Online poker has become massively popular over the years and as a result it has had a dramatic change on the world of poker. Some of these changes should have been expected but others are quite surprising. What is clear however is that over the last few years poker has changed more than at any other time in its history and the online game is largely responsible for that.
The biggest change that online poker has brought is that it has greatly increased the number of players. There are millions of people playing online who have never even been to a casino let alone played in a live game of poker. Not only are there a lot more people playing but the type of person playing has changed as well. In particular there are a lot more younger players than there used to be. These days there are kids barely old enough to be in a casino winning major tournaments because of all the practice that they got online.
The other big change that online poker has brought is that the players have gotten a lot better. Online play allows you the chance to play a lot more than you would be able to do live and this has given players a lot of practice. All of that practice has made them much better as players and this has really raised the level of play. Certainly there are still plenty of inexperienced players out there but the days when a skilled player could show up at a casino popular with tourists and expect to come away a winner are over, there are just too many good players for that.
Online poker has also changed the way that the game is played. In particular the players who have learned to play online are a lot more aggressive than the older players who learned to play the traditional way. Whether this is good for the game or not remains to be seen. The track record of the best online players when they play in major tournaments is only mediocre so there is a belief that this style of play doesn't translate to the live game all that well. However as more players who learned to play online start playing live games this may change.
One interesting change that seems counter intuitive is that the huge popularity of online poker has resulted in a huge increase in players in the casinos as well. One would have assumed that playing online would reduce the number of people who played in live games but the opposite has happened. The reason for this seems to be that online play allows people to learn the game in the privacy of their own home so they don't have to be intimidated when they go to a live game. The result is that more people are playing live games.
