With the advent of the World Wide Web, the traditional card game of Poker has also made its transition to the online world. The question of people who play poker in a brick-and-mortar setting is “Is there a difference between playing it in real life and playing it online?”

To answer that question, you have to take a look at the skills and strategies needed in a game of poker. For lack of a better term and for comparison purposes, we’ll call poker that is played in the real world as traditional poker and poker played over the internet as online poker.

There are a lot of factors that affect a traditional game of poker. One of them is the setting. Traditional poker can be played anywhere. It can be a glitzy casino in Las Vegas, or a smoke-filled back room of your favorite bar. But whatever the location is, it can affect how a player reacts to the game. The noise from people and the background, the ambience and even the food and drinks they serve can influence the game. Contrast that to playing online poker where a person can be alone in a room with his favorite music playing in the background and food and drinks that he or she chose.

Another factor to consider is the human interaction between players. In a game of poker, “bluffing” can spell the difference between winning and losing. A player tries to guess a player’s hand through the body language of another player. If a person guesses right then he can strategize his hand to win the pot. This is done in traditional poker while it is absent in online poker. The absence of this all important strategy makes it harder for one person to win at online poker. Also, in traditional poker there is no time limit as to how a person will play a certain hand. Online poker imposes time limits per turn which makes it harder for a player to concentrate.

One last major factor to consider in playing online poker is amount of money involved. Because of the betting system employed by the game of poker, traditional poker players tend to gamble less money than those players who play online. If you take into consideration the expense one makes to go to the venue and the tip one person gives to the dealer and to the waitresses, by the time a traditional player gets to play a hand, his or her “pot money” has already diminished. But this also makes a person use the money wisely unlike in an online poker game. Players tend to get careless when betting money.

So is there a difference between an online poker game and a traditional brick-and-mortar game? There are a lot of differences. If you’re a traditional poker player who wants to transition to the online community, it would be harder for you to switch. There are many unwritten rules when playing an online poker game that only experience can teach.