I wish I was that much into poker when I was a student. Or my advisors and the department I was in were more creative in applying science. Years later when I see that a student did his bacheloror master thesis on poker I think of one thing. Not how useful university was for him, or how useless it was, I think of just that he had fun studying. And we had fun being part of that: The author of An Artificial Intelligence Agent for Texas Hold'em Poker Patrick McCurley writes in his chapter with acknolwedgements: "One of my biggest sources of inspiration and ideas came from regulars of the ‘PokerAI’ forums (http://pokerai.org). Not only did they provide a centralised library of useful material and offer an incredible amount of hand history samples in which to apply my solution to, I always felt assured that I could post my ideas or questions knowing that they would be answered by a group of highly intelligent experts in the domain".And judging his work academically: From what I've seen so far this would be my future insta recommendation for people that just want to start with pokerbotting (next to Johanson's thesis), and before they are into it enough to recommend them the more cutting edge stuff.