Differences Between Play Money And Low-Stakes
When starting out playing poker, many people believe they can play for fake money (play money) and then transition for real money. This simply is not the case. There’s a big difference between fake money games and real-money games.
In fake money games, there’s no incentive to fold whatsoever. All of the online poker sites will give you unlimited amounts of fake money, so there’s no major reason to conserve your chips. Obviously, in a real money game, you don’t have an unlimited amount of cash (if you do, congrats!) so people actually play seriously. Some play-money players play for pride (some nice alliteration huh?), but that incentive is not nearly as much as cold, hard cash.
In a fake money game, you will be called and paid off with all sorts of hands because people simply want to see what you have. People won’t do this in a real-money game, even if the bet is just a dollar. If you play a lot of play money games, you will get used to winning more with your ‘winning hands’ which doesn’t transition into a real-money game. Your hand selection will get too loose, and it will affect your style of play too much.
While fake money games are good to get used to the rules of Texas Hold’em or just for fun, they are not a good learning tool for transitioning into low-stakes real-money games.