Online Poker (real money)...anyone do it?

Is it just me, or does playing poker without being face-to-face kind of kill the point/challenge/fun of the game for anyone else?

Oh for sure! But if you're like me and you have a brutal tell, it makes winning alot easier.

only reason I ask is cause I'm on pokerstars, and over the course the last month I've gone from 1000 play dollars to 8300. Would be sweet to make some real money, even if it was a 1/100th of that.
 
CFH: the playmoney games are much different from the real money games because people in the playmoney games just play without giving a shit. If you are good at playing systematically then you can make good money at online poker. I suck at this game and lost quite some money in 2005 before I figured out that it was not for me ... :)
 
I played quite a bit, mainly on OnGame and FullTilt, before I decided I'm not gonna be a winning player because I can't be bothered to study the game hard enough. I made a nice couple of hundred euros a few times, but overall I ended up on the losing side. I still play a tournament every now and then just because I really enjoy the game, not because I think I can make huge sums of money out of it. It's a brilliant game, though, so much more complicated and demanding than it might seem. Anyone who says they're good at poker without any idea of calculating pot odds is just full of shit :)
 
CFH: the playmoney games are much different from the real money games because people in the playmoney games just play without giving a shit. If you are good at playing systematically then you can make good money at online poker. I suck at this game and lost quite some money in 2005 before I figured out that it was not for me ... :)

Yeah I realize that. I play real poker (with actual people) almost weekly and have been doing so for close to 10 years. I was more wondering about whether or not they are ligit in payouts or whether anyone had ever heard of people cheating on them (cause you can do it apparently).