Digital Poker practices

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

- Go ahead. - [Narrating] I just got top two pair on the flop,            and I want to keep him in the hand.            Against your average guy, I'd set a bear trap, hardly bet at all.            Let him walk into it. But KGB's too smart for that.            So, what I've got to do is over-bet the pot,            make it look like I'm trying to buy it.

Although online poker is a gold mine of data, until now nobody knows where the players and their money come from. It seems that the knowledge about the online poker market has not been able to keep up with the speed of its evolution in the past years. This paper is the first to shed light on this matter. We use data of 4,591,342 poker identities from the Online Poker Database of the University of Hamburg (OPD-UHH) collected over a six months period from 09/2009 to 03/2010. We find that the USA is still by far the biggest market with 1,428,823 active players and 650.5 million US$ net revenues in 2009. However, with regard to the number of internet users in a country Hungary is the biggest relative market: One out of 57 Hungarians with internet access plays online poker for real money. The two main drivers of the proportion of online poker players per internet users are GDP per capita and culture. Using the data from the OPD-UHH, future research will be able to break down the market also on a regional level within countries and to examine inter and intra country differences in the playing habits of online poker players.

Ranked by bonus rates.

Online poker stats and site rankings.

First, the main objective is to promote poker as a game of skill, a mind-sport, and to take it away from just being associated with casinos and gambling. USPF members love poker, we love the possibilities of the game, the way it can be used to hone one's mental muscle, and how it can be applied as a teaching tool. The idea is that we are going to be a sports federation … we weill sanction events, rank players, organize or own events.