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One of the most important skills that you need to develop as a poker player is the skill of observation. There are many things about the poker game that are observable, such as the behavior of poker players near you and if you are not taking advantage of those readily apparent visual cues, there is a whole part of the game that you are not involved in. In the end, that is going to hurt your poker game big time, regardless of whether you are playing live poker or online poker.
A lot of people claim that observation is not as important in online poker as it is in live poker, but the truth is far from that. The two main reasons that people claim this about online poker are that there are software packages to do that for you and there are no visual cues that you can pick up from a player at an online poker table.
In regards to the first of these two reasons, it should be relatively self-evident how ridiculous that particular argument is. If there are popular online poker software packages dedicated to collecting and recording data on the observations that can be made at the table, obviously it is an important part of the online poker game. However, those data are useless unless you do something with them and it is in applying those data to your game that observation becomes important again.
As to the second claim, it is true that there are fewer visual cues at the online poker table. You can’t see a person fiddle with their chips or take a deep breath before making a bet. However, you can take note of how fast they bet, how often they bet, how much they bet and the types of hands they have when they do this. In fact, the lack of direct visual cues makes observing betting patterns even easier to do in online poker and since most poker players believe betting patterns to be more important anyway, observing poker players at the table in online poker is still very important to do.
So keep that in mind when you’re next at the online poker table and start looking for patterns in the play of your opponents. This will surely help you in placing good bets and ultimately winner the poker game.
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