What Now Brown Cow? My Poker update since Poker's Black Friday

Well it came as a sudden shock to the system to find the primary sites I play real money poker on had been closed down by the US DOJ on what appear to be pretty serious charges. I'm not sure some of that may must be the DOJ tossing all the shirt they can find at the fan and seeing how much of it will stick. That's neither here nor there at the moment, as the reality is, none of sites (Full TIlt & Poker Stars in my case) are allowing US players any kind of cash play, even if it's only freerolls, PERIOD!. The money we have there is in some sort of limbo, though this week Poker Stars wants us to cash out our funds NOW. That's a whole big $10.54 for me. No additional word from Full Tilt yet where I have between $275 and $375, depending how they handle the Tournament and Step tickets.

Since April 15th I've been playing on the play money side of these sites, mainly Full Tilt. Wow, how much my game has changed since I started Mark B's classes and weekly group meetings from my Poker Stars play money days. When you're playing play money you don't realize just how much different playing with real money is. I always wanted to win whether it was play money or not. I wasn't one of those All-In every hand play money players; I wanted to play well. Now I clearly see how much different the play is. There are so many hands I won't play now that I did back then and I see the play money players playing now.

Certainly if you are just going to play for fun and never really expect to be involved in cash games, except for maybe some friendly home games, then online play money poker is the way you should go. I still feel there is a place for play money sessions for the more serious poker player, at least for a short time, such as when they are learning about a new form of the game, such as Omaha. It won't teach you how to play real money players, but if you are lucky and get onto a table where the players actually try to play poker, it will help you get an idea of how Omaha hands run, and then when you get back to the real money Omaha tables, you'll have a bit better understanding of the cards flow.

Now, yesterday I decided to the plunge and try a poker site that is still taking US players. I was originally thinking about Carbon Poker (one of the weekly group folks has re-started there). But in a Card Player email they talked about a new site, PokerView that has a webcam options so you can actually see the other players you are playing. I checked it out and decided to give it try. If you're a real serious poker player, this site isn't ready for your prime time yet. It took a bit of juggling things around to get the webcam working and $$$ into the site. It seems to work best with the Firefox browser. They are a small site with only a few hundred to somewhat over a 1000 players at any one time and I think, but don't know for sure, that may also include the play money players. They also have human looking avatars for rooms that don't use the webcam.

Here is a picture of a room with avatars:

 

This is one with the webcam:

That's it for now.