Poker is a game of luck

Poker is a game which involves luck, but in the long-run outcomes will be dictated by skill. If you toss a coin 1,000,000 times and get $2 everytime it comes heads, and pay up $1 every time it comes tails, it doesn’t matter what kind of run of tails your friend goes on, he’s going home out of pocket! Poker is exactly the same. If you’re better at estimating your equity and making better decisions than your opponents, you’ll make money in the long run (provided the rake isn’t too high!).

Online poker is rigged

Back in the day this was sort of a real thing. There were a couple of big superuser scandals, back around 2007, with Absolute and Ultimate Poker. These days, provided you avoid some of the sketchiest sites, this is a non-issue. The big sites have far too much to lose to risk being shut down by cheating their players, and what would be the motivation? They are making huge bank anyway, every day, on the rake - variance free! Why would they care which players they deliver the next bad beat to? The answer - they don’t, and it isn’t rigged.

You get more bad beats in online poker

One thing is totally true - you get more bad beats in online poker per hour of play. The reason is very simple - you get more hands per hour. Many more hands per hour. In a live casino game with a fast dealer, you might clock 40 hands per hour or fewer. Online, you’re generally looking at 70 as a good minimum, and if you want to hit the zoom tables, it can go north of 200 hands per hour per table. Not to mention you can multi-table. You’ll receive, and deliver more bad beats, and have more hands hold up, too, because you’re playing more poker!

Live Poker is all about reading your opponents

We’ve even heard this as an argument against playing poker online - those who say that it’s not “real poker”. Live tells are fascinating, and a dimension of the game missing from online, sure. The truth is though that they’re a small part of the total skill set you need for live poker and will come in gradually as the “icing on the cake” of your live poker strategy - which should still be firmly based around the exact same fundamentals as online - understand odds, stack depths, sizings, position and betting patterns, hand ranges. There’s a ton of work you can do in poker without ever touching live reads.

The Cashout Curse

Poker players are a superstitious bunch sometimes. At PokerDeals we’ve heard of many poker curses over the years, including a pro who refused to look at the tournament lobby on deep runs in MTTs as he felt it “cursed him”. The absolute classic though is the cashout curse - they say if you withdraw profits you’ll immediately go on a downswing. There’s absolutely no truth to it of course. Don’t believe the hype, doom-switches are just another online poker myth. Fingers crossed!

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