Does Play Money Have Value?

Full Tilt is back up and running, and I had a chance yesterday to play a little.  To start, I multi-tabled with two SNGs, a 90 person and a six-handed single table.  It had been since well before Black Friday since I'd played online, but it didn't take me long to remember one of the reasons I had started to shy away from it.

Put simply, people play like idiots.

There's no question that people play differently when it's not real money on the line.  I see that on Full Tilt, I see it on the WSOP app we have on the Kindle, and I'm sure its  the same everywhere.  For a long time, even at the beginning yesterday, I wondered if it was worth it for me.  Should I spend my time on the play money sites, or would that time be better served reading, watching videos, and doing other research?

Ultimately, I decided it IS worth the time.  For one, with my vast inexperience, I just need to see hands.  I remember hearing during this year's ME final table that Greg Merson had seen 7 million hands of poker, online.  Staggering.  The discussion went on to emphasize how beneficial this was in Merson's improvement as a player.  Obviously, I'm never going to see that many hands, but there is value in seeing as many as I can - knowing when to get involved in pots and when to get out, how to play relative to my position, raising patterns, etc.

For two, despite the fact that there are people who play like idiots, it doesn't take long in one of the SNGs for those people to be weeded out.  Invariably, there are three or four people who go all-in on the first hand, but by about five hands are so, things have calmed down a bit and it resembles something more like a real tournament.  This was the case with the 9-handed SNG I played to end my session: it didn't take long for it to get down to five players, counting myself, all of whom seemed like they were playing, for lack of a better term, "normally".

I finished second in that tournament, and was proud of the way I played: no stupid decisions, and I lost heads-up when I pushed short stacked in the small blind and my opponent's Jc/7c beat my Qh/Jh thanks to a rivered 7. 

That was my best result; I was out 20th in the 90 person and actually dead last in the six-handed, though I didn't play poorly there either.  I also played around with some PLO and found it interesting; I wasn't very successful but I think I could be in the future.  But first things first - to get to a point where my NLH game is more respectable, both in tournament and cash games.