Poker is awesome. Free poker doesn't teach you much. Programmers value security and structure. With free money there is no structure to poker. People will go al

Poker is awesome. Free poker doesn't teach you much. Programmers value security and structure. With free money there is no structure to poker. People will go all-in, or raise the big blinds. There is no accountability and nothing to risk. Once you play real-money games you see a drastic difference between play and real. People start being accountable for their actions and try to calculate optimally as to their odds of success on a given hand. The problem is once you start with real-money, win or lose, you find it harder to stop. This is where programming and poker are intertwined. Programmers can't stop programming. They will always program. Poker players will always buy-in.