I'm talking about the Online Poker Tactical RFC. (Also, the Internet may have had something to do with it.) But the thing which had earth-shaking ramifications for poker as a whole was that textual hand histories enabled the crowdsourcing of poker strategy. If you played an interesting hand or won or lost big in a killer session, you could request the hand history and sanity-check your play or maybe email it to a friend whatever you had the record. It meant you could do post-mortem analysis, to a certain extent. You'd go in and say 'hey, give me my last 100 hands,' and you'd get an email containing the textual history of those hands.Īnd that was fine, for a while. And early on, on some sites at least, the way you got these hand histories was over email, usually via sort of automated 'Request Hand Histories' window. After all, it's poker over the Internet for real money some sort of formal, human-readable game record is essential. Since the dawn of online poker (more or less), players have had the ability to request hand histories-textual, step-by-step descriptions of each and every hand of poker played by the player while playing. But always interesting.Īnd it all started with those pesky goddamn text files. The evolution of online poker from its naive roots into the tooled-up search-and-destroy seven-headed acid-spitting monster of today is fascinating, at times profound, colorful, even crazy. Software-assisted poker isn't the noblest use of open-source technology that can be imagined.but it is one of the most interesting.

These things happen, but they can't be predicted.Īnd I guess that the application of open-source technology to a game as viscerally competitive as poker is not without irony. And you'd never (in your hypothetical shoes as a PostgreSQL contributor) be able to predict that certain dedicated poker players would take it upon themselves to learn SQL and relational database theory/practice, delving into the arcane (to a normal person) minutiae of keys and joins and tables and DDL and DML, all in order to better use a third-party online poker tool originally written by a single developer with an MS Access database now thankfully running on a PostgreSQL back-end. You wouldn't consider or even be aware of the thousands upon thousands of PokerTracker and Hold'em Manager users who'll flock to your database, learning its ins and outs, getting their hands dirty, occasionally even parlaying an end-user poker player's knowledge of a third-party online poker tool into a job as a full-time database administrator. subvert your open-source database as a cog in the gearworks of an intricate online poker botting rig nor how many other people will do the same thing in Dallas, and New York, and L.A., and London, and Paris, and Leipzig, and Hyderabad, and Rio, those elusive poker botting hatcheries springing up out of nowhere and from nothing, like underground massage parlors or Northern Cali marijuana grow-houses or seedy all-night poker clubs conducting business in smoke-filled back-offices in nondescript greater metropolitan area office parks. You don't wonder how long it will be until a group of people in Austin, Texas, in a dilapidated basement not far from 6th Street. I wonder if the PostgreSQL development team had any idea.Īfter all, when you go about the incredibly difficult task of building (that is, coding) a relational database, you don't think: man, this thing will one day achieve mass popularity as the storage repository of choice for tens of thousands of real-money online poker players.

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