Practice like a pro – online

Jonathan Duhamel recently attested to the time he spent playing online before he made it on the poker circuit to his recent WSOP win. More and more professional players say that playing online has been crucial in helping them build up their skills prior to becoming pros.

Jonathan Duhamel is 23 years old and has just managed to win the WSOP. How did this university dropout do this? Well, he studied and he studied hard. He spent 2 years reading poker books and articles online and playing poker online, building up his skills of analysis, strategy, mathematics, problem solving and poker of course.

Chris Tessaro, who has written many articles on poker, recommends playing as much as possible online. Some poker players play up to 30 or 40 online games at a time. Tessaro recons it takes hundreds of thousands of hands of practice to get even vaguely close to playing poker professionally at a World Series level.

Before internet use became such a way of life, young players would have to play for in the region of 15 years to gain such experience but with online poker we’re starting to see 18-20 year olds gaining that kind of skill in a matter of years.