Last week a dispute arose on Twitter, between Olivier Busquet and Daniel Negreanu after Busquet posted the following Tweet:
Online poker is chess, live poker is checkers…
The tweets betweenthe two quickly became a hot topic on Twitter and on 2+2, with Busquet and Negreanu engaged in a somewhat heated back-and-forth:
DN: @olivierbusquet just a joke. You win lots online and maybe not so much live. Online/Chess Live/Checkers your tweet shocked people here!
OB: @RealKidPoker you mean a bunch of people who win live but can’t win online didn’t like my tweet? shocking…doesn’t make it less true
OB: @RealKidPoker do you deny that a player who can win at a certain cash game stake online usually can win at a higher level live?
DN: @olivierbusquet as your opinion is just an opinion from a successful online player who hasn’t been able to translate that to live yes?
Sadly, this is a debate that has raged since online poker exploded in popularity, and the most ironic part of the debate is that initially it was live poker players who scoffed at online poker players, but now the roles have been reversed and its online players that look down their noses at live poker players, as evidenced by Busquet’s comments.
Why Busquet is wrong
Busquet’s reasoning seems to be two-fold:
* #1 – Live players struggle online
* #2 – Online games are tougher to beat than live games of the same stakes
I don’t disagree with either of these assertions, but neither of these arguments back-up Busquet’s opinion that online players are better or more talented.
For one thing, online players have been shown to struggle just as much when switching to live poker, so it doesn’t seem to be a matter of a lack of skill, but rather the differences between live and online poker [more on this below].
To Busquet’s second point, there are actually two good reasons why online games of the same stakes are tougher than live poker games:
* Live players have to play higher to overcome the rake, so you will not see many (if any) pros in lower stakes games because they are all but unbeatable due to the rake, tipping, and added expenses of playing live poker. Not that brick & mortar casinos spread lower stakes to begin with.
* Because they can’t sit at 20 tables and play 2,000 hands in an hour, live players must play higher to make a decent hourly rate. Comparatively, an online grinder 8-tabling $50 No limit Holdem is likely wagering the same amount per hour as a live $5/$10 No Limit Holdem player. So, while the stakes may be different the amount of money going into the pot every hour is the same.
Why Negreanu is wrong
There is a simple argument to Busquet’s claims: If live poker is so easy to beat why don’t you play live?
Instead Daniel decided to take the opposite point of view, and even though he called both forms skillful he basically made a case for live poker being more skillful, tweeting:
It’s possible you are missing some skills required to excel at live poker? … or possible that you are unaware of the added weapons available to a live players arsenal because you don’t possess them?
As I’ll explain below, it’s not that live poker has “added” weapons available; the weapons are simply different.
The problem with analogies
A better analogy than comparing live poker and online poker to checkers and chess would be that online poker is baseball and live poker is football [or choose any sport you like].
While many of the skills needed to excel in both live and online poker overlap, they do not all overlap; there are certain skills that are unique to live poker and certain skills that are unique to online poker. Picture a Venn diagram where 90% of the objects are shared, but without possessing the other 10% you can only ever to aspire to be good, not great at the activity.
So it’s not fair to characterize one format being easier or harder than the other. The differences are large enough that online poker players cannot simply pull up a chair at a live online poker table and dominate, nor is the reverse true.
It’s definitely possible to be competitive when you switch from one arena to the other, just as a professional basketball player could jump into a volleyball game and be dominant against regular competition in short order. But to assume that the best online players will decimate the best live players in a live poker game is a bit far-fetched. It’s not much different than saying the best No Limit Holdem players would beat the best Limit Holdem players in Limit Holdem.
Two-sport athletes
Sure, there are a few Bo Jackson’s and Deion Sander’s in the poker world –players who can excel in both the live and online arena simultaneously—but for the vast majority of players it’s either one or the other, and if they do play both live and online it’s rarely at the highest levels in each or at the same time.
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