Every now and then you find yourself in a live game with a couple of experts who must've gotten lost on their way to the interwebs. And although any sane person's response is to pull on some diapers cause there will be some shiteing-in-you-pants moments of awe, it's also instructive to contemplate what they do differently from us mere mortals whilst you're rummaging around in your murse for a wetwipe.
We're all familiar with the stereotype of the internet kid as the brash, loud, obnoxious barely-post pubescent kid who's just dying to tell the dealer 'tits or gtfo'. And although there is a small-but-distinct subset of the population that live up to this stereotype (many of whom just need a few years to grow into themselves), the vast majority of the guys you meet (and they are overwhelmingly guys, still, my darlings) are more-or-less polite, well reasoned kids who really, really fucking know their shit.
Livepros, when you get them to be candid, like to talk about how these kids lack some of the 'essential skills' of making it in the 'live game' (as if winrate somehow isn't the primary one), but I'm pretty sure they're wrong. And while we can talk about mechanics of whatever the actual game in question itself is, or wax poetoic about just who is better equipped to adjust to shifting aggression and ranges between the live and the interweb, let's look at the head-game for a seccie here kiddos.
Live players tilt. Online players tilt. And while there is some ineffable component of tilt that is personality-driven, there is a still a significant component that is totally experiential.
People have long talked about how playing hundreds of thousands of hands in your still-nascent poker lifetime makes you better at the nuts and bolts of poker, because you have seen similar situations before and novel situations are where you are more likely to make novel mistakes. But what people don't talk about is how, over the course of those hundreds of thousands of hands you've also experienced the sequential stringing together of thousands of independent events.
This means that you have also experienced patterns in the somewhat stochastic process of 'running bad' or 'running good'. Humans, as a species, are not good at intuiting statistical randomness; we're a pattern-matching species. Which means we are very very good at finding signal where there is really only noise. And worse, we have emotional responses to those false signals. If you have no experience with what those pseudo-signals look like you are much more likely to react to them in ways that are not healthy for your bankroll.
Have you ever seen a live player just lose it over losing twelve bets, or a buy in, or even a pot? What about live players who enter 'downswings' of 100 bets and make terrible terrible adjustments to their games because they just can't possibly be running this badly and they must be doing something wrong, or who stop c-betting because they never hit, or who just torch whole buyins on fire because they are running badly over 100. hand. samples.
Now online players do these things too. But the distinct difference is that there is a magnitude-scale difference in the pain tolerance of anyone who has had any longevity online. Because 100 bet downswings happen in fast succession and having emotional responses to them will literally torch your roll in the relatively tougher online games. Because you see units of 100 hands so quickly that the pain is come and gone really quickly.
What has functionally happened is that the kids with millions of hands under their belts have first-handedly experienced more possible sequential permutations of the random combinations of the three outcomes of each individual hand: win, lose, or break even. It's tolerance plain and simple.
So what does this translate to when one of these lost experts wanders into, say a live midstakes limit holdem game populated with fishies? It means that even tho they're running horrifyingly badly by any live player standard, they're calm. Stuck three racks? lol 30 bet downswing. Frenzied spewing? Not here. Worst ever table captain starts taunting them (literally taunting them) because they haven't won a single pot they've three bet with a range that is so much ridiculously stronger than the fields? They just smile, laugh, make a joke about how it's too late to stop now, and just keep playing their A game.
LIKE ALOOOOOTTT
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