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Comment by matt1 | Hacker News Reader

Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did.

After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This helped bring some people to the site and if I had continued it for some time it may have brought in a few more registrations. In hindsight maybe I should have done this more. It's hard to say... No matter how much you prod a dead duck it's not gonna move much.

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Were you aware of the existing (and immensely popular) free tools when you started programming?

If so, what was going to be your edge?

I assume you're talking about PokerStove, no? I happily used it for a long time, but felt it could use some improvement. For example, you can't weigh the hands in your opponent's range (that is, saying KK is half as likely as AA). Also, PokerStove is great for calculating equity, but not so much for calculating EV. To calculate your EV when you call is pretty easy (EV = equity * new_pot - to_call), but to calculate your shove EV takes a bit of work. My aim with ALL IN expert was to make those things trivially easy to do. Eventually I had planned on doing postflop calculations as well (the first iteration only had preflop), but as I mentioned elsewhere I just didn't see it being worth the investment in time for a project that didn't have much of a future.

Yup, pokerstove. I agree that weighted range calculations aren't so easy with pokerstove, but it's pretty easy to make a good estimate. Still, it's definitely useful, and a feature I expected to be in pokerstove the first time I used it.

Still, I don't get why you would focus on preflop calculations. Knowing whether to shove preflop is pretty easy, isn't it? The tough decisions are often when you face an overbet on the turn or river, in my experience.

The calculations are actually still done the same.

Preflop is easier to build an interface around, which is why I chose to focus on it for the first iteration. PokerStove's postflop range selection tool worked, but I felt it could have been done a lot better. For example, how would you select the range "A2s-ATs of hearts and clubs" using PokerStove? Making a clean way to select that would have been the next step for ALL IN Expert.

Interesting article. I remember reading your announcement on 2p2 at the time. I went to your website and scanned the 2p2 thread.

The main reason I didn't buy it was that from what I read it seemed like anything I could do with your program I could already do with PokerStove or StoxEV. And they're both free.

If you want me to pay for poker software (and I've paid for lots of poker-related software) you have to convince me that it will give me an edge or allow me to do something that I can't already do with existing free software.

I guess the lesson there is that you have to clearly show how spending the money will benefit the customer. I agree, the homepage didn't do it very well. Thanks for the post. What did you think of StoxEV?

I found StoxEv to be quite powerful but also quite complex. It took me a while to figure out how to use it. But once I grokked it, it's a powerful program that can facilitate very detailed analysis of a hand.

Having said that, I don't actually use it that much - for most situations I find PokerStove is good enough.

Was it just for cash games, or did you offer ICM calcs too?

$cEV = $EV; no ICM calcs.

Not saying that it would have been successful, hard to say.

But reading "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable” seems a bit harsh. In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services that they really boil down to the hard calculation of "how expensive is it to convert a user we bought with advertising". Like if they raise their conversion rates, they can afford more advertising, and so on. Sure, maybe sometimes there will be a "hit dating service" that spreads through word of mouth, but the others seem to do OK, too.

Especially in Poker it seems advertising is huge?

It's harsh, but I think there is merit to it. You can definitely succeed with a strong advertising campaign, but if your product is remarkable you'll be able to focus on it a lot less.

You're right that the poker industry does depend heavily on advertising. I imagine a big part of PokerStars and FullTilt's userbase discovered online poker after seeing a commercial during a rerun of the World Poker Tour.

I'm not sure how that translates into marketing a poker tool, but you (and the other posters) are right to say I could have done more.

> In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services

I don't think advertising is necessary for an online dating service. For example, quite a few of my friends are on OK Cupid, and as far as I know they don't do much advertising.

"Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" is a really succinct way of putting it.

Even if you can be successful without advertising, it seems a bit silly to be against it. If you know that by investing 100000$ in advertising, you can earn another 1000000$ in revenue, why would you not do it? Just because it loses you points in the indie scene?

I used to be all negative about advertising, but I changed my attitude since I realized that nature itself relies heavily on advertising. A beautiful flower is advertising, too. Even a flower has to announce "I am here" with colors and odors. Maybe in some cases a "social recommendation mechanism" is also at work (like the bees who inform other bees about food sources), but without such a mechanism, how are your clients going to discover you?

One example answer is that if your gross margin is anything under 10%, you shouldn't spend $100m in advertising for $1mm in marginal revenue.

Doesn't happen often in software, of course.

I admit you have lost me here - why should one not make that investment?

Let's say your gross margin is 9%.

You spend $100K in advertising. You get an additional $1000K in revenue, on which you make a 9% profit. You bank $90K profit from this.

You're $10K worse off for having done that advertising.

OK - not so used to terms like "gross margin" ;-)

I'm not against advertising.

OK Cupid is free and freemium, isn't it?

I think a free product or service is in trouble if it has to advertise.

Perhaps the quote should read: "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable, and/or not free."

If they're spending that much money on advertising doesn't that imply that they are unremarkable?

Advertising isn't a bad thing, but if your only differentiator is advertising you're probably screwed.

Unremarkable or not, they do make a lot of money.

Right, but remarkable and unremarkable have nothing to do with making money, but I don't really want to turn this into an argument about semantics. A similar quote that I prefer on this subject is "Be so good they can't ignore you".

I think the message is simply you're better off focusing on making a great product than making a really great ad campaign for a product.

The only reason I argue against this is that I think it would be a shame if a great product fails because of a wanting advertising strategy. I think not even Apple would be where it is now without advertising.

Sure, it would be nice to be "so great they can't ignore you", but how likely is it to be like that? Is it more effective to keep trying to create that super product, or maybe invest more to make your normal, really good product sell?

"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise."

- Ted Turner

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