In an interesting story on Pokerlistings.com, the veteran pro Hoyt Corkins and young guns Jason Mercier and Yevgeniy Timoshenko comment on the "generation gap" in modern poker. It has often been said that young online players can play tons of hands in a relatively short time and gain experience much faster than old time pros ever did; while this is true, all three pros remark that mere quantity without quality is no help at all.


While Corkins admires a lot of young players, he says that just playing hundreds of thousands of hands and learning the technique does not make you a good live player. "You can't discount 32 years of watching people's faces and watching the way they put their money in the pot," says Corkins to Pokerlistings.com and adds, "(Poker) has got a human element to it."

Jason Mercier (pictured) agrees with the pro and says that many good online players have failed at live poker because they haven't grasped the special skills needed live. "There's just so much more to it... There are so many more things you get live that you don't get playing online," Mercier says to Pokerlistings.com.

Finally, Yevgeniy Timoshenko states that it's not the number of hands that makes you good but what you do to learn from them. "What's more important is reviewing your sessions. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter if you play a million hands," he says.

So, instead of piling up hand after hand on autopilot, you should spend as much time analysing your play; that way, says Timoshenko, you can gain valuable experience online about four times as fast as playing live.

Read the whole story on Pokerlistings.com.