I don't play poker and I'm not interested in learning. I inherited the software at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpoker/ and tried to fix it. I then thought I'd write a much better server quickly.

I ended up writing a server that's scalable and robust but incompatible with the original Delphi client. Part of it is that the contract programmers blackmailed me into Delphi (C++ will cost you more!) and I was greedy. The other part is that they are serializing Delphi objects and shipping them down the wire. Supporting that would be a nightmare.

It's hard to sell a server without a client and my server is pretty bare bones too. There's only Texas Hold'em, no tournaments. There's no accounting, payment processing, affiliate tracking, etc. I tried to sell it as a base people could build around but not very successfully. I broke even on development but that's it.

Ultimately, poker people are fine with running a 200K solution on scores of servers that handle just thousands of clients. There's not much interest in squeezing that into a handful of servers since marketing expenses of a new poker room dwarf those of hardware and software.