If you are at a live table, it's best to keep your mouth shut. If someone sucks out on you, you say nothing. If you suck out on someone, you take the chips and say nothing. If someone starts verbally abusing you, you say nothing. If it gets out of hand, you ask the dealer to contact security. I've personally never seen it go that far in a live game. If someone wishes to engage you in polite conversation, you can respond politely. If someone says "nice hand", you say "thank you." That's really about all you need to say. Some people like to talk at the table, and that's fine. Just remember that if you're winning, even nice things you say can be taken the wrong way by someone who's stuck. Things like not splashing the pot should be obvious, but I did see one kid so excited about playing that he threw his chips, one or two bounced onto another player, and that player got visibly and audibly upset. Showing bluffs is not my style, but not against the rules. It may make people angry though.

I have been involved in bottle throwing/breaking over a discussion on what qualified as a foreigner in sexual history, and there was a fight over whether or not we should listen to Eric Clapton, but these were in home games. They often involve drinking. As far as that goes, even if you're in a home game, and you're playing with people you know, keep in mind that money is on the line, and even with small amounts of money, people start to feel enough pressure to start fights where they wouldn't normally. 

In general, in live games, people tend to be much more polite, perhaps because the threat of violence sitting right next to you. Kind of like people are more likely to flip someone off if they're sitting in a car rather than on a park bench.

Most of my experience is online. I started playing for fake money in 2006. I started playing for real money in 2009. There are some differences that might be of interest for someone going from play money to real money:

1. The "zzzzzz"'s are not cool. They're never cool, in my opinion, but they are very common in play money games and much more rare in real money games. When you are playing for real money, there are times when you really need to think about how to handle a hand. Most people respect this. Some people don't. When they don't, I usually look up their stats. They're almost always newcomers, like having played less than 15 games online - that new. By doing the zzzzzz thing, you're announcing yourself as a newbie. Are you SURE that's what you want to do?

2. One player per hand. It's not cool to tell someone how to play a hand, announce what you folded, or announce what you have while a hand is in play, anytime, but when you are playing for real money, it can be considered cheating. I have yet to report anyone for doing this. But I have heard of people being reported. Their prizes were taken back, and they were kicked off the site, so I heard. I usually just say "one player per hand", and people cut it out.

The main difference you'll find online is that people can become extremely verbally abusive at the slightest provocation, or more often, because they lost a hand. This can be intimidating at first. I have to admit, I've done it myself. It's usually in response to something offensive someone has said to me, but I'm guilty of it as are many online. It's just that you feel there are no consequences. And there probably aren't. I did see one guy claim to have a friend at the site we were playing at that had access to account info and that he was going to find the guy's address, go to his house, and break his legs. He was probably bluffing, but you never really know. If you get too out of line, you may get your chat revoked. Try to keep in mind that a lot of people you will be playing with are down. Like, most of them. Most people who play poker lose money. Some of them lose a lot of money. They're already angry. Don't send them out into the real world with blinding rage. You may not suffer from their hands, but someone else might.  Besides that, here are some reasons for not going off the wall with the insults:

1. You never convince the other person you are right, ever. As soon as insults get thrown in, logic goes out the window. It becomes a contest, seeing who can hurt the other the deepest. That's it.

2. It let's other people at the table know that you are pretty immature. Let's face it, you're screaming and swearing at someone you don't know because they played their hand badly and accidentally won. Do you really want to teach them how to play better? Why?

3. You get yourself on tilt. You get so mad at someone that all you can think of is taking their chips and saying something smart afterward. You stop paying attention to what OTHER PEOPLE at the table are doing, and they all start looking at you and licking their chops.

One thing I'd like to point out is that I've observed that the higher stakes I play, the less verbally abusive players are. People at the higher stakes are generally much less interesting in convincing you that they are better players and much more interested in taking your money. If you want to know how to act at a table, watch some of the bigger games. It's not always true, but more often.

I've talked mostly about behaving properly at the table out of fear of the consequences, but I'd like to add my personal belief that I love playing poker. I think it's a game that brilliantly combines skill AND luck, and the most skillful out there will learn how to outplay people when possible and be aware of the psychological impact their suckout, bluff, or well-played hand will have on the table, and use it to their advantage. It's a fun game, but it's hard. And you should respect people who have the courage to put their money and their reputations on the line by sitting at the poker table, even if you don't respect the WAY they play. Be polite while playing poker, not out of fear, but out of respect for the game and the people who have the courage to play it.

