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Online Poker Game Getting Much Harder

October 28, 2008

Recently many online poker players have noticed that its getting harder and harder to beat the game, and there are fewer and fewer soft players to take advantage of. Also, there is much more parody at the top of the game. Whereas in the past the top few players were miles ahead of the rest, right now everyone is about the same when it comes to the top computer poker players in the world. We’ll look at a few reasons as to why this has happened, and hypothesize as to what this will do to the online poker world.

Fewer Low Skill Players

The reason that there are fewer poor players nowadays is because of the wealth of information available to the casual player. There are thousands of poker books, tens of thousands of informational poker websites, and millions of collective poker articles, forum posts, and papers written about poker strategy and theory. Since the majority of this is freely, or cheaply, available, the casual player has fallen into an enormous amount of poker knowledge.

By studying and reading up, the poor poker player has now become an average poker player, so the previous average poker players have had to improve their game even more to stay profitable. This trend continues up the chain, as each caliber player has had to improve his/her skill to maintain his/her current edge.

Online poker has also contributed to this in its own strange way. Whereas in a live casino, a player will see roughly 30 hands per hour, at an online poker room you can see up to 100 hands per hour per table, and with the use of multi tabling you can see upwards of 1,000 hands per hour. Imagine two poker players – one playing 30 hands per hour, and one playing 1,000 hands per hour: who do you think is going to improve fastest?

However, the average player will eventually “top out”, and learn all they can just from playing. So if everyone is “topping out” faster than ever before, there are going to be much more skilled players than poor players.

Parody at the Top

The reason that the best players in the world are all about the same nowadays can be attributed to training sites. Almost every major online pro either has his/her own training site, contributes to a training site, or writes strategy articles for a poker site.

This results in everyone else seeing that player’s strategy, so all of the edges that each player had are being spread around. This is causing almost every major online pro to have a similar edge over average players, and relatively no edge over each other.

Also, since most of these major pros are in the same social circle and post at the same strategy forums, there is even more “sharing of the wealth” when it comes to secret poker strategies and tactics.

Written by admin · Filed Under Poker Strategy 

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