $0.05/$0.10 table with jagoff players who don’t mind throwing $20-50 around just to mess with the nits who are trying to play a decent game. In other words, you could run into bingo-itis at any stakes level, really, although it should be less likely the higher up you go, but you just never know unless you have some idea who you’re playing with. In an online game, there’s user profiles and personal history, but you still probably don’t have very much to go on there.
In terms of the actually play style, or strategy, I don’t know (which is again why I asked) but my hunch is that you’d expect to see tighter opening ranges, less bluffing, and more aggressive betting – all more or less for the same reasons, to protect that real money. Beyond that, I’m not sure, but maybe I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that there’s more 3-betting, more slow play/trapping, and perhaps other advanced moves that doesn’t work very well in free poker due to players being willing to call with ridiculous card because there’s nothing of real value at stake when they do call. As to what might constitute such “advanced moves”, I don’t really know. I would kindof expect to hear that position factors into real-money player’s strategy especially strongly – I know it’s very important in Texas Hold Em, but I don’t see as much evidence for players taking position into account so much in the games I play here. Some, yes, the better players, but a lot of players here don’t seem to be very position-ally aware when they’re in a hand – although in recent weeks I’ve been seeing a lot of players who hit top pair in early position playing check-raise a lot more, or check-call a lot more, than I did several months ago.
Now, when it comes to live “real money” poker, there’s a whole bunch of additional factors that come into play: You can read your opponent’s faces and body language. And they can read you. The table doesn’t provide any “heads up display” type info telling you the exact size of the pot, or what the best hand is that you’ve made with the board, or the exact size of everyone’s stack. This adds a considerable cognitive load that you have to manage. The trade-off is that you do get more time to act in a live game, as compared to a turbo SNG here. And you need to use it, to take all that information into account. You might also not get as clear a view of the cards on the table as you do on the computer screen, and if you’re not sitting close to the middle and have poor eyesight, this could cause problems simply reading what your hand is (I’m very nearsighted IRL, so this is something that would potentially be an issue for me, where it’s not at all an issue playing online).
If you’re not accustomed to keeping track of the size of the pot, you’re going to need to figure out how to do that quickly. The easiest thing for that, I guess, is to count the BB’s that go into the middle, and develop your short term memory so that you can hold onto that number without forgetting it a second later when your brain shifts focus to something else for a moment. The nice thing about counting BB’s is that its’ easier to calculate the pot-odds since you’ve reduced the problem to the least common denominator already. To be able to do this, you need to be focused at all times, and very sharp to not allow your attention to wander when there’s a lull and miss someone’s action.
There’s also the potential in live poker for things like misdeals and other mistakes, such as misreading a showdown. While this should be rare if you’re in a casino with a professional croupier, if you’re playing in someone’s living room that might well happen from time to time, and you’ll need to make sure that the showdown is read correctly, since you don’t have the luxury of it being read and resolved by the computer.
This is all just the stuff that came to me off the top of my head (more or less) as I thought about all the dimensions and angles that go into a poker game, but I don’t know if I’ve touched upon everything. As deep as the game is, I’d be surprised if I had. But perhaps this is a pretty good start on it, anyway.
I’d like to know what everyone thinks about this, and if they have more they can add.
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