Online poker
Playing the odds in the computer age
Tanya Procyshyn
Any way you cut it, poker is hot.
Over the last year, poker’s presence in the popular media has ballooned from a near absence to absolute unavoidability. On television, sports channels such as TSN are now including poker tournaments among their regular programming. The series Celebrity Poker features Hollywood personalities competing in a high-stakes game of no-limit Texas hold ’em. And advertisements for how to improve your poker skills have moved from late-night infomercial fodder to prime time.
Every bookstore carries at least one volume promising to reveal the strategies of the world’s greatest poker pros, and even general retailers including Wal-Mart and Zellers are stocking professional sets of poker chips, official World Series of Poker playing cards and poker-themed merchandise such as t-shirts and shot glasses.
So what’s the cause of this resurgence in the popularity of a classic card game?
Rather than filling the casinos, the new generation of poker players is getting their fix in the comfort of their own home — courtesy of online poker. Walking up to a poker table at a casino can be intimidating to the novice player — the stakes tend to be high and the level of competition is steep.
Unlike at the casino, online poker attracts gamblers of all skill levels and may offer features specifically to aid new players in mastering the game. With the size of bets at online tables dipping as low as a penny and many poker websites offering players “pretend” money to learn with, the amateur gambler has little or nothing to lose.
Calculating statistics is also a breeze with computer-moderated poker, and most online poker software automatically keeps track of all the actions made by each player at the table during each hand. Such detailed statistics are of potential value to poker players of all calibers, as it allows them to review and analyse all of the hands they played, thereby learning from their mistakes.
The most obvious way that online poker differs from the traditional, in-person poker game is that you’re unable to physically see your opponent. A key poker strategy has always been to observe your opponent’s reaction to the cards they are dealt or a bet that has been placed, and to use this information to make an educated guess as to what cards they are holding. While this is impossible in a virtual game, the astute online poker player can compensate by learning to recognize patterns in their opponents’ betting, response times and other non-physical behaviors. Having learned to play poker online was clearly no handicap to 2003 World Series of Poker winner Chris Moneymaker; his first live poker tournament resulted in a $2.5 million win.
Although operating an online casino is technically illegal in Canada and the U.S., online poker websites are able to avoid governmental regulation by operating out of Caribbean countries, such as Antigua and Barbuda. As the popularity of online gambling continues to grow, it seems that governments will be forced to review these laws — the Canada-based Interactive Gaming Council estimates online poker sites to attract $10 billion in business annually, 60 to 65 per cent of it being from American customers.
While the legalities of online gambling remain murky, online poker services are able to promote their websites by describing them as free poker schools. In Canada it is illegal to advertise for an illegal product or service (such as online gambling), so the large online poker services commonly have two websites — one that processes cash bets and one that only deals in fake money. The two websites generally have very similar names, with the website for the free service ending with the extension .net and the cash version having the suffix most internet users automatically type — .com.
The major appeal of online poker is also its vice: the convenience of being able to join a poker game at any time and for any amount of money can be a strong temptation, and the game has the potential to become addictive. To practise responsible gambling, remember to set your limits before you play and then stick to them, and never gamble with money you can’t afford to lose.
Were Kenny Rogers to revise his song The Gambler to include a word of caution to the modern poker player, he might say: “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em . . . and know when to log off.”
