Why do you guys pay for Poker Tracker?

[Mark1978]

You can get a demo version of pokertracker for free if you want to use it for ideas for your own software. There are many features that people would like in PT that you could implement in your software (there have been some threads on this subject which may be useful to you).
I wasn't trying to be a dick. I was just answering the question you asked in the title of your thread. If the intention of the post was to find coding partners then just say so.
It would be great to get an open-source database project up and running. Many people get started then they just disappear.

[GoodCallYouWin]

Of course if he put in say 10 hours it would save EVERYONE $50, not just him... which is pretty cool (unless your poker tracker).

[Dazarath]

OP, are you one of those people who spends 5 hours looking for coupons so they can save $0.60?

[WARRiOR520]

Mark1798: I'm sorry, I really did appreciate your input (and especially your second response), I meant that I was just a little irritated because people were repeating the idea in various tones and I didn't want my post to make me look like a dick, I was just upset that people are complaining about how I am wasting my time coding something that would benefit them (or not if they bought PT) but its no problem to hop in here and one line the same thing that we have heard, great the majority of Mr. Joe Pokers out there would much rather pay $50 than spend time even figuring out my open source program, thats fine with me, and it is why I doubt the PT guys would have a problem with me.

Also, I'm sorry I didn't just come out and say i was looking for interested programmers, I kind of thought I had implied it, but I am not expecting it. I do not claim to be extremely skilled, but I am a CS major almost done with my AS so if this seems like the type of project you are interested in, it would be great to have some collaboration. This is an open invitation to anyone who believed that have something to contribute and I thank everyone for taking the time to read this and also anyone who takes the time to meaningfully reply.

[WARRiOR520]

Also, I forgot to mention...

PT Doesn't do razz, and that is a major major part of this.

[Mr. Orange]

[ QUOTE ]
Also, I forgot to mention...

PT Doesn't do razz, and that is a major major part of this.

[/ QUOTE ]

PT stud supports Razz.

[Phil153]

[ QUOTE ]
Of course if he put in say 10 hours it would save EVERYONE $50, not just him... which is pretty cool (unless your poker tracker).

[/ QUOTE ]
To make a better PokerTracker would take a skilled coder 100-200x that long. And a team of coders far longer (in total hours).

Even using a highly productive language like c#, you'd need at least 25,000 lines of code, and a crapload of time in debugging and testing (more than most programs).

The PokerTracker add on I created for my personal/friends' use (which does everything you could possibly want, and then some) is 19,000 lines of original c# code - and I'm using third party dlls for graphing and postgres database access. I shudder to think what it would take to write a PokerTracker clone, with all its features, and deal with backwards compatibility issues for all the variants of hand histories while maintaining perfect accuracy. Which is the standard that most current users will demand.

Sure, it's trivial to write regex parsers for 10 sites, stick some results in a database and display them. But as the system grows larger and more complex, you need to a deal with a crapload of speed issues, design issues, conflicts, the hassles of multithreading, random bugs, GUI issues (more complex than you might think if you want to make quality product), and so on. Your code will grow hairs and easy things will become hard. And those annoyingly complex/tedius/difficult to code extra items that your product HAS to have (i.e. reading hand histories from email, autorating, bulletproof note export) will bog you down and turn your easy parsing & database job into a nightmare.

But I wish you luck.

[rvg72]

Phil153 pretty much nailed it - anyone with real world software experience knows how much work even the simplest of programs becomes once other people start using it.

TourneyManager is a much smaller project than Poker Tracker and it took a good 200 hours of work before it was released and another 200+ since then in updates, obscure bug fixes, dealing with site hand history changes and support and that's in a highly productive language like C# and 14 years of experience...

If your original post was something like: "I want to make an open source poker manager like Poker Tracker. Any developers out there want to take part?" then the responses would be a lot different.

Good luck with it though,

rvg