Playing online poker differs greatly from playing poker in real life in a number of different aspects. The most tangible difference is the fact that you are not actually sitting with the players and cannot see what they are doing. This is a big disadvantage to playing in a personal situation where you can see a players reactions and visual cues that they give to what they may be holding or thinking so playing online has a completely different type of strategy involved.
The first difference when playing at any online poker sites is the fact that you have to play more by the statistic and mathematical probabilities and less by what information players give you because they give you less information. While it is still possible to glean some information from players, it is much harder to “read” players since you cannot see what they are doing. For the reason, you have to focus more on the math behind the poker and more on playing the cards and less on playing the player. While you can still get a feel and an idea for how a player plays and what type of plays they get, you lack the visual cues that are an extremely important part of traditional real life poker.
Another thing that is different about online at poker stars is the odd shift in how bluffing works. It is a lot easier to bluff online than it is in real life because the players you are playing against cannot read you and any tells that you may have to signify the other players cannot read your bluff. Because of this, bluffing is more prevalent when playing internet poker as opposed to playing in real life. By that same token, it is also easier to get away with the bluffs because players have to trust the math and the cards more than they do their own gut instinct. This creates situations where determining who is bluffing and who is not extremely difficult.
This fact makes bluffing a much more viable action in online poker than real life poker. When you are playing online, you should consider bluffing more often than you would in real life and you should be much warier about calling people on their bluffs because you cannot easily determine whether they are, in fact, bluffing.
Overall, playing online at espn poker is a completely different beast from playing in real life. With the lack of visual cues and information from the other players that you are playing with, you get to bluff more and have more difficulty calling bluffs. Additionally, you are forced to play mathematically and playing the cards as opposed to playing the players. While the importance of math and statistics in online play can be frustrating for some, it removes an element of skill, the ability to read other players, and allows players to focus more on the numbers, which is an easier skill than learning how to read other players.