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The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

nytimes.com

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Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#91

Post by awakeasleep »

gonvaled wrote: post #8
pedrocr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Isn't this obvious? Not at all. This article certainly doesn't imply it and it would be illegal. Do you have any evidence of that being done?

You are joking, aren't you? You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal !!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

You're missing the bigger picture: the cheating has already been done and the game is over.

It's perfectly legal to make games that, bound by physics and probability, pay more to the casino than the players. There is no need to cheat, get it?

The only thing casinos need to work at is attracting a bigger slice of the pie to their games.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#92

Post by iopq »

hannibal5 wrote: post #87
jib wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don't need to know what the opponents strategy is. You calculate based on worst case (ie op playing perfect) and worst case is you break even. There is no way to maximize profit but you can play unexploitable, ie at a minimum not lose and possibly win assuming op doesn't play perfect.

In poker optimal strategy is not winning strategy. An optimal strategy’s goal is to loose the least against any arbitrary strategy. It is a strategy that is impossible to exploit in poker because poker has antes. Poker players must seek maximal strategy. A maximal strategy’s goal is to win as much as possible against a specific strategy.

That's just not accurate. An optimal strategy beats everything but itself, against which it ties. Are you talking about rake? Because antes are included into the poker strategy.

For example, you would raise more often when the antes are higher, regardless of the other player's strategy.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#93

Post by sunkencity »

menubar wrote: post #3
scotch_drinker wrote: post #2

In his book Super System, Doyle Brunson wrote that a computer would never be able to play elite poker because you played the man, not the cards or the game. He greatly underestimated the power of modern computing it appears. Personally, I'd rather see resources go into a robot that can cook for me but development follows the money I suppose.

..or, he greatly underestimated the fact that the computer knows what cards it has dealt to you. Isn't this obvious?

At least it's tuned to the bias of the RNG on the device.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#94

Post by Wingman4l7 »

ianstallings wrote: post #31
ianstallings wrote: post #10

The article says the machine can't be beaten. And then points out that a pro has consistently won against it. This article is filled with bold claims by people that want to sell the idea IMHO. I'm not buying it because even limit texas Hold'Em has never been solved mathematically by super computers, let alone a single machine. Limit Hold'Em is close to being solved but if you check out the last match of pros against…

(Putting this as its own thread because it's so large and slightly off-topic). I've thought long and hard on this, it's one of my life goals to create a piece of software that could mimic good players in texas hold-em, and I think I might have found a way to do just that using big data, hand histories, neural-networking, and a ton of input by actual players. Or at least a good start. How would I accomplish this? Well…

Logging hand histories from real players is pretty much how consistently successful poker bots work. The first major lesson you learn when trying to program one is that a rule-based bot is virtually impossible to write. Finding holes or weaknesses in the inconsistent play of humans? Much easier.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#95

Post by jib »

iopq wrote: post #92
hannibal5 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In poker optimal strategy is not winning strategy. An optimal strategy’s goal is to loose the least against any arbitrary strategy. It is a strategy that is impossible to exploit in poker because poker has antes. Poker players must seek maximal strategy. A maximal strategy’s goal is to win as much as possible against a specific strategy.

That's just not accurate. An optimal strategy beats everything but itself, against which it ties. Are you talking about rake? Because antes are included into the poker strategy. For example, you would raise more often when the antes are higher, regardless of the other player's strategy.

I think the point he is trying to make is that if your goal is to maximise your profits then it is not always optimal to play the nash equilibrium strategy. That is true.

The optimal strategy beats everything but an equally good strategy, and ties against itself, but it doesnt necessarily maximise profits against other bad strategies.

If you are able to identify flaws in your opponents strategy then you can play non-game theory optimal to increase your profits against that perceived strategy. Doing so comes at the cost of you yourself no longer playing the best strategy though.

There exists strategies that gives higher yields vs certain unbalanced strategies than the game theory optimal strategy (or strategies - for all we know there are several optimal strategies in limit hold'em).

For instance - in limit poker if your opponent will never raise, call every street, but not call the river with anything less than a pair, regardless of what you do, then bluffing every river is a more winning strategy than the game theory optimal strategy. The game theory optimal strategy would include times when you do not bet the river, for balance, but knowledge of your opponent's flawed strategy would tell you that betting 100% of the time has a higher yield.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#96

Post by ianstallings »

hannibal5 wrote: post #87
jib wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don't need to know what the opponents strategy is. You calculate based on worst case (ie op playing perfect) and worst case is you break even. There is no way to maximize profit but you can play unexploitable, ie at a minimum not lose and possibly win assuming op doesn't play perfect.

In poker optimal strategy is not winning strategy. An optimal strategy’s goal is to loose the least against any arbitrary strategy. It is a strategy that is impossible to exploit in poker because poker has antes. Poker players must seek maximal strategy. A maximal strategy’s goal is to win as much as possible against a specific strategy.

Yes I tend to agree here, that "optimal" strategy could be defined as making the least amount of mistakes. While a poker player also needs to minimize mistakes, sometimes to increase your expected value in future betting rounds or future hands one can make a mistake and get more value from it.

I'd like to add that how poker players generally define as their main goal, to maximize expected value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#97

Post by ianstallings »

sanswork wrote: post #85
ianstallings wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Putting this as its own thread because it's so large and slightly off-topic). I've thought long and hard on this, it's one of my life goals to create a piece of software that could mimic good players in texas hold-em, and I think I might have found a way to do just that using big data, hand histories, neural-networking, and a ton of input by actual players. Or at least a good start. How would I accomplish this? Well…

Just replaying hands fails to take into account a lot of variables related to the other players play style. Once to start to take those into account the replaying of hands isn't needed.

Yeah I think that's why I would like to add the human input and tagging. Because in a given context it might be a good move, but it also could be classified as a bad move in other contexts. I need to work that out.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#98

Post by iopq »

jib wrote: post #95
iopq wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not accurate. An optimal strategy beats everything but itself, against which it ties. Are you talking about rake? Because antes are included into the poker strategy. For example, you would raise more often when the antes are higher, regardless of the other player's strategy.

I think the point he is trying to make is that if your goal is to maximise your profits then it is not always optimal to play the nash equilibrium strategy. That is true. The optimal strategy beats everything but an equally good strategy, and ties against itself, but it doesnt necessarily maximise profits against other bad strategies. If you are able to identify flaws in your opponents strategy then you can play non-…

This is true, but the program can't adapt due to the regulations, so it tries to play a Nash equilibrium strategy.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#99

Post by Wingman4l7 »

wallawe wrote: post #33
scotch_drinker wrote: post #2

In his book Super System, Doyle Brunson wrote that a computer would never be able to play elite poker because you played the man, not the cards or the game. He greatly underestimated the power of modern computing it appears. Personally, I'd rather see resources go into a robot that can cook for me but development follows the money I suppose.

I was worried this type of misinformation would be extrapolated from the article. The game the computer plays, is limit hold-em. This game is much more mathematical since bluffs are limited to a big blind. Although Super System was written for all different types of poker, he is referring to no-limit holdem which still involves playing the player, with heavy math elements as well, but still much more psychology invol…

> There is still no computer that is efficient at winning no-limit hold-em.

... and there won't be for a long time yet, as all hobbyist and academic efforts have been focused towards a consistently winning limit bot, because of the reason you outlined.

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