Recently, I played in a home game with some friends of mine. If $.25-$.50 no-limit hold'em sounds like a friendly get together, think again. All the players were tough, and there was no max buy-in. $100, a 200 big blind stack, was typically the shortest stack at the table. Meanwhile, the largest stack was around $4,000. If that seems excessive for $.25-$.50 blinds, just believe me when I say that it wasn't. What was excessive was the number of players at the table: 11!
These days, when I play online, I typically 8-table shorthanded no-limit hold'em cash games, meaning that I play something on the order of 600 hands per hour. That's 10 hands per minute, or one hand every 6 seconds! And since I'm playing shorthanded, I'm not folding 85% of my hands preflop. When you're used to such a high rate of action, it's easy to let impatience creep in at a live table especially an eleven-handed one where the number of hands per hour was probably somewhere in the 20-25 range.
The game was too slow for my taste, but that didn't mean I got into a bored funk. Maybe it helped that all the players at the table were highly skilled; lots of interesting poker was happening. But the bottom line is that poker is a game that's played even when you're not in a hand. In fact, with all the thinking I do away from the table, I tend to think that it's a game you play even when you're not at a table!
I think having started out as a live player helps me a lot whenever I'm in a live game. But for those of you whose only experience is online, open yourself to the whole new world of information that awaits you live. Online, you get information from repeated situations happening within a short period of time, and from heads-up displays with all sorts of statistics. Live, you don't necessarily have the same context density when it comes to betting patterns. But nonetheless, a wealth of information is at your disposal. It just presents itself in a different way.
When playing live, people's words and physical actions might give something away both when they're in a hand and when they're not in a hand. And you're in a realm where it's impossible to miss what an opponent does because you have to do something to do at five other tables; you don't necessarily need betting patterns to repeat a whole bunch of times when you're playing live.
You'll wish that you could play more hands per hour. But the quality per hand is much higher live. And that's what should compensate. Datamine and enjoy the show when you're not in a hand, so that way you can pummel your opponents whenever you are in a hand.
