The Game
With the dangers of online poker addiction being more apparent than ever before, one must be careful about approaching any free poker online. These free poker games can often act simply as a gateway drug to playing fully paid poker, and can lead you down a path you never meant to tread. Nevertheless, however, if you can keep yourself playing simply free poker, with only play tokens, and without any paid money, then you can still take advantage of this enjoyable game, without falling prey to its darker side.
As simple of a site as it is, freepoker.org appears to be one of the safest possible sites for finding good, free poker online. The website provides access to a host of different online services, each of which offers a different variant of poker, but none of which forces you to put in any amount of money, or even give the game any of your credit card information. There is no chance that this free poker could become paid poker, though you could easily find paid poker at another site. But the chance that you can easily switch from one to the other at the same site is part of the danger of a supposedly free poker site like PokerStars.net, so you’re much more likely to keep any potential online addiction to poker in check with utterly free poker online from freepoker.org.
There are disadvantages to free poker online, of course, as has been pointed out by expert poker players. The primary disadvantage is that the game is fundamentally different because real money is not on the line. Poker with money involves a great deal more care on the part of the participating players, as opposed to free poker online, in which players can afford to be significantly more reckless with the play money of the game, because it is entirely false. All players need to do to replenish their play money is to start a new game of free poker, which gives a certain amount of detachment from the normal procedures of poker play. Furthermore, because of the recklessness that can be bred by playing a great deal of free poker online, it often becomes more dangerous for a given player to move from playing free poker to playing paid poker, more so than it would be if that player were to have gone directly into playing paid poker. In terms of the functioning of actual poker games, free poker teaches a poor set of skills.
But therein lies perhaps the most importance difference to understand, and the reason why most individuals will be better off playing free poker online than playing paid poker. Free poker is about an entertaining game; it’s about enjoyment, and it’s about having a good time. Paid poker is about success, winning, earning back everything you bet and more. Paid poker has to be about the money you make, more than it is about any sense of enjoyment or fulfillment you get from the game; such a greed-based foundation to the game is inherently a sign to be cautious. Free poker online, for all that it bears many similarities to paid poker, is without that rather dangerous foundation, and is therefore inherently safer.