Online Poker Play

A few years ago when playing online poker was somewhat “legal” I was playing on Pokerstars and Fulltilt. I look back now and those were fun years when the opportunity to build a bankroll was good. Now I am left trying to make it happen in the casino’s here in my area and once in a while being able to travel to a bigger casino and play in their games. It was before the “Black Friday” event that I would be playing a tournament online and would find myself being knocked out of the tournament by an inferior hand. It was common for me to lose hands that I thought should have won and I could never figure out why it would happen. During my time playing online poker I had made friends that lived in other parts of the United States. We would email back and forth and discuss hands and we would talk some strategy. One day I received an email about a booklet that was discussing something that we found interesting. This booklet was describing how to win at online poker and how the computer programs operated. It mentioned the term Random Number Generator (RNG) and how it worked. Now this was interesting, since I figured all computers would be able to do the big calculations and put out the required amount of possible hands. I learned that this is not possible unless you have a big government computer. At least it would have to be big. From there the booklet got more interesting to me because then it started talking about the Net Win Percentage (NWP) and the Overall Win Percentage (OWP). I really started to get interested in this information. This also meant, to me, that playing poker live in the casinos is definitely different than playing online. My friends and I decided that we would try out this new information for ourselves and see if it would really work. We made sure we had the proper NWP when hands were played and we also threw hands away that, even though would be premium hands, would allow our OWP to be in a certain percentage. This also meant we had to keep an eye on all the players at the table. By letting someone win then we were allowing our percentage to drop and prepare us to play hands that would maximize our chip stack. What we found with this knowledge was that we were able to approach this online poker game at a different level and play the percentages more than playing the cards. Remember I said that we didn’t get very far with this because of the “Black Friday” event but I wonder if this is still appropriate. Have things changed in the computer industry that this is no longer working and more combinations of hands are available? When I picked up the booklet the other day it brought back some memories and made me go back and read it again. I must say I miss playing live online poker.