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I totally agree with you when you say people are getting addicted to different social networking sites. I would say it has become even worse. I have a friend in Spain that whenever I like to talk to her, she asks me to enter a game-site. On this site http://www.pokerroom.com/es/ you are able to ask friends to join you and play poker on private tables and talk while playing. It's just like she wants to do all at once: eat, socialize, take care of her children and earn some money, all at the same time. I understand that with new technology comes new ways of living, but hasn't it become a little bit extreme? When we try to do all at once, we miss to nurture our relations and we tend not to talk to each other,not about things that really matter. The more we try to communicate with the world around us, the less we actually say things that matter. Perhaps it's time to try not to live our lives according to different sites and try to talk to people on the street and try to be real?

What stops two bots from playing in the same game?

As far as I know, most online poker places have explicit rules against this, the Poker Room License Agreement, for example, states:

PokerRoom.com also has the right to hold any and all of a player's funds indefinitely if it is found, determined at the sole discretion of PokerRoom.com, that the player has been involved in fraudulent activity on PokerRoom.com. Fraudulent activity may include, but is not limited to, stolen credit cards, transfer of funds to other player accounts (chip dumping), forgery, collusion and the provision of false account information.

My guess is that they have bots to find correlations between players winning and who's at the table, different patterns raising flags, and freezing accounts.

I really like PokerRoom It's linux friendly, and really has one of the nicest interfaces. You can play for money later if you want. There is also ofcourse Yahoo! games but I find it's ugly, and they only offer texas holdem.

PokerRoom has always had a full java implementation which works just fine in Linux.

Unless your opponent is playing in a very predictable manner, you are unlikely to be able to deduce their hand based on how they have acted in the past. And if you are playing based on statistics, you are going to be playing in a very predictable manner and will be an easy target (though it could be argued that most players of online poker are geeks and thus this is what is happening).

I'm sorry, but unless you are like the guy in Rainman and can count cards, I don't really think math skills will help you that much in poker. Maybe psychiatry, but not math. If you think math skills are helping you, I'm afraid you may be relying more on luck than you think.

OK, it's clear from this post you haven't played much poker.

1. Most people do play predictably. They have standards for which hands they will start with, how strong a hand they need to raise, and what they will call with. It's not about deducing their exact hand, but rather about deducing a range of hands that they may hold. You then act based on how well your hand does, on average, against this range.

Example: Pre-flop (in limit hold 'em) I hold AA, and raise. I get 3 callers.

The flop is T73. I bet and am raised by a player that has only raised in the past with the very strongest hands -- even with fairly strong hands, she will just call. Based on her previous play, I believe her most likely holding is a set (three of a kind) or (less likely) two pair.

Another player calls and I fold. The other player calls her to the river and she shows 3 sevens.

This is an extreme example, in the sense that typical players have more relaxed standards for raising, but this is an actual hand from this past weekend.

2. Playing predictable ABC poker (only playing the better hands) works at the lower limits precisely because most of your opponents aren't paying attention to you. They're not geeks or math whizzes -- they're the people you see in the casino playing roulette or hitting on 14 in blackjack because they "feel it."

Check out these numbers. These are the expected value of all the hold 'em starting hands, in terms of big bets, based on actual hands played (122 million) at pokerroom.com. Plenty of opponents at the lower limits will play the hands you see in the red without hesitation. This is why playing predictably, but restricting yourself to better starting hands, can make a profit here. (At the higher limits your hand selection should be similar, but you have to pay closer attention to your opponents, and play somewhat less predictably).

3. Card counting is a blackjack thing, not a poker thing. The deck is shuffled between poker hands. In 7 card stud, you do have to remember which cards have been folded in the current hand, but in texas hold 'em and omaha (the most popular games currently), the only cards you see are your own and 5 community cards.

4. Most of the pure math in poker isn't terribly complicated. If it's a $1 bet to you to win a $5 pot, you should call if your hand will win more than 1 in 6 times (1:5 odds).

The game theory part (putting people on ranges of hands and calculating the likelihood that you'll win) can get hairy with multiple people in the pot. The people who can make good estimates on these numbers will be better poker players.

5. No one is saying there isn't luck in poker. But over time everyone gets the same distribution of cards. The money will end up with the people who play better. Math skills aren't the end all or be all, but they can help you win.

PokerRoom.com has a pretty good interface. I'm not sure what OS's it supports (i've used it on Windows). I only play with the virtual money, but it is fun playing Texas Hold'em with other people online. You don't have to submit that much info if you aren't using real money.

PokerRoom.com has a nice Java interface that works great in Linux.

www.pokerroom.com

Java client. Play from work :)

I play cards 8 hours a night on pokerroom.com and as a winning player (over $10,000 in 1 year) i can say you are completely wrong.

limit hold'em is almost all about pot odds with your cards, with a little bit of knowing about the other players playing style... what kind of cards they play and how they play them. the first one is simple to program AI... figure out what you are drawing to, how many cards help you and make sure there is enough money in the pot to justify.

you may not think the second can be automated, but i have done so myself. online pokerrooms offer "hand history" pages so you can type in a hand number and get data about the hand. i wrote a program that pulls all of that data and puts in it my own mysql DB and generates player reports. sit at a table, type in the last hand number and it will show you a report with everyone on the table and generally how they play including how much they have won/lost and their average hourly rate.

if you sign up using this link, and email me, i'll give you access to the reporting page handhistory.com.

I play cards 8 hours a night on pokerroom.com and as a winning player (over $10,000 in 1 year) i can say you are completely wrong.

limit hold'em is almost all about pot odds with your cards, with a little bit of knowing about the other players playing style... what kind of cards they play and how they play them. the first one is simple to program AI... figure out what you are drawing to, how many cards help you and make sure there is enough money in the pot to justify.

you may not think the second can be automated, but i have done so myself. online pokerrooms offer "hand history" pages so you can type in a hand number and get data about the hand. i wrote a program that pulls all of that data and puts in it my own mysql DB and generates player reports. sit at a table, type in the last hand number and it will show you a report with everyone on the table and generally how they play including how much they have won/lost and their average hourly rate.

if you sign up using this link, and email me, i'll give you access to the reporting page handhistory.com.

I have the 700Mhz iBook that comes with 128 megs of built-in RAM. It took an awful long time to open explorer, longer for netscape 7, and pretty long for even a terminal. Last week I bought a 512 stick from Crucial and now the thing just kicks ass in every way. I can't believe how much more enjoyable it is to use now.

And for anyone that wants enjoyment, I offer the following equation:

iBook + 640MBs RAM + Airport + Pokerroom.com + Monday Night Football on 53" TV = Awesome