This is an incredibly jaded reply. Somebody who was "never especially good" at programming but spent a lot of time try to be could make the exact same post. Poker is very difficult to become successful at in your part-time, because you need to balance playing with studying which forces you to divide a small pie even smaller.

While the best of the best can beat tough tables and will play anybody, most of us make money by playing worse players. Recreational players will often say "I cant beat these players because they dont think, if only I could move up to where they respected my raises!" But the problem with that is that the majority of our profits come from those players, if you cant figure them out, then you wont be beating the better players. Plain and simple.

As far as math being overrated, I couldnt disagree more. Yes, bad players or people who dont play often ask if you need to be a math genius to figure it out, or if you have to count cards, both of which arent true but that doesnt mean math is unimportant. Yes, pot odds, counting outs, etc is all pretty basic. Solving complex game trees for various situations to find the maximally exploitive play is not. Is the math complex? No, not really. It can be confusing, but there are tools to help and it isnt very high level math; however, that doesnt make it unimportant.

Further, saying math is unimportant is completely ignoring the activity you are "playing." Poker is entirely math. All you are doing is playing a numbers game. In texas hold'em your first card dealt will have a 1/52 chance of being a specific card, and your second will have a 1/51 chance. Then you have the various probabilities for the flop, turn, river, etc. Saying poker isnt about math misses the forest for the trees. I could say blackjack isnt about math, you just need to follow the basic counting strategies to turn a profit. But what do you think those are based on? How were they calculated? Look at what the University of Alberta is doing with math and try to say it isnt important.

I respect your posts in BFI at 2p2, but this is something that only provides the perspective of a player who never reached a high level of play. It is important to understand that perspective, but while people should always learn from somebody who failed, they need to be very careful when looking to them for advice. Yes, many give great advice, and many winners just got lucky, but you need to hear both sides.

TLDR: As far as the actual question goes, if you live in the US dont get into online poker unless it is just for fun. There arent enough options for you to play, and the risks are too high. If you are outside the US and want to learn the game, make sure you have enough time to study and play, use good resources (twoplustwo.com in conjunction with a video training site), listen to people better than you, and always try to improve. Dont look for how to play x hand in y situation, look to understand the framework that will help you make those decisions. It isnt easy, and if you already code then your time is better spent freelancing, but for college students, I think it is a great option, provided they can be honest with themselves about their abilities.

When it comes to crossover with programming, Im not so sure i directly agree (although Im just learning to code, so take this with a grain of salt) with their specific points. I think when poker is properly studied, it helps you learn how to think and analyze situations rationally. That ability helps the coding process, but it is broader than that, and not really the reasons the author outlined. It truly is a math/logic based game (so is any non purely luck based game), so it requires a similar mindset, but I dont expect learning one would help a ton with the other directly.