In live play, there are a lot of gray areas that require floor people to make decisions and as a result a lot of times those decisions are not consistent. That can be frustrated. I've played where a floorperson ruled against me and later after a shift change the exact same situation occured except in reverse and a new floor person ruled the otherway. Completely contradicting the initial ruling.
I forget the action specifically but I remember the first floor person's ruling affected my decision and I acted in deference to it. You could say, I got double whammied. In online play, there are no shift changes or multiple rulings or reversals the law.
The are also no options for exploitation by running angles. The players shadiness is reigned in because of it. I read an interesting story from Minnesota about softball of all things, but it makes a great parallel to one of the weakneses of live poker and rulings by the floor compared to online poker tournaments.
Essentially, one team beat the other team by a walk-off homerun, however on the way to the plate the winning run, the girl who hit the homerun high fived her teammates. This is illegal because she touched another teamate before scoring. The angle-shooting manager brought his rule-book to the plate and bitched his way into having the run denied by showing a section where it said the play was illegal.
The umpire saw it was written that way, confered with his team and disallowed the play. On the face of it, good prevailed because the manager showed it was an illegal play (though bitching about that is as bush league as it gets... actually, no, because this gets worse).
What the umpire didn't read, and the manager didn't show him, was the caveat in a subequent section, where in the case of A HOMERUN a warning is given and the run is not taken away. So, the other team, with the angle shooting manager wins the game in extra innings, wrongfully.
The parallel to us who play poker tournaments is simple. Some players have a little more clout than others. Some know the game well and dealers might defer to their decisions. I've been in a situation where the floor defers to their decision (wrongfully) and the players take advantage of this.
In one live poker tournament a player declared a misdeal, despite action being completed by 7 people (all folds) and induced the button and small blind to discard when I sat in the big blind with what turned out to be rockets. The dealer disagreed and then agreed because of who the player was.
The floor did the same. I did not think to go over the floor's head to the tournament director who would have called it correctly. Truth is the guy was partially right, and when I started to debate it with him, got the two players in between us to fold because he was certain he was right. This was a pivitol hand.
None of this would have transpired when you play poker tournament online. First off, the dealer wouldn't have exposed a card (which he didn't the angle shooter did) and there'd be no debate. There are no misdeals nor debates about hands. How vociferously I debated also would indicate the strength of my holding. Which I didn't want to do.
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