The new year is almost there and I just had some random thoughts about online poker to share.

I haven’t done any rake analysis for a while. This is mainly because I’ve been playing at a level where the rake, while not negligible, is fairly easily beatable. However, I was poking around a Poker Tracker database of a friend of mine. He plays low limits, mostly $.5/$1 and $1/$2 NLHE. He does ok, nothing special. For him, the rake chews up about 67% of his win. That is to say, if there were no rake, he’d have made triple what he has so far.

Limp-reraises scare me. They scare me a lot. Who cares if there are only four people in the hand. I mean, what would you limp-reraise with on the button at a four handed table? As evidence of just how scared they make me just look at how I freeze up with QQ when I get limp-reraised. I not only fail to four-bet, but I can’t even bet a paired KK board till the joker goes passive.

On a different note, I’ve finally put some code up for hand analysis. It is very simple, and the driver program doesn’t do much. In fact, it’s just a clone of the rake example from learn2holdem. This code is written in C. It is a good illustration of the kinds of basic optimizations you can perform for computation intensive applications. There’s a fair amount of bit-twiddling and lookup tables used to run fast.

I stopped coding in Java four years ago because I came to really dislike it. After working in it for a couple of years I found that it just didn’t meet my needs at the time. In particular, the performance was horrid, especially when dealing with GUI applications. I now only develop in C. There may be bugs and strange semantic problems with the code, but it does it job.