Newb question

So, I decided a few days ago to sign up on pokerstars and learn how to play the variety games, and hopefully to improve my poker skills. My question is, with money games banned, do any US players with any skill play on there for play money? I'm guessing not.

The thing is, as bad as I am (and I am bad; this is not false modesty) I cash about 1/2 of the time, but they tend to only pay about 20% of the field or less. So I'm wondering if there's value in playing there for learning purposes, if someone with just a few skills can do that well. I've only been playing 4 days, and I've made several final tables out of hundreds of people in some of the tournaments. So I'm starting to wonder if anybody's playing real poker there.

I know this is probably a stupid question, although they do sell money to play with, so there is some commerce, and I have to figure people don't just buy chips to throw them away. But it doesn't really matter, because as far as I can tell, you can't win anything, even little prizes.

Thanks.

Quote: beachbumbabs

So, I decided a few days ago to sign up on pokerstars and learn how to play the variety games, and hopefully to improve my poker skills. My question is, with money games banned, do any US players with any skill play on there for play money? I'm guessing not.

The thing is, as bad as I am (and I am bad; this is not false modesty) I cash about 1/2 of the time, but they tend to only pay about 20% of the field or less. So I'm wondering if there's value in playing there for learning purposes, if someone with just a few skills can do that well. I've only been playing 4 days, and I've made several final tables out of hundreds of people in some of the tournaments. So I'm starting to wonder if anybody's playing real poker there.

I know this is probably a stupid question, although they do sell money to play with, so there is some commerce, and I have to figure people don't just buy chips to throw them away. But it doesn't really matter, because as far as I can tell, you can't win anything, even little prizes.

Thanks.

I think if people are going to go through the process of actually playing on the site, they'll still try their best play money or not. They just might lack skill in general.

IMO you will learn very little from playing those games.

You should YouTube cash game poker shows. I mean they're edited to mostly show exciting hands, but it's worth it to see what pros do and get intelligent commentator opinion on them.

BTW, are there any WoV online poker games hosted? It might be a fun place to talk about poker and play some hands for low stakes.

Quote: Lemieux66

You should YouTube cash game poker shows. I mean they're edited to mostly show exciting hands, but it's worth it to see what pros do and get intelligent commentator opinion on them.

come on Mario. As someone who plays poker you should know that what the pros do at cash games are about the exact opposite of what actually happens at a 1/3 game or a tournament.

Paying 20% of the field is high. Maybe because its online, particularly for play money. In live cash games it's more typical to pay 10% of the field. And the bottom of the payouts can sometimes be for less than the buy-in!

Quote: GWAE

come on Mario. As someone who plays poker you should know that what the pros do at cash games are about the exact opposite of what actually happens at a 1/3 game or a tournament.

It is but it's never wrong to see what the upper tier of players do. You just have to pick and choose what kinds of moves work against idiots. The best thing to do is just play 1/2 in a casino, buy in short, play tight(especially since you're short), and keep your eyes and ears open.

Quote: beachbumbabs

...but they tend to only pay about 20% of the field or less.

That part is different than most of the live brick & mortar tournaments I'm acquainted with. A more top-heavy prize structure that starts paying with reaching the top 10% of the field is what I usually see in those.

I use to use some software by Poker Academy occasionally just to practice my decision making. It was an old version and the bots it involved playing "against" varied but were not exceptionally good overall. I imagine that the more current versions of it are probably a lot more sophisticated, but for that purpose it was still useful, and I didn't care about what the man vs. bot results were, just how I made decisions. I might be tempted to treat a play money game in a similar way.