In my previous post, I listed the reasons that live poker is better. I like it much better than playing online. That said, in some situations and for some players, online poker is a better choice. Like a lot of players I do both. Here are some reasons that online poker might be the best choice for you.
1. It costs almost nothing to get started. When I started playing on PokerStars I didn't have a lot of money to invest. I learned about poker from watching the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour on TV. I tried play money games on Party Poker to figure out how everything worked. I read library books about poker, and when I realized most of them were really old, I used interlibrary loan to get newer ones. Once I got a Kindle I started downloading poker books from amazon.com for about $6 per book.*
When you start playing online, you will find all kinds of tournaments, from 10 players or less to hundreds or even thousands of players. Buy-ins can range from $1 to hundreds of dollars.
2. You don't have to deal with people. Maybe you're an introvert and you don't want to spend several hours in a poker room packed with 50 or more people. Or you don't want to deal with the guy who's been drinking for the entire tournament and is loud and obnoxious. Just stay at home and play online.
3. You can play whenever and wherever you want. Most live poker tournaments are at night and/or on weekends. My local room has tournaments only Thursday through Sunday.
Online, you can look up the tournament schedule and play whenever you want. You can play in the afternoon when you get home from work. If you work second shift, you can play poker in the morning. I know of a single mother who made her living playing online while her children were in school.
You can play wherever you want as well, All you need is a laptop and an internet connection.
4. You can track the statistics of your opponents. If you're serious about making money playing poker online you need to get Holdem Manager 2. It's a tracking and database program with a heads-up display. You can choose what you want to track from the hundreds of available statistics. I track the number of hands that I've played against that player, the percentage of his hands that he chooses to play, the percentage of raises before the flop, how often he continuation bets or folds to a c-bet, and how often he folds to button steals when he is the small or big blind. All of those statistics are displayed on the screen while you play.
If you're a serious player and you're not using Holdem Manager 2 you're at a disadvantage because your opponent might be.
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*I recommend two books for anyone getting started with poker. The first is The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. It's a good theoretical overview of what you are trying to accomplish at the poker table. The second is Harrington on Holdem, Volume 1. This is a great book for learning the basics of how and when to bet, call, raise or fold.
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