Last May an accountant with no tournament experience joined the World Series of Poker and trashed a whole table of skilled professional gamblers in the final. How? He learnt to play poker on the Internet.
The biggest difference between real and online poker is that online it’s simply faster. A hand can take as little as 30 seconds. But that’s just for starters. Try testing strategies by playing simulations with nifty AI as much and as often as you like. That’ll quickly give you an experience even the most gifted poker players of previous generations lacked.
New players, who gain their experience online, are even knocking some of the old theories thought to be tried and tested. For example, ‘Tells’, the idea of reading an opponents body language for an advantage in the game. These new players have learnt in an environment where they can’t even see their opposition, and they don’t believe it helps one bit. Instead they’ve learnt to focus on the patterns of the betting amongst players, when they raise or call.
There’s even a book that teaches you how to learn online written by novelist and poet James McManus entitled: 'Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker.' In it he describes his real life adventure of learning to play from simulations like Texas Hold’em. The skills he learnt took him to fifth place in the 2000 World Poker Series.
Learning from simulations to revolutionise the way poker is learnt is all very well, but it looks like even the latest generation of online players is set to be topped already. At the University of Alberta, for example, professors are trying to build bots that no human could defeat.
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The biggest difference between real and online poker is that online it’s simply faster. A hand can take as little as 30 seconds. But that’s just for starters. Try testing strategies by playing simulations with nifty AI as much and as often as you like. That’ll quickly give you an experience even the most gifted poker players of previous generations lacked.
New players, who gain their experience online, are even knocking some of the old theories thought to be tried and tested. For example, ‘Tells’, the idea of reading an opponents body language for an advantage in the game. These new players have learnt in an environment where they can’t even see their opposition, and they don’t believe it helps one bit. Instead they’ve learnt to focus on the patterns of the betting amongst players, when they raise or call.
There’s even a book that teaches you how to learn online written by novelist and poet James McManus entitled: 'Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker.' In it he describes his real life adventure of learning to play from simulations like Texas Hold’em. The skills he learnt took him to fifth place in the 2000 World Poker Series.
Learning from simulations to revolutionise the way poker is learnt is all very well, but it looks like even the latest generation of online players is set to be topped already. At the University of Alberta, for example, professors are trying to build bots that no human could defeat.
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