Maybe 1) because he needed adaptations to live game
2) by far the most important reason poker =/= chess you can't claim you're gonna win a (let's say) 500 players tournament the first year you play.

This question is about as stupid as it gets but just for arguments sake I'll give you a few answers.

1) Not everybody has a casino or game in their area where they can play the stakes they want.
2) The pace is atrocious and not everybody loves that.
3) The people you sit with can be a real pain in the ass.
4) Improving your game is really hard playing that few hands.
5) The comfort of playing sessions at home at times you like and with pauses as you please.
6) For live donkaments, are just about the biggest variancefest you can ever imagine when the maximum volume you can attain is small enough to not even assure a win over a few years.
7) The maximum stakes most fish play can be a cap to somebody's earning potential.
8) It can drive you insane.
9) Lots of online players do sometimes pick out juicy live games as it is.

@up: and, most importantly, you can easily get a 100k or 200k hands downswing in poker, and it would take you a lifetime to actually play so many hands live. You need to be very lucky to beat variance playing live. And even if you wanted this gamble, if you play, for example, 10 tables online, you would need 20 times the winrate (as live play is sloooow) to get similar hourly, still loosing to other costs.

e: ok, with 20bb+/100 winrates, it's very unlikely to go on 100k+ hands downswing, but still not impossible, and you need to be really crushing and play with low rake to achieve those winrates

Online cash players are better and live mtt players are better imo

Why can't we all just be poker players :,(

I wish I did. Tampa has a nice live poker scene. My ADD kicks in and I get bored.

So, pretty much, the smaller edge is made up for by volume. Gotcha. Thanks for answering without being a jerk.

funny how im the hud guy but also the feel player guy. blah blah blah im going to get a brain tumor

It's so funny how people believe a story that sort of makes sense over endless quantities of clear data. Even many of the live players themselves are raging victims of confirmation bias, as if one *own* or some 100 hand sample where the other guy seemed to be owned suddenly means something live when it never did online. I could go on forever about this, etc etc.

come take my money please, no hustles/games. Think I'm destroying most of the players live that I am also destroying online.

Sick re-level?

So do you believe that Phil Hellmuth is on a 25 year heater Jungle?

Wow, lack of logic in OP is strong.

Live players who play almost exclusively full ring against bad players use "ABC" poker less than online players which play lots of variants(namely 6max and HU) against extremely good competition?

I can assure you that you learn a lot more about poker playing a lot of variants against tough competition than you do playing full ring against drunks.

Id have to go with the average live grinder being better than the mostly online guys

For the simple factor of TELLS

There are no tells online, but every other aspect of live poker is there, thus tells are the telling factor so to speak which tips live poker into needing more skill

Simply put sometimes you just KNOW the guy has AA pre and youve gotta fold your KK

Or if u need to call a 10th pot size bet on the river with TP no kicker and you see the guy twitch and just know to fold

solid troll OP

I agree. Doing less of something makes you better at it than if you did it more of it.

Why, I only hammer on average 5 nails a year, and because of that, I can hammer nails better than a carpenter who hammers thousands of them a year. I hammer those damn nails so sweetly it makes women wet their panties.

Yeah But the carpenter uses a HUD to hammer his nails, so it's not the same

Pretty sure this is a bad level. Hope so at least.

I've done both and am currently a live pro and the answer is without question online. Winning online grinders have way better fundamentals and are just better 'poker players'. There are some live pros who are really good at the live aspects of the game (I'm not one one of them) and those skills should not be dismissed, it helps them make a lot more money than just their poker ability alone would otherwise allow, but the answer is still online grinders.

Concepts like playing GTO, merging ranges and all of that just don't exist live except maybe at the very highest nosebleed stakes, where the best players are online players anyway. Live poker is paint by numbers in comparison to the online game in 2014.

The carpenter uses a nail gun. Takes all of the skill out of it! So he does a worse job!

Who gives a **** about who's better? The right question is which one makes more money at this moment? right now live poker wins because there is no legal online poker in the US.

The vast majority of live and online grinders are horrible at poker and life in general. It would be more appropriate if you were to ask which group of players is worse.

A better question is, who is more socially awkward, live or online poker players?

Well, of course, if we are playing live and we "just know it" then we have to fold. Or if someone twitches of course. WAIT! Do we care what the twitch means? Should we watch this a while and see what happens after the twitch for that specific person for a while? Or did someone just twitch and so obviously we should fold to a 10% pot bet bet with top pair bad kicker or worse?





Sorry. I just find almost everyone who is talking about tells to be almost completely full of ****.

Not quite true.

Answer is the better player plays online and the guy who wants to make retirement money plays live. Easy game.