I play 2-5 NL in Atlantic City. I've been a moderate winner over 5000 hours but there is alot of room for improvement. I've read most of the books and follow 2+2, specifically the low limit live forum.
My question is will practicing online playing .10-.25 NL be helpful to my live game, or is online and B&M so different that I would be practicing with apples to eat oranges? Thanks

Thats a ton of hours live.

If anything can be gained by doing this it would be to check your game for leaks via tracking software but....there are a lot of spots where a leak online isn't necessarilly a leak live. I would only suggest you do this if you have never played a lot of hands online and fear you might have some fundamental flaws ....if you came up online you have probably already gone through this process and I think that you will gain little.

too much of a different animal.

I will say this though. If you have the skillz to rise to where you could say beat 1/2 full ring 6 tables for say 2ptbb/100....

THEN

have the ability to adjust correctly to the tendencies and ranges that happen at live poker, then yes, online would help you quite a bit. Too many players do not make the adjustment well at all though, so it is a slippery slope.

I really think it's too different...for one, it's tough to truly predict what "level" 2-5 Live compares to online. I know that 1/2 live can legitimately be compared to something like .05/.10 online...it's that putrid at many tables. However, I think the games are so different that I would never suggest somebody play that low online to try to fix leaks to their much higher live game.

Another huge problem is simply this: good luck trying to take .10/.25 nearly as seriously as you take 2/5 live. After a short while, I would almost guarantee that you can't take the money seriously, and thus it would be a pointless experiment.

A 25nl game plays differently than a 2/5 game. Several reasons are mentioned above, not least of which is that regular 25nl players typically have an ample BR and most 2/5 players are playing what would be conventionally considered underrolled. There are virtually no regular LAGs at 25nl, while you will see them frequently at 2/5. The passive caller at 2/5 doesn't last long at 25nl.

That said, there are advantages to playing both on-line and live. The main one is that you exercise different parts of playing poker, just like knowing how to play LHE, or PLO exercises different elements of the game. The on-line game is far more odds, bet size and range orientated. If this is a weakness, spending time reading the COTWs in the micro forum and practicing them is better on-line. You probably play about 50k hands year. A decent on-line player sees that many hands in a month. It becomes easier to practice whatever you're working on and make it part of your game with that intensity of hands.

A HUD is mandatory at 25nl. About 10% of the value of one is seeing what your opponent is doing. The vast majority is to see what really works and doesn't if you are like me and want proof on whether some advice is good or not. There's a lot of bad advice out (there was a time when people said JTs was the best starting hand in poker). When I posted in the current COTM that one should raise and not call with trouble hands, it is based on over 1500 hands that I could look at over the last 3 months to show whether that was a good idea or not.

It will end up being like everything else in life. The more you get out of it the more you put into it.