101–110 of 167 posts
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Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.
Cash games in person are pretty bad too. Casinos need to make money and they only get it off rake, so they have lately turned a blind eye to collusion. The only safe poker (except among friends) is tournaments, in person, so they randomize the tables properly.
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Given how awful LLM are at chess, I'd say GPT sucks at poker. Making a profitable bot using state of the art poker software, like stockfish for chess? That's already done.
The bot would realistically be GPT interacting with the web application and calling out to a poker engine for any calculations/decisions.
Sure you could use an AI agent to write that code, but it wouldn't actually being that AI agent in the hot loop constantly coordinating your UI interactions with the poker engine...
Comments like these make me feel a bit safer from AI in my engineering job. People think it's a perfect no brainer fit for so many inane situations.
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The "standard" strategy is to play GTO (game theory optimal). There are solvers out there (like GTO Wizard) that show you the "optimal" play for every situation, which is used as a baseline, and then players deviate to exploit specific player tendencies. GTO trees are far too complex to fully memorize, so nobody can play perfect GTO