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No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

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Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#91

Post by NhanH »

elcomet wrote: post #73
femto113 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the highest levels of play psychological factors are pretty minimal. Before a showdown which cards you actually hold aren't particularly material, as the only information you convey is through your bids. This means if you predict that you're more likely to win a hand by bidding (and inducing a fold) than by calling and going to a showdown it makes mathematical sense to "bluff". I'm sure AIs have no trouble learnin…

The issue is that you don't know exactly the probability of your opponent folding. This is psychology.

The probability of the opponent folding doesn't matter. The goal of bluffing in modern games is so that optimal players are indifferent in their decision (no matter how they play, you can't lose money). And because this is a zero sum game, if you can't lose money then you win if the opponent makes mistake.

You only need to know the probability of the opponent folding so that you can deviate from the theoretical optimal strategy to win even more money if they are a biased player

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#92

Post by Avamander »

noambrown wrote: post #51
andr3w321 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance of the code being released or a cepheus style answer key being provided? http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/strategy

I don't think the poker world would be happy with us if we did that. Heads-up limit hold'em isn't really played professionally anymore, but six-player no-limit hold'em is very popular.

As other commenters have said, I do too think you're delaying the inevitable but releasing now would mean you get credited with the first free solution.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#93

Post by Bartweiss »

gfody wrote: post #38
noambrown wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie... It's going for game-theory-optimal play. It doesn't adapt to its opponents' observed weaknesses. But I think it's cool to show that you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels. You just need to not have any weaknesses yourself.

> you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels that may be true for limit poker, but in a no-limit tournament the best this bot could do is not lose. as the pressure increases with the blinds and the players are forced to bluff and call bluffs how does this bot avoid folding itself to death from a run of bad cards? I could see this bot doing well at cashing but I don't see how…

I think this comes down to ambiguity over what "optimal play" means.

There's a poker strategy we might call 'deterministically' optimal play, which consists of precisely assessing each hand's expected value with little to no bluffing. This is already common in online cash games with both bots and players running multiple games at once. And you're right - it's excellent at running net-positive and not losing, but unlikely to win significant tournaments.

Pluribus, though, is playing something close to game-theoretically optimal poker. In playing against itself, it's attempting to develop a takes-all-comers strategy with no exploitable weaknesses. That includes bluffing and calling bluffs - the goal is simply to find a mixed-strategy equilibrium where those moves are made some percentage of the time, in proportion to their expected payoffs. This can involve doing all of the same basic operations as pro players, like valuing button raises differently than donks or attempting to bluff based on how many players remain in the hand. The distinctive limitation is simply that Pluribus plays 'locally' optimal poker with no conception of opponent's identities or behavior in prior hands.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#94

Post by gringoDan »

TylerE wrote: post #83
gringoDan wrote: post #78

Curious if we'll see human poker pros get much better in the coming years as they incorporate training regimens that involve bots (analogous to chess today vs. 50 years ago). Seems like this will be the trend in almost every game.

As someone who plays both games....I doubt it. Poker is an incomplete information game with crushingly high variance. The bots strategy is likely not quantifiable.

Can you expand on this? I'm a novice at both games, but the Facebook blog post mentioned that the bot exhibited some unconventional strategies:

> Pluribus disagrees with the folk wisdom that donk betting (starting a round by betting when one ended the previous betting round with a call) is a mistake; Pluribus does this far more often than professional humans do.

Is it overly simplistic to think that humans could improve their game by incorporating some strategies like this more/less often than they were previously?

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#95

Post by ayemeng »

throwamay1241 wrote: post #84
noambrown wrote: post #6

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

Who were the pros? Are they credible endbosses? Seth Davies works at RIO which deserves respect but I've never heard of the others except Chris Ferguson who I doubt is a very good player by todays standards (or human being, for that matter), but I've never heard of the others when I do know the likes of LLinusLove (iirc, the king of 6max), Polk and Phil Ganford. Is 10,000 hands really considered a good enough sample?…

Jimmy Chou, Jason Les, Dong Kim are affiliated with Doug Polk.

It is an interesting point that these are pros but their specialities are either tournament or heads up. The current 6 max pros are LLinusLove, Otb_RedBaron, TrueTeller.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#96

Post by newfangle »

gfody wrote: post #38
noambrown wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie... It's going for game-theory-optimal play. It doesn't adapt to its opponents' observed weaknesses. But I think it's cool to show that you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels. You just need to not have any weaknesses yourself.

> you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels that may be true for limit poker, but in a no-limit tournament the best this bot could do is not lose. as the pressure increases with the blinds and the players are forced to bluff and call bluffs how does this bot avoid folding itself to death from a run of bad cards? I could see this bot doing well at cashing but I don't see how…

The game actually becomes simpler when you have less blinds to the point where if you have 15 blinds or fewer you actually just follow a chart and go all in or fold preflop

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#97

Post by TheChosenZygote »

TylerE wrote: post #83
gringoDan wrote: post #78

Curious if we'll see human poker pros get much better in the coming years as they incorporate training regimens that involve bots (analogous to chess today vs. 50 years ago). Seems like this will be the trend in almost every game.

As someone who plays both games....I doubt it. Poker is an incomplete information game with crushingly high variance. The bots strategy is likely not quantifiable.

Bots have already influenced the poker meta. Libratus showed us how it was optimal to sometimes overbet bluff when you have nut blocker(s). I'm sure when these poker pros do hand reviews, they're not looking at how they can exploit Pluribus, but moreso how they can incorporate some of the lines/strategies it used to beat everyone else.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#98

Post by waynecochran »

elcomet wrote: post #73
femto113 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the highest levels of play psychological factors are pretty minimal. Before a showdown which cards you actually hold aren't particularly material, as the only information you convey is through your bids. This means if you predict that you're more likely to win a hand by bidding (and inducing a fold) than by calling and going to a showdown it makes mathematical sense to "bluff". I'm sure AIs have no trouble learnin…

The issue is that you don't know exactly the probability of your opponent folding. This is psychology.

I'll have to go back and watch Data playing poker on Star Trek NG -- what do sci fi writers think of this.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#100

Post by anbop »

nradov wrote: post #85
noambrown wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the poker world would be happy with us if we did that. Heads-up limit hold'em isn't really played professionally anymore, but six-player no-limit hold'em is very popular.

Why are you concerned about the happiness of the poker world?

Well if they upset the poker world do you think they would have top pros willing to go on record endorsing them?
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