More Opinion - Online Poker

I just finished reading Anthony Holden's 'Big Deal', a book which I would recommend to anybody, just because he's such an outstanding writer. He has a real appreciation for life in general, and poker in particular, and writes with a style that makes it difficult to put the book down. I wish I could write half as well as Tony Holden.
The book chronicles a year that he spent as a 'Poker Pro'. He left the life of writer and biographer to step up from the ranks of an accomplished amateur, to ply his skills and luck on what was at that time the poker 'circuit'. Now this was in the early '80s, when online poker did not exist, and the biggest poker 'event' in the world, the World Series of Poker, attracted less than 200 entrants (compared with over 9000 in 2007). Many of the poker 'pioneers', such as Amarillo Slim and Johnny Moss were still active regular competitors.
Then, as now, most of the money was actually made in cash games on the fringes of the tournaments. Although the allure of huge tournament prizes attracted most pros, the real action was in the cash 'side games'.
They plied their skills against one another, taking the occasional amateur to the cleaners, but they were constantly trying to improve their standing against one another. The money was important, of course, but the best players of the time admitted that having the mental attitude of playing for the money alone could actually be a handicap.
Today's online poker arena, by contrast, can probably be best described as mostly predators waiting for the occasional 'fish' to swim by so that they can pick his carcass clean.
Go to online forums such as those at twoplustwo.com, and you can hear these jackasses lamenting the fact that there are too many of their ilk lurking on the poker sites, and not enough 'fish' to make a decent living. These people measure their skill only by the amounts of money they have claim to won.
What's really ironic is that these pathetic losers would probably get their clocks cleaned in a 'live' game at a brick and mortar casino or card club, where they would be the fish without the sophisticated software that virtually all of them use to track other players' habits, etc., online. This gives them a huge advantage over those that don't use the software. The kind of information the software provides is, for example, the percentage of times a player may call, bet, and/or raise before and after the flop, etc. For one player to use this information against another who does not have access to it is, in a word, cheating.
The internet can be a wonderful thing, but the perception of anonymity has created an environment in which the most coarse and crude among us are not only allowed to behave in ways that would not be conceivable in person, but this gross behavior has actually become so common that to many it is acceptable.