TEXAS HOLDEM ONLINE POKER

Each Sunday this summer, Senior Correspondent Richard T. Pienciak will provide Daily News readers with a special report about the wildly popular world of Texas Hold'em and other exotic gambling specialties. He'll talk to the pros and the amateurs and he'll take part in the action himself, playing in casino poker rooms across the country and on the Internet.

Pienciak's Poker Tour (PPT) is a journey every gamblin' Daily News reader can only dream of taking.

Competing in No Limit Texas Holdem online with play money is like being surrounded by a bunch of muggers, only to have them pummel you with dainty pillows.

Crazy behavior often reigns. Players bet phenomenal amounts of "money" without consequence because, well, there are no consequences. It seems as if many of these freeloaders have no idea when to bet and when to git.

For the past month, in preparation for the start of my poker series - Pienciak's Poker Tour, also known as PPT - I have been "wagering" in the play money section at PokerStars.com, the second-largest Internet poker room in the world, alternating between winning and losing thousands of fake dollars.

On some occasions, like Thursday evening into Friday morning, I joined a group of reasonable people trying to hone their skills at a table of $5/$10 Play Money No Limit Texas Holdem.

I started last week's session with "$7,567" in my account. After pulling a string of flushes and a couple of full houses, I quit with "$27,486" in play money. I can only dream of pulling those kind of cards when I start playing with real money.

More often, though, playing with fake dough has been less than satisfying.

Time after time, some nutball across the virtual table from me goes "all in," meaning he bets all of his chips, often before any common cards are turned over. Such behavior might make sense if the raising player has a pair of Aces as hole cards. But usually, whenever those cards are shown, they are mediocre, or worse.

"People want to play," says Dan Goldman, PokerStars.com's vice president of marketing, referring to those who play online with play money or real cash. "They want to be involved - and raise and re-raise. And they want to see the flop. The result is much more action."

Goldman, 49, a poker player himself, says that when gamblers sit down at a $15/$30 Limit HoldEm game in a casino poker room, "maybe four people see the flop," the set of three common cards that gives players five of their eventual seven cards.

"Online, six, seven or eight people see the flop," he says. "That means much larger pots. But then you see people turn over their hands and you ask yourself, 'What was that guy thinking?' You wouldn't put in a nickel on the cards they bet on."

Todd Discenza, PokerStars.com's assistant marketing director, says playing online with fake money "can be a very basic learning tool, for example you can learn the rank of hands. But the play is very loose. It's more like playing craps than playing poker."

Typically, when a wild player goes "all in" and loses at a play money table, he or she simply goes back to an online poker room's "bank" and reloads with additional fake money.

Most sites limit the number of "withdrawals" per hour or day, but there are plenty of cowboys out there ready to bet the ranch without fear of losing a single head of cattle.

Popularity of online play

There are literally dozens of online poker rooms: PartyPoker.com, PokerStars.com, UltimateBet.com and ParadisePoker.com are the four largest. Each offer wannabes the ability to play with fake dough as well as with real money.

At 2 a.m. Friday, about 15,000 players were wagering real money at some 2,200 online poker tables, according to PokerPulse.com, a website that measures online poker activity. The site estimated that in the prior 24 hours, some $95 million had been wagered in real-live online poker games.

At that same moment, PokerStars.com's website stated that it had 8,123 players on 1,337 tables. According to PokerPulse.com, PokerStars.com had 2,070 gamblers wagering real money on 307 tables at that time, meaning that many more were just practicing. Earlier this month, PokerStars.com announced that it had dealt its 500 millionth hand.

At the recently concluded World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, four of the top finishers started their journeys at satellite tournaments on the PokerStars.com site, according to Discenza.v

This year's $5 million champ, Greg Raymer, a patent attorney from Connecticut, plays on PokerStars.com under the moniker Fossilman. Second-place winner David Williams from Dallas is RugDoctor, seventh-place finisher Matt Dean of Woodlands, Tex., is mattpackage and ninth-place winner Michael McClain of Davis Calif., plays under the log-on mockahai.

The 2003 winner, then-amateur Chris Moneymaker, also started out on PokerStars.com (his log-on is Money800), and is credited with having played a major role in the current explosion in the popularity of Texas Hold'em.

Still, PokerStars.com isn't even at the top of the game. The busiest site, PartyPoker.com, often gets three times the action, according to PokerPulse.com. To keep pulling in paying customers, that site offers a $100 bonus for a player's first cash deposit. But thousands play practice games there, too.

Online poker involving play money has gotten so wild, says Discenza, that a small second-hand market has sprung up on eBay and on Internet poker news groups for the purchase of large amounts of the electronic practice chips.

As if all that action isn't enough, nine of the world's best poker players have banded together to help form FullTiltPoker.com, another Internet poker room.

While its software is still in beta testing, the site will offer amateurs a chance to test their skills at Texas Hold'em, and several other forms of poker, against professional legends like Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey and Chris (Jesus) Ferguson.

Discenza says that "while the free games are there to get you familiar with the process, you can pick up a lot of bad habits." He recommends that once you are comfortable with the basic nuances of HoldEm, you should take some action in a real money low-limit game, even as small as 2-cents/4-cents or 5-cents/10 cents.

"At least then you are playing with real money," he says. "Even at those amounts it hurts if you lose."

I'm going to find out in the next several weeks. In between visiting and playing at several more casino poker rooms, PPT is going to fund an online account with real cash and give it a whirl.