As an aside, does anyone else ever feel the desire to start programming some sort of poker app whenever they read codingthewheel? Seems like it'd be such a fun area for a side-project!
And finally, no, I haven't made any significant income from my bot (as it current only plays preflop on 6-max tables ... I manually takeover after the flop).
My usual (although probably totally unhealthy) habit of waking up and immediately (as in...within 20 seconds of opening my eyes) checking HN, gibsonandlily.com, reddit.com, and slashdot.com led me to this article. I read the entire thing from beginning to end (which is rare, for me), and thoroughly enjoyed the entire thing.
In fact, as I was reading it, I kept remarking to myself how much I enjoyed the writing style.
To each his own, I guess. It does frighten me a bit, though, that people make this complaint so much. What do people who can't be bothered to read a couple of pages worth of a story do when they are confronted by a book, magazine, or newspaper? (or a kindle).
2 things:
1 MySQL has had support for transactions since version 4.
2 Relaxed attitude towards data integrity Seriously?
create table foo (blah, blah, blah) engine = innodb
Sorry, I'm not trying to start an argument. That sentence just struck me as a bit inflammatory.
And the reason poker attracts so much technology is the same reason the stock market does: there's a hell of a lot of money to be made. A $50 piece of software is worth what you pay for it 10,000 times over if it even improves your win rate by 1% (and Poker Tracker most certainly does much more). A bot that can average winning 1 cent a hand could make you a millionaire, so a year or two spent building it is easily justified.
hehe - there's a big "if" there: if you play enough and if you use the info. I bought PT 5-6 yrs ago and I don't play anymore. A 1% improvement over 400 hands won't make my $50 back at the low limits :)
All this talk is often making me wonder whether good (and improving bots) will take over the world of online poker someday, to the point where it is just a pure waste of money for anyone else than an expert to play, on any blinds level. (not that I'd feel sad about it).
