With the gaining popularity of online poker, I have seen many players learn and develop their skills of the game by starting out online. Online poker is more accessible than live poker games, as you are pretty much guaranteed to find a game to play at any given day at any given time. This gives players more reason to play online, and it also gives players more reason to play more often. Soon, these players, especially those who started out playing online, will only learn the skills developed through the online style of play. While you can still become a very good player and develop very solid poker skills and strategy, there is one element of the game of poker that is missing from the current style of online play. In a live game, you learn to read your opponents judging by their every action. That can include what they are wearing, their eye movement, hand and body movement, or even their social tendencies around other players and certain situations. Great poker players know how to play this aspect of their competition, and will always have that edge over purely online players. In my opinion, this aspect of the game is just as important as any other poker technique, and is just as much part of the game as anything else.