If you are like most people, you probably played poker with people around an actual table with cards that had to be shuffled by hand and dealt out one at a time. Whether your experience has been at the kitchen table with friends and family or in a brick and mortar casino, the game was probably full of people having a good time. Occasionally there was someone dead set on making everyone miserable and there was just no way to avoid them without leaving the table.
This isn’t the case with online poker. Since all of the conversation takes place through built in chat features on the poker sites, it is your choice whether you want to participate or not. You can even ignore it all together if you choose. One thing about online poker is that people are a lot more aggressive when they don’t have to look you in the face. If you get irritated easily, you should probably ignore the chat. Many seem more interested in getting under peoples skin than in winning pots.
The aggression isn’t limited to just the chat feature. Many people play a game style that you just don’t see very often in a live game. Ramming and jamming every pot is not uncommon. I have seen players sit down and raise every single street of every single hand regardless of what others are doing. Usually they go broke in a couple hands and have to reload. Even so, they may stay at the table for hours. Other times, this hyper aggression makes them look invincible. Their cards match the flop perfectly and they clean out several people at once. If they can pull it off a couple times, the rest of the table starts to fold more than they should and the maniac picks up pots without having to show their hand. Playing with this mindset can either lose a lot of money really fast or build up a monster stack quickly. More often than not, it leads to disaster.