

The American Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen - ForHackernews
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/07/04/online_poker_american_poker_exiles_gamble_all_day_and_party_all_night_in.html

======
xweb
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.

~~~
duncanawoods
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!

------
GreenPlastic
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.

------
cjensen
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.

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

~~~
throwawaypoker
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/](http://www.holdemmanager.com/)
[https://www.pokertracker.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.

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

~~~
markcampbell
AutoHotkey exists on Windows for moving and clicking the mouse.

