I first knew about poker from a movie entitled, the Rounders. My fascination for the game became more intense when Chris Moneymaker, an amateur online player, won the World Series of Poker in 2003. I was so inspired by his success that I quit my day job, started a small business and built my savings so I can start playing professionally. Poker is not only a game of chance but a game of strategy as well. It requires a good grasp of mathematical skills to determine if the odds are in your favor, and psychological skills to evaluate how other players think, and to trick them into leaving the game prematurely.
I consider myself a self-taught professional poker player, and I got most of my education from online casinos . There are many advantages to practicing on an online casino. For starters, it provides folks like me the chance to figure out and master the game at their own pace. The rate of play in an online casino or poker room is also much faster thereby speeding up the learning curve.
By using the platform’s free-to-play mode, I was able to hone my skills and became more confident in playing various poker games and limits without the risk of losing real money. Most of these online casinos also provide history of played hands and poker hand converters hands giving me the ability to analyze and discuss strategies with other players to better my game.
One downside to training on virtual poker rooms though is that when I started to wager in amateur offline poker tournaments, I was confronted by a different set of obstacles altogether – deciphering physical tells.
As you can probably imagine, I had a lot of difficulty in the first few live games because I was not used to reading through fake body language tells. Seeing beyond physical tells is not emphasized in virtual poker rooms. Online casino had to depend on other tells, such as the quantity of chips that a player plays with and chat messages, to discover if one another player is bluffing. Think of it this way, if another player fakes a tell during a live game, and you don’t know how to decipher it, you may be induced to make poor judgments.
Another skill that one should have before considering living exclusively on poker earnings is risk and money management. The life of a professional poker player is sadly never all gains and pleasure. No matter how good you are, the possibility of losing money is never entirely removed. If you intend to play poker for a living, you need to have money you can afford to lose, and a source of funds to cover for interruptions in your income stream.