The American Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen | Hacker News Reader

The American Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen

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I played poker online back when it was legal. Ran my bankroll from a couple hundred up to a few thousand. Got really, really bored playing poker during all my free time. Ran my bankroll back down to zero a bit before the crackdown, semi-on-purpose. Haven't played since 2010. But it sure was fun for a while. The feel of winning, of knowing exactly what another player will do before you bet, of stringing someone along with a made hand...nothing like it. If it gets legalized in the States again, I'd take a peek.

I have similar feelings. Its weird that online poker ever took off really. The fun of poker isn't playing the odds, its playing people. Its the psychology, the acting, the stacks of chips, the emotions - basically the theatre of the whole event.

Nothing quite like being faced with a massive raise and then your opponent fumbles their chips or something and now you know your deuces are good.

Only in live poker do you get such sustained experience reading people and attempting to influence their behaviour - much more exhilarating than making statistically correct decisions across a terminal!

I use to play quite a bit and helped out on a few websites and heard the same thing from a lot of the pros(I tended to get bored and make stupid moves so never had a chance). Once its a job it loses a lot of the enjoyment but its hard to step away from something paying you $1K/day at 19-20. Even if you are grinding for most of the day and never having time to actually spend the money.

The thing about poker is most of the guys who have been very successful at it are fairly intelligent and would have been successful at a lot of different things. In 2004-2010 it was a little different as a really good player could expect to make 200-300k a year fairly easily.

As poker gets tougher, win rates decrease and a really strong player's expected yearly winnings might be reduced to 100k a year without any real applicable real-world connections or skills. 5 years from now, with the game losing popularity, that expectation might be 50k.

Whereas, if the player had entered the real world, their expected career earnings would increase over time. It'd be hard for me to recommend poker as a career to anyone with the state of today's games. 4 or 5 years ago, it would have been tough for me to convince someone otherwise - especially with the freedom it afforded.

Sounds like a Gold Rush... despite the stories of hitting it rich, there's a lot of background in the story about failure and loans. Only the toolmakers will get rich.

Where do they get all that data on other players? And surely there have been attempts to automate this process they use?

Anyone who plays online poker seriously uses a hand tracker. When you play online, each hand is saved as a .txt file. People have written software for it, its usually 40$-100$. Its usually a postgres database that allows for easy access to every hand, filterable by position, profit/loss, opponent, etc.

The two most popularly used are: http://www.holdemmanager.com/ https://www.pokertracker.com/

There is a lot more to winning than just owning a HUD, it takes a lot of skill to manipulate statistics properly to observe weaknesses in your opponents.

Is there a program that will play the game for me, or an api that will allow me to make raw mouse moves?

AutoHotkey exists on Windows for moving and clicking the mouse.

In addition to tracking the hands players play themselves there is a black market for buying hand histories gathered by other players.

This is not allowed by the sites and there have been some notable scandals of nose bleed-players sharing hand histories to explicitly target another player.

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2009/12/the-4-million-controve...

Poker applications output your hand history to text files, which can then be imported into poker tracking applications for analysis. You can also buy hand histories online in bulks of millions.

When I was playing, there were programs that recorded hand histories. You could have the program display certain stats in a HUD at each table you were playing on.

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