Literally, as I began writing this, in a 10k gtd, someone pushed with a J high rainbow board. I was holding QQ and had twice the chips she had and called, thinking she might have AJ. I was wrong. She had A10. Complete air. Runner, runner later, she hit her straight. The next hand, I picked up KK but got no action. Next hand, in the sb, I got A9, and there was what I perceived as a steal attempt from the button. I reraised all in and was called by the button with JJ. A J came on the flop, and I was out. This was shortly after, in a 25k gtd, I had been busted with trip jacks by trip jacks with a better kicker. And in my last game last night, in a 2k gtd, down to heads up, I had the other person all in with my aces against her kings with a 9 kicker. The 9 came on the river. A few hands later, short-stacked, I pushed all in with A3 and was called with 78 suited. A seven came out immediately, and the river gave me a straight, but gave her a higher straight. Not to mention earlier in the day, I basically lost $400 in a cash game when I pushed all in on the flop with KJ8 and two clubs on the board. I was called by someone with KQ and ONE club. Runner, runner clubs came, leaving me yelling at the screen. And I had gone to the cash games, which I hate to do (I just don't do well in them - bad luck, lol), after busting out of a 15k gtd holding trip fives against pocket kings. As soon as all the money went in, a K came on the turn.

Okay, so there was some bad luck involved in my games yesterday, and some today. First of all, I'd like to define luck. To me, luck is not some magical entity that controls our destiny. It is statistical variance. You take the best starting hand in poker, AA, and run it against the worst hand, 27 off, and you will win about 88% of the time. A very good percentage, but that means if you go all in with AA against 27 off a hundred times, you are going to lose 12 times, or about one in every eight times. An advantage is not a guarantee. And let's face it. You aren't going to get all in with AA against 27 very often. People generally like to play better cards against AA. Let's take a more common match up. AA v KK. They flip it over, and you rejoice. But you are still going to lose about 19% of the time. That's about one time out of five. How you react to each of those losses sheds light on what you believe luck is.

Now, many times, when I see someone lose a hand online, they erupt in one of two ways. #1, they insult the player who has won ("moron", "donkey", "idiot", etc. If you respond to these, they escalate, but I can discuss that more in a blog on table etiquette). #2, they claim "set up" and insult the site.

#1, there have been many times when I have seen someone raise preflop with something like AQ, hit a Q on the board. AQ raises, and gets reraised all in. AQ calls, and the other player shows something like two pair that holds up. The preflop genius begins a Helmuthesque rant going something like this, "How the f can you call preflop with that shit, you mthfuckr. Fk you. I hope you die. And your family..." Etc. First of all, if you're going to get that involved over one hand, you're probably playing in stakes that are too high for you. Secondly, you should be happy if someone is consistently making bad plays. Over time, you will beat them if you play the odds. Thirdly, people seem to forget that there is more to NL Hold'em than preflop play. Let's say the person who hit two pair had something like J10 suited. The flop comes out T,J,Q rainbow. First of all, that's should be a scary flop for both players. The person with two pair puts the other on a draw and pushes. The person with AQ decides they've got top pair and a gutshot, so they call all in.  Before the flop, AQ is favored to win about 63% of the time. But after the flop, with that board, J10 figures to win 63% of the time. The percentages are flipped. And that's when the money went in. That's not getting unlucky. That's putting your money in with the worst of it.

#2, set ups. No matter what site you play on, many people will claim that the site is rigged if they lose a hand. They'll say "fk this site" (and many times will add "and fk all of you too", just to cover their bases). I have seen no strong evidence to suggest that online play is rigged. There were the AP/UB hole card scandals, but that had to do with people using software that allowed people to see others' hole cards, mainly in the highest level cash games (and that, I have read, and believe, has been cleared up). It had nothing to do with which hole cards people received. In cash games, people claim that "set ups" are created to "increase the rake", failing to realize that there are rake caps for each limit that are often exceeded in the bigger pots, the ones that involve the "set ups", (the max rake is reached, and the company sees no more profit for the pot), making those claims pretty much mute. In tourneys, the claims of set ups seem even more ridiculous. Why would a company target specific players, which some people seem to believe, with the aim of getting you all in with the worst hand, when they've already collected your fee? You know when you sign up, for example, in a $50 game, it says $50+5. That five goes to the house. After that, they have no way of getting more money from you. You're on your own. You're free! The time and effort it would take to design these setups, not knowing which preflop hands you will play or when you might be in the bathroom, are not worth it. It's much more likely that there is a random number generator guiding which cards are dealt, and you just can't believe that you lost when you started with a hand that had an ADVANTAGE, not a GUARANTEE.

I just finished my first year of playing online, and I turned $500 into $18,000 over that year (2009). I started off by finding the only two sites that I could figure out how to make a deposit for in China, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. I promised my wife I would only put $500 in. If I lost it all, I would stop playing poker. My wife helped me set up an account on an online banking system and I sent the money from there into my Absolute Poker account. I immediately tried to withdraw it because I wanted to see if it could be withdrawn before investing a lot of time and energy into building a bankroll only to find out later that I couldn't withdraw it. This sent up a red flag, and my account was put under review. Curiosly, the same thing happened with my Ultimate Bet account, which I hadn't tried to yet deposit into. Turns out they're really the same company. Some people like to sign in under the different accounts so that people don't always know who their playing against, but I suspect the reason the site is presented as two sites is to increase the odds of one of them being chosen when new poker players are browsing the web, looking for places to play. A site pops up saying, "Top five poker sites: 1..." If you're two of the five, you've got a 40% of being randomly picked, compared to the 20% for each of the others, assuming they are independent of each other. While I was being reviewed, I was not allowed to remove my money. Apparantly, they thought I was trying to steal my own money... Things got sorted out eventually, but there was a period of a week or more where my wife was convinced that I had thrown my money away to a bunch of theives and that I'd never get my money back. I had to send in a copy of my passport and proof of where I lived before I was given access to my account back. Once I got it back, I was so relieved that I could actually start playing poker that I gave up trying to prove to myself that the money could be withdrawn, just told myself, if I make a bunch of money playing poker someday, I'll figure out how to get it out. They're not just going to steal my money. This is a business. You don't steal from your customers and expect to get more customers. I started to play. I asked some people when I first started playing if they'd ever withdrawn money from their accounts. They said yeah, no problem. That was encouraging. Maybe there really was some kind of scam going on at the time, and they were just doing there best to protect their customers. It was just a false detection. I started playing $10 sit-and-goes, but that didn't last long. I had considered my best poker to be sit-and-goes before I started playing real money. But here, I just kept getting creamed. I couldn't figure it out. It seemed like I kept going all in with the best hand; some moron would call me, and as soon as all the money was in the pot, the card he needed would come. I went over to the 5/10c cash games, and did equally badly, but I would lose in a different way. I would start with a pretty good hand, bet half the pot until we got to the river, and then the other guy went all in. And every time I called, they had me beat. I did so badly in the sit-and-goes and cash games, that I was down $200 of my $500 after only two days. $318. That was the lowest point of the year. I decided to focus on MTTs. That turned out to be a good decision. A few days later, I was out of the hole and started climbing. I never bought into a tournament that was more than 1/20th of my roll. This is actually more than what I play now (no more than 2%, based on Chris Fergusons recommendations on his essay on bankroll management, which you can google for, and I highly recommend), but with it, I was able to win amounts that exceeded the losses I had while waiting to hit. In other words, I made a profit. About half the year through, I made a trip to America. At that time, I was at about $3,000 in profit and was sometimes playing $50 games. I had even played a $130 entry game once, and barely cashed to tell the tale. While I was in America, I played poker at a former professional gambler's house, and we talked about poker online. He said if I'm winning at all, I'm probably better than 90% of the people out there. This gave me confidence. I came back and won the 10k sniper GTD. I hovered around $6-8k for several months after that and then started slipping. I actually went from 10k to under 5k in less than a month.  I was moping around the house, yelling at the computer. I even slumped to the floor whining and cursing my luck once. Then I won the 5k one early morning, and I started getting my confidence back. In December, I won the 30k sniper GTD, the 5k rebuy, and the 1.5k rebuy, as well as cashing in several others, making a profit of about 13k in that one month alone. That gives me enough to take a shot in a few of the uboc events starting on January 20th. 2% is now more than $300. More than my lowest point.