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Watching the site grow.....some thoughts for new players

The invention of online poker has made learning how to play poker much easier. While some people insist "membership poker" games tell you nothing about your ability as a player, I don't think that is right. First, and most important, learning to play poker well is a process, an evolution, a journey even.

It requires a stubborn attitude and a high threshold of pain. The first time anyone plays, they play badly, if only because they don't know all the rules. People who just give up at their first failure will make terrible poker players. Even if you don't take an ass kicking your first time, you will soon. You must be able to handle losing. And then you must have a desire to improve at the game. Simply playing should not be your end goal. Improving at a game that has choices is a big part of the fun of the game itself.

Free online poker games seem pointless on the surface. Except when membership poker can be turned in for promotional stuff (Bellagio entries, Festa Al Lago, WPT Bootcamp), winning or losing membership poker makes zero difference. But if you are trying to get better, simply, you are playing to learn. The currency of real money poker games is just that, real money. That is the point of the game. Online membership poker games are wholly different. They are like "implied odds". New players should play them specifically to learn how to play better, including controlling emotions, reading player betting patterns, testing your stamina, etc. The point of the game should not be to accumulate membership poker points. The point should be to help learn how to accumulate real money!

While the membership poker games have obvious limitations, they can tell a new player quite a lot. If you can't beat the membership poker games, you will not beat any real money game. The membership poker games have no rake and donkey play because they are free or something next to it. Keep in mind that $20 is a 10x blind short stack at the lowest level games casinos spread. This equates to 10 minutes of poker if you run bad. This is an important thing to understand if you are new to online poker. After a small amount of hours it makes sense to get off the freeroll tables, but if you log considerable hours playing membership poker, and you are losing, it is 99% likely you play badly.

Membership poker tables can help you learn the relative strength of hands... like seeing that KQs will win more and bigger pots than 96o. Membership poker games online will help a player learn to play poker better than any other single resource that has ever existed. But like any beginner thing it's limited.

The membership poker games should take you from knowing nothing to the level of "novice" about twenty times faster than any of us who had to learn the game other ways. The basic lesson a new player needs to learn is: how to beat a poker game. The specifics of how to do that vary. Beating membership poker games is similar to beating very low limit games, but not all that similar. It's not the actual skill in beating the play games that is important. It is simply the process of figuring out how to do it -- how to beat whatever style of game you are in. That "how to" may not be very useful in any other poker game, but that doesn't matter.

Poker is answering a question from the information you manage to gather together. The actual information doesn't matter, and will vary and change and never be the same. Your job is to master the information -- both the pieces you are involved with at each individual moment, and the pieces that carry over from session to session and year to year like discipline and bankroll management. Learning valuable lessons from online membership poker games is just the first answer to hundreds of questions a new poker player needs to put together.

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