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How A.I. Conquered Poker

nytimes.com

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Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#101

Post by bostonsre »

noambrown wrote: post #80
hooande wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to say, Pluribus beating top humans for 10,000 hands isn't the same thing as being super human. It's just too small of a sample to make that claim. Further, thousands of the hands that Pluribus played against the human pros are available online in an easy to parse format [0]. I've analyzed them. Pluribus has multiple obvious deficiencies in its play that I can describe in detail. It seems like it's very difficul…

Normally 10,000 hands would be too small a sample size but we used variance-reduction techniques to reduce the luck factor. Think things like all-in EV but much more powerful. It's described in the paper.

Do you think human players could use the results of this paper to learn how to be better poker players? I'm wondering if it could be an alpha go type situation where players learned different strategies.

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#102

Post by ironrabbit »

protoax wrote: post #31
jstx1 wrote: post #27

But it hasn't conquered it! I kept searching the article for some new recent breakthrough that I've missed but it's not there. Yes, solvers like Pio have been around for years and limit holdem has been essentially solved for a while but nobody plays limit holdem anyway. The two most popular games (no-limit Texas holdem and pot-limit Omaha) are still unsolved.

Hasn't Facebook's Pluribus come pretty close to "solving" no-limit holdem? I don't know a lot about poker so I can't really assess their claim's validity.

Not even mentioning Pluribus is just bad journalism

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#103

Post by throwaway_Aef8 »

tziki wrote: post #98
jstx1 wrote: post #27

But it hasn't conquered it! I kept searching the article for some new recent breakthrough that I've missed but it's not there. Yes, solvers like Pio have been around for years and limit holdem has been essentially solved for a while but nobody plays limit holdem anyway. The two most popular games (no-limit Texas holdem and pot-limit Omaha) are still unsolved.

No limit holdem has been essentially solved. Pluribus & co not withstanding, you just haven't heard of it because the people who have solved it are busy printing money in online poker (yes, I know they try to detect bots, and no, they can't detect them all). With stakes this high, academic progress lags the 'actual' state-of-the-art by years.

IIRC it's "solved" for heads up but not really multiway like 3+ to the flop. I believe in a recent Bart Hanson Youtube he points out that mutltiway is not solved.

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#104

Post by splonk »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #83
splonk wrote: post #52

(Former pro and high stakes player, occasional solver developer) This is actually one of the best poker articles I've ever seen in generalist media. Not too clickbaity, reasonable high level overview of game theory, a (very accurate IMO) quote from old pro Erik Seidel about the state of the game just 15 years ago, a discussion on variance vs. EV and results, and most importantly, an emphasis on math, randomization te…

So how much have you won and lost in total? I don’t have any knowledge of poker, so I don’t know how to ballpark this. And the impersonal questions are boring after seven lifetimes, so I thought I’d ask. It would be interesting to see a GitHub style graph of poker activity, with won and lost corresponding to added lines and removed lines.

6 figures. Turns out there's a lot more (and less risky) money in software development than there is in poker. I gave up the professional poker life pretty early and actually made quite a lot more as a talented "amateur" with a Silicon Valley software dev salary that took away the risk of ruin constraints I had a pro. Plus I didn't really enjoy playing professionally anyways - it's pretty mindnumbingly boring to play the number of hands you need to in order to get the EV/variance tradeoff to some acceptable point, at least for me.

My highest and lowest sessions were in the 5 figure range (cash game player, not tournament), so I was never up in the really nosebleed stakes, but I was high enough up that a lot of the nosebleed players would play in my games. Some of them have an impressive ability to play their A-game even when switching between games an order of magnitude in stakes apart. Some of them, uh, don't. People you've seen on TV are overwhelmingly more likely to be in the second category and were generally welcome in my games, at least for monetary reasons. (There was an old screenshot of Phil Hellmuth sitting at a full 9- or 10-handed 300/600 limit hold'em table online. He's out of chips and every other player is sitting out, waiting for him to reload. I have a pretty similar live story about him.)

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#105

Post by throwaway_Aef8 »

throwaway_Aef8 wrote: post #103
tziki wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No limit holdem has been essentially solved. Pluribus & co not withstanding, you just haven't heard of it because the people who have solved it are busy printing money in online poker (yes, I know they try to detect bots, and no, they can't detect them all). With stakes this high, academic progress lags the 'actual' state-of-the-art by years.

IIRC it's "solved" for heads up but not really multiway like 3+ to the flop. I believe in a recent Bart Hanson Youtube he points out that mutltiway is not solved.

oh wait, Google showed me this:

> Machines have raised the stakes once again. A superhuman poker-playing bot called Pluribus has beaten top human professionals at six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the most popular variant of the game. It is the first time that an artificial-intelligence (AI) program has beaten elite human players at a game with more than two players

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9#ref-CR1

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#106

Post by bluecalm »

muldvarp wrote: post #73
bluecalm wrote: post #9

I am the solver programmer mentioned in the article. I think it came out pretty decently. Maybe not all the details are right (I was late answering fact checking email) but I think it's a decent read and the author has done a good job!

2016 you said "It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are still doing very well." Did this turn out to be true or has PioSOLVER become more popular again?

I think poker in general is slowly dwindling but somehow the solver in fact got more popular over the years. I think the pandemics helped us a bit and maybe general switch to nie analytical play. To be honest I don't understand it very well. We have never done any marketing, our website is terrible (put together on a free Shopify template and never really updated) but somehow it keeps getting more traction.

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#107

Post by bluecalm »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #84
bluecalm wrote: post #9

I am the solver programmer mentioned in the article. I think it came out pretty decently. Maybe not all the details are right (I was late answering fact checking email) but I think it's a decent read and the author has done a good job!

How did you end up working on this? It’s an interesting history.

I was always interested in math and encountered game theory concepts early in life. It's a perfect mix of being not a very good programmer, not a top math mind, not an exceptional poker player but still being all those things at the right time and place.

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#109

Post by bluecalm »

michalsustr wrote: post #58
bluecalm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solver was purely based on our (mine and my partner's) ideas. We tried reading some papers to find ideas to improve our solver but we had found that they are not very helpful - written in opaque language, using wrong tree representation and not focusing on practical implementation aspect. Maybe things changed since then but I haven't found anything useful at all in published papers about poker with the exception…

Interesting! We have very recently wrote a paper on the various tree representations [1]. Maybe it is the same distinction you found on your own? I judge this based on the screenshots on your website. Public state trees are amenable to nice factorization over the hands, and indeed most implementations use it, but formally they write they use the history tree notation. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10890

It's a paper so it will take me a while to go through but that sounds more or less right from your description. The history tree notation and the whole information sets nonsense just make things very confusing to read and think about.

Re: How A.I. Conquered Poker

#110

Post by bluecalm »

splonk wrote: post #99
vincentmarle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?

One very simplified model is that on the river, all your hands fall into certain buckets, from strongest to weakest. (I'm ignoring a ton of nuance here and there are actually many more buckets in a real game) - Worth betting, because you have the best hand - Worth calling, because your hand is good enough to beat a bluff (and maybe some value bets as well). - Intending to fold, because your hand is bad, but maybe it'…

Yeah but that only works in the very simplified model. In the real game you pretty much always choose bluffing hands based on card removal (the ones that makes your opponent holding a calling hand less likely).
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