Self Accountability (Your to Blaim)

DONKEY! CALLING STATION! FISH!

Online poker is a very hard game to play. In NL live poker you see about 20 hands an hour. To sit at a $1/$2 live table your max buy-in is from $200 - $300. Online, you can see 60 to 100 hands a hour. Depending on the stakes you play, I'll assume you play $1 BB or less if you are reading this, then yu are buying in from $5 to $100 max. A live Tournament at a casino will cost you somewhere close to $100 to play. Online you can play for about $2, some sites for pennies, all day long.

On top of this, the majority bad of online players do not risk losing a lot at any one time, thus their tendancy to take huge risks. This constant barrage of low quality players are quite a challenge to protect your money from. There are players that win playing online. It is not the software that makes someone a losing player, it is not the bad players either. The bad players may take down some big pots playing bad cards, but they give it all away, plus some, playing those same bad cards against the winning players.

Argue as much as you want about this. The winning players will suffer their bad beats against the bad players, but the winning players learn to also control their loses. They adjust constantly to those bad players. Losing players have trouble adjusting. Winning players know when to muck over pairs, 2 pairs, and wait to risk all their money. Losing players keep putting money in the pot, even though thy played good cards.

The more you refuse to admit you may not have the best hand, the more you will lose. The more you put all your money in the pot, agianst small pots specially, the more you will lose big pots. Drawing hands sometimes are atually the odds on favorites to win, learn that. Stop losing $10 when you called a $9 bet into a $1 pot, jjst because you have TPTK at the time. Or if you make the call, have the better outs.

IMHO, if you can win consistently online then you should do even better live. Unless you have some uncontrollable twitches or noises you make. If you can not win online, do not expect to do any better live. A losing player online will lose just as much live, proportional to the amount of hands they play. Since playing live they will probably have more money on the line at any on time, they will just end up losing more money then they would have online anyways, and in less time.

Playing on multiple sites.

Would you go to the same casino and sit with the same players all the time? Hopefully not. So why play on just one online site, where over a period of days you tend to just play the same core players over and over? I do think there is a general advantage to knowing your competition, but there is also a benefit in playing different players.

Your objective is to keep developing your game, to win more and more. A different site can help you with this. Not just with different opponents, but different structures. Also, different numbers of players in their tournamants. A site like carbonpoker.com allows you to play in tournaments against a reasonable number of other players. Smaller payouts, easier to make it into the money if you are a good enough player. Large sites like FullTiltPoker.com force you to play tournaments a lot differently, because of the number of players in them. The reward though is going to be much greater, plsu their tournaments will pay out to more places.

You may discover that some sites offer additional or different tables (buy-in, structure, players) that you end up doing better on. For example, some sites have cash tables that cap how much one can bet total per hand. Some sites have Heads Up SNG's that have buy-ins that you like better. And some will offer tournaments in your buy-in range at better times during the day then others do. And there is always some type of promotion going on, you may find one sites promotions that month are better for you then the other ones available.

If you have a limited bank roll, and start winning, look into investing some of those winnings into trying out other sites.