[gexla]

This has been a standard tool in remote poker for years. That tooling has even included hand histories for your opponent. One of the last great new players to blow up the poker scene before "Black Friday" almost went bust in a match where his opponent analyzed his hand history. You wouldn't gain an edge with these tools, you would be way behind if you didn't use them.

Running the calculations in your head isn't hard. You can get it with practice and it's an obvious step for being a good poker player.

There's a huge difference in quality of players in virtual gaming vs "B&M" (bricks and mortar, or playing face to face.) The world mourned the poker scene after Black Friday because the market for horrible players with money to blow disappeared. This left the hard core grinders with nobody to fish but each other. I suppose this would be much like potential competition in a world of WFH vs requiring your presence in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

There's still lots of horrible players in B&M games. You can do okay with just a gut feel for the calculations in these games. A lot of players like to gamble. It depends on the level of the game. As the blinds climb, the game gets harder.

[Semaphor]

For anyone wondering, Black Friday seems to refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

[metroholografix]

I played online during the golden years (2003-2010), made a lot of money but also witnessed the progression of the game from shooting fish in a barrel to becoming significantly more demanding, even at low stakes.

I started playing one table at a time, then two and ended up at 4 (6max NL holdem). One thing that always bothered me, especially when the HUDs + pokertracker became necessities, was that no poker site allowed you to switch usernames in order to nullify playing history that your opponents had accumulated.

Eventually, this ruined the game for me as it completely changed the dynamics and took away a lot of possibilities and excitement. I also saw limit holdem be completely destroyed by algorithms and bots, long before it became so obvious that most stopped playing it altogether. I don't play these days but I'm wondering as to what extent shorthanded NL is being algorithmically exploited.