It’s been hard to find time away from the sights and sounds of Melbourne this week. As I mentioned before, the Crown Casino is amazing and I’ve been hitting the tables with ferocity this week, but I figure I’d find time to come up and play a little online.

The Crown Casino

I prefer online cash games and tournaments to live poker. There’s always a tournament or game running when I log on, there are games to fit every bankroll and I don’t have to pay for airfare, hotel and food — I just need £30 a month for a good Internet connection.

In live poker, if you’re lucky, you may see about 20 hands an hour. If I’m on several tables online, I can see more than 150 in an hour — which may be a bad thing now that I think about it.

With the exception of the big-time events, the structures in live, smaller buy-in tournaments are usually awful — they turn into a lottery after the fourth level.

Still, some live pros I know don’t play online — and if they do, it’s to fulfill an obligation to a certain site. They don’t like that they can’t see who they’re playing against and there are some players who couldn’t make a decision in 15 seconds if their life depended on it. (Likewise I know a bunch of online pros who don’t have the patience for the speed of a live tournament.)

There’s something about holding the cards and chips in your hand that gives you a different — and better — feeling than clicking a mouse. But there’s nothing like the feeling of getting knocked out of a big live tournament, and not being able to register into another one minutes after.

There are no lonely walks online.