Poker

Poker is an interesting (at least to me) hobby, but not one I suggest you take up. For what it's worth, in addition to poker, I like drinking alcohol, but it too is not something I suggest you take up. I'm also not trying to discourage you from either, but if you partake, I wish you the blessing of circumspection.

From a scoring point of view, poker is a zero sum game, meaning every chip you win is at someone else's expense. Spending time with friends, however, can be a positive sum endeavor, in that both you and your friend may benefit from the time you spend together (even if it's playing poker). So, social poker, from a friendship point of view doesn't have to be zero-sum, when one's utility function is more than mere chips.

My introduction was the video poker machine at the hotel I stayed in when I went to Las Vegas to see and hear the Grateful Dead play the Aladdin Theater on March 26th, 1983. That's not real poker, and I wasn't as clever as I thought I was <cough>martingale</cough>, but being a programmer, I got back to Albuquerque and coded up a video poker simulator.

Fast foward many years and I discovered IRC poker and rec.gambling. The IRC bot was dealing poker "ring games", but we could approximate tournaments by having up to 23 players at a table playing Hold'Em with a gentleman's agreement to raise the blinds periodically. That was crazy and fun, but it too wasn't real poker.

As I explored poker, I found some free software that did hand analysis and performed some simulations. It was in C, the language I was programming at the time, so I made some contributions and released the source code.

In the back of my mind, I had been thinking about writing an IRC bot to deal multi-tab;e poker tournaments (so, e.g., 23 players would initially start out on three separate tables: two with eight players and one with seven). On Halloween night, 1998, on a handful of cheap amphetimines¹ I pulled the trigger and wrote the core of multibot.

Although what I wrote on Halloween was in C, that was a proof-of-concept that I rewrote in Objective-C. Why? Because I wanted to increase my knowledge of Objective-C. My plan was to give away the source to multibot, but I wound up selling it instead, to Poker School Online.

Fast forward to April 2019 and I started work on mb2. Fast forward to January 2021 and I founded Craft Poker Co..

Anyway, I have a bunch of poker stories to share. If there's interest, I'll start populating this chapter.