Online poker has been one of the most exciting developments in the history of the internet. Few activities can engage the mind and the soul in the way that a game like No Limit Texas Hold’em can. It’s this combination of intellectual and emotional stimulation that makes the game so great, creating, perhaps, the best mind sport that there is.
But there are a few things you should know if you’re just getting started today. Whether you’re someone who just likes to play for fun on the weekend or someone who’s aspiring to take their game to the next level: There are a both benefits and costs to playing poker online. Let’s review some of the key points that you won’t see advertised by the major sites but which can bear heavily on a player’s results.
Thing’s ain’t what they used to be
If you’re just getting into the game, perhaps the most important thing to know is that it’s not 2007 anymore. Ok, so that’s almost too obvious to state. But it’s a real issue with online poker because you’ll frequently encounter lots of information that repeats things that were true in 2007, in other words, at the peak of the poker boom, that simply aren’t true anymore.
The U.S. poker market was essentially nuked on Black Friday, April 15, 2011, when the U.S. District Attorney for the Souther District of New York, Preet Bharara, seized the U.S. assets of every U.S.-facing poker site. This was an absolutely seminal and catastrophic event in the history of online poker, and the industry has never come anywhere close to even looking like it might recover. The golden days of poker are long since gone.
You might ask, “so what?” Well, today it’s much harder to get to a level where you can make anything at all, much less become one of the best. In fact, most of the players who continue to have success in 2017 are people who made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars during the boom years and have continued to work on their game. We’ll just be blunt, without an extremely strong approach, you have no chance of making money in online poker. You can still play for fun, but the days of the easy rakeback grinder are long since passed. If you want to make money, you need to become world-class, for instance on judi poker online android.
How you can develop a personal learning system that rises to the level of an extremely strong approach is beyond the scope of this article. But it’s something that you’ll want to consider before anything else. Without the means to learn the game at the highest level, you won’t be able to earn anything worthwhile.
A few bots here, a few bots there, pretty soon, it starts adding up to serious problems
Bots are a problem. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. The reason is because well-designed bots and bot syndicates are capable of taking millions of dollars out of the poker economy in a matter of weeks.
In 2015, a massive PLO bot ring was uncovered on PokerStars, the largest online poker site, which has a reputation for having the most capable security team and bot-detection abilities. It was estimated that the ring took at least $5,000,000 from PLO players. Other bot rings were widely reported around the same time at other poker variants on the site. Players were never adequately reimbursed for their losses.
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