Johnnyboy
From PokerAI
Johhnyboy is a WinHoldem veteran.
Bio
This is Johhnyboy's story, as told on OpenHoldem forums, and reposted with Johhnyboy's permissions.
"I got into Holdem during the boom of 2003. Im sure some of you can relate to the excitement of watching the final table of WSOP on TV back then. A few friends and I learned how to play, bought a deck of cards, some plastic chips, and played $2 buyin NL tourney games until the sun came out. Eventually they lost interest, but I didnt. In 2004 I ended up moving away from my hometown and relocating in FL. I really didnt know anyone down there, so I had alot of time on my hands! I found online poker, and starting playing the play money games, cleaning up, decided to ante up for some 1/2 cash games on Party Poker and got my ass handed to me in under 2 hours! Being the obsessive competitive person I am, I found a Barnes & Noble book store and spent a ton of money on Poker books. The first one I read was Hellmuth's, talk about bad luck! More on this to come.
In the meantime I figured there had to be a program or something that could help me play better poker. I stumble across Winholdem. It asks me for my email address and some other info and I try it for my 24hr trial period, and decide it sucks worse than I do!
So I continue studying and playing until I'm crushing the low limit games, which took a few weeks. Eventually I get an email from Winholdem that a forum has been created. So I sign up, and start looking around. I then realize that you can make the bot play however you tell it to. I HAD to have a working copy of WH, but I had no money, because I had just moved and hadn't found a job yet. So I ask Ray how the hell it keeps track of trial periods. MAC addresses? Sweet! Found a program to spoof mac addresses and ran it daily! Fast forward a couple weeks, and I now know all the WH symbols pretty well, and am on my way to making a winning bot. I've impressed some people on the forum and Ray wants to make me and some others part of the first LAB, LAB0. Only one issue! I needed a valid WH License for Ray to make me a member of Lab0. Didnt have one so I kept on doing my thing. A couple weeks later Lab0 had come up with a slightly under break even bot. I also had a break even bot at .25/.50. One of the members of LAB0 asked me to take a look at the formula. I ran it for a few hundred hands sitting in front of it with a notebook, and making notes of clear strategy error. The next day I instituted some of my code to fix the code that was causing the bad play, and sent it back as Frank1.0 a Frankenstein of both bots. It was, to my knowledge the first ever winning WH bot.
I was bartending by this time, letting the bots play while I was at work, and coming home to see how much they won. Shutting them down, making some tweaks, repeat. One day I came home from work and had won $300 across 4 tables. I had made $100 bartending that day. I had been playing live at the casino on my days off and was cleaning up there too. I realized there was no point to me working! At this point in my life I ate/breathed/slept poker then bots. I would set the bots up, go to the casino, come home, and work on the bots. It was quite the life.
A year later I was completely infatuated with bots, a staple of the WH forum, a member of Lab2 exploring new ideas. I was so obsessed I would sit in front of the computer for 10-12 hours a day coding, reviewing hands, and literally pulling my hair out from the stress I put on myself to build a real winner. Thats why I had to wear a hat! I used to stay up late at night watching the masters of heads up on stars play eachother 100/200 and figured their style of play out. I was extremely good at limit holdem 10 handed down to heads up, and I especially enjoyed smoking someone in a heads up game. 6 months of this and I gave it up completely for my own sanity! I moved back home, got a job, and forgot about poker and bots until now."
