I play at MansionPoker.net and BoDog.net... but I only play the fake money tournies.   Too many cheaters to play for real.   Plus there are more and more Bots out there.

I do however play the local free bar tournies and a big cash game on Friday nights.   All the online stuff and free poker is just practice for the cash game.  

I would play at the casinos, but I like playing Pai Gow and Black Jack too much.

Rico's Revenge wrote:  Too many cheaters to play for real.   Plus there are more and more Bots out there.

I hereby declare those both myths.

Theoretical backing: 

Software cheating is really really hard, unless you have an inside guy at the site.  This is not BF1942.  The only cheating that could really be done is collusion.  And while I am sure collusion does happen, it is (a) of limited value in most games, since it only helps in certain circumstances, and (b) easy to spot (for the site managers) since it results in very odd betting patterns.

If there exist bots that work, then they are hidden very well.  Several major universities have put their best computer minds to work trying to develop poker bots.  So far, a very few capable bots have been developed, but they can only work in heads-up play, and can all be outsmarted fairly easily.  I can maybe accept - maybe - that there is a single super-genius 1337 hacker that has developed the uberbot in complete secrecy, but I cannot accept that there are "many" bots around, yet nobody can find any reliable information about them.

Empirical backing:

I have more than 100,000 hands in my PokerTracker database, for a variety of real money levels.  Not only does my winrate match the predicted winrate for my style of play, but the hand winrate ranking also matches, the position winrates match, and individual subsamples also match.  The exact same data is also reported by hundreds of other serious online players.

So if there are bots and cheaters out there, they aren't doing a good job, as I am winning exactly as much as I should in an honest game.

Another observation - whenever I see somebody at a table complain about cheaters/bots (which happens about as often as it does in CS), it is invariably the guys that are playing badly and losing (just like in CS).  Whenever I see a guy complain about cheaters I put him on my buddy list and play with him whenever I can.

Low-stakes online poker = free money for me.

choopie911 wrote: If someone is calling right away, that means that they dont care what you do, they're going to call anyways. Chances are, they have a solid hand.

Not sure that I agree with that tell.  I often use the "bet/raise" button for bluffing purposes, as I have seen others do as well.

As Mike Caro would say - "strong means weak".

And in other cases it just means that they are loose/bad players.  People will call with the darndest hands sometimes.

I do agree that there are online tells, however.  But they, like live tells, have to be interpreted carefully.

lol - I suck at heads-up play.

I need a full table to ensure that the standard quota of idiots are present.

;)

Clark Kent wrote: lol - I suck at heads-up play. I need a full table to ensure that the standard quota of idiots are present. ;)

I don't like full tables... 6 is about perfect for my style.   I like to play as much as possible, 8-10 players makes it too easy for your monster hand to get waxed by some idiot holding pocket 2s and he pulls 4 of a kind or something stupid like that.

And I love when that happens.  Because that means he is going to continue to play like an idiot, and most of the time he is just donating money.

If you never get beaten by a bad beat, that means that your opponents are not idiots.

Even though you will take the occasional brutal beating, in the long run these guys are just ATMs.