The Bot Farm

I’m past the point of my life where I regularly wake up clutching a head still reeling from the excesses of the night before.  But I’m feeling similar disorientation this Monday morning after my crash (and burn) introduction to manual play in Rush Poker.  It should be a positive story, if viewed from 30,000 feet.  Having tried and failed to turn the Shanky bot into an ATM on the micro-limit Rush Poker tables, I decided to have a try manually, bought in with $32 and ended up an hour later with $236 in the account.   Defying my normal practice of throwing it all away again I actually withdrew $136 of that back to safety before burning through the remaining $100 at the highest limit tables.  What I find troubling is that a) in no time at all I got hooked on the sheer pace and excitement of the game and b) my manual poker instincts are no better than they ever were.  I’m still too much of an optimist and have a serious leak in my game which accounted for most of the $100 bust-out – that is that I call all-in raises with the second-best hand – over and over and over again.

I guess that is the downside of being an optimist – I always envisage the good outcome rather than fearing the bad.  Something similar makes me prone to extrapolation on an industrial scale, ie if I can make $200 in one hour, how much can I make in a day, a week, a year.   All of which makes me remember why I gravitated towards botting in the first place – to take my frail humanity out of the equation of money-making in the hope of making a more consistent return.  Except that this dream too has taken a bit of a knock in the past few days.  Nothing to do with the technical hassles which have plagued me up until last week.  Rather I am suffering from a failure in the strategies needed to capitalise on this wonderful technical infrastructure.  Specifically:

• the value graphing technique which I developed for horses, dogs, football and other Betfair markets appears to be unassailable on a theoretical basis, but my every attempt to capitalise on it with real money appears to grind my bankroll down to zero
• having pleaded and cajoled with the Super-Roulette developers until they  introduced a fully-featured positive progression staking system, I now find myself unable to develop a strategy which shows a long-term profit from any positive staking approach
• the Shanky bot, with all of its expensive add-ons, is still not grinding out a positive return on any of the limits I have tried

Hence the reason for the post’s title – I was thinking of the difference between a working, money-making farm and a dude ranch which is just set up to let people swagger about and make believe.

I guess everyone’s entitled to a down day – mine don’t tend to last for long.  In fact, even as I typed the above comment about Shanky I was remembering the email from someone who had bought it on my advice and was making a regular $20 a day using it straight out of the box and setting it to grind out a return at the lowest microlimits.

There is always something else to try.  And I may not be inventing a cure for cancer, but as a friend always says I could be spending my money less productively, for example by investing in a golf club membership and equipment!

PS – Point of information.  Rush Poker is the innovation by Full Tilt which enables you to zip to another table and another dealt hand as soon as you fold the one you have just been given.  So there is no more waiting around to see who is in or out and how much is in the pot – as soon as you decide you don’t want to play your hand, bang – you have another one.  This makes it a lot easier to play a super-tight game, waiting for AA and KK for example, without all of the hours of waiting about that this would normally entail.  However, the effect of the sheer speed of the game is probably to make for dubious decisions when you do get a playable hand – this game  is trickier than it looks, but undeniably addictive.