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I'm guessing not many people here played play money on pokerstars for years before they made their first deposit.
I did. You can certainly stay a noob for a long time when there is no risk to heighten your senses and trigger your risk-aversion response.
However, one of the most important things in poker is reading your opponents and responding. You can certainly do that on play money tables on pokerstars. The problem is that the opponents on play money represent a very limited class of donks, and not many people on real money tables will be so broadly bad.
If you can comfortably navigate all the various groups on pokerstars play money, then you still have only a small skillset in the bigger picture of poker. I mean, when I made my first real deposit, I could comfortably sit at any play money NLHE table on stars.
The only tables that were inconsistent were the nosebleed tables. (The high stakes tables with a waiting list 20+ long, where the standard pre-flop open is a 200bb bet. You have to win a lot of all-in flips to be able to play any post-flop game there, and so the swinginess is absurd.)
My point is that I could still beat those tables, and I was jumping back and forth between 6-max and FR, too.
NONE of that was good study, or good practice. As soon as I made my first (only) deposit, I quickly learned that I had terrible skills, and I couldn't beat the lowest stakes.
It didn't take me long to realize that I needed help, and I paid an FTR reg for a 1-hour lesson that turned me around. I had a lot of skills built up, but they were all over the place. I had a lot of bad habits mixed in with good, and a little outside help was supremely needed. (Thanks again, bikes.)
So.
Can you learn on play money? Yes. IF you put in the effort to study. It'll be slow, and there will be a lot of bad lessons learned which can only be used on terribad fish opponents.
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