World Poker Views Blog

When 22 year old Peter Eastgate won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event two weeks ago, it served as the icing on the cake for what many have known for a long time: youth is certainly no disadvantage to excelling in poker. In fact, it might be that young (under 30) poker players are better than any other age group.

Prior to the advent of online poker, it was uncommon to hear of a young player excell mightily in the game. One anamoly to this is Phil Hellmuth who won the WSOP in 1989 at the age of 24. Hellmuth held the record for youngest player to win the Main Event for 19 years before Eastgate’s win.

Another historic instance of youth triumphing over seasoned players is the story of Annette Obrestad. Last year, Obrestad won WSOP Europe at the age of 18. It was the first live poker tournament of her life. How did Obrestad manage to pull that off? She started playing (illegally, mind you) online poker at the age of 15. After three years of around-the-clock practice, she managed to close the gap in skill between herself and professionals three times her age. Indeed, she did more than simply “close the gap”. Obrestad is one of many under 25 players who are now better than their older counterparts who have spent decades honing their skill under the roof of a casino.

Online Poker Makes it Possible

Poker is not unlike most other games in that you must practice to get better. The only true way to practice the game of poker is to sit down and start gambling! If one does this in a brick-and-mortar casino game, they can expect to play about 30 hands per hour. In an online poker game, they can play more like 60 hands per hour. Of course, it depends on some factors such as: speed of the site’s software, number of players sitting in the game, betting style being used, etc. But a good rule of thumb is that you can play about one hand per minute at an online poker game.

So with this in mind, it seems that one could learn about twice as fast playing online instead of in person, right? But here’s where online poker really leverages an advantage: the ability to play more than one table at a time!

For obvious reasons, you can only play one table at a time in a live poker game. However, in an online poker game you can play anywhere from 8 to as many as 30, depending on which site you’re playing at. For beginners, trying to play more than two tables at a time is likely to be very challenging. But once the basics are learned, it’s not hard to start playing somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5 tables at once. This is the reason why young players have gotten so good, so quickly relative to their older counterparts: the ability to play ~10x the number of hands in the same amount of time!

When online poker exploded in popularity in 2004, young players in college dorms all across the world began playing online poker in their spare time. Another appealing feature of online poker relative to live poker is the stakes. Understandably, casinos do not want to waste floorspace or staff on a penny-ante game. However, there are no such overhead considerations for online poker sites. For this reason, poor college kids were able to practice playing online poker for literally next to nothing.

In some cases, they did play for nothing! Almost all online poker rooms have “play money” games where nothing is being wagered. However, these games are generally full of players who aren’t taking the game at all seriously. After all, it’s not like they have anything to lose.

Next time you sit down at a poker player with a seasoned pro and some young kid in sunglasses, don’t be too quick to assume its the seasoned pro you should be concerned with. In all likelihood, it’s the young kid who has actually played more hands of poker in his life than the old guy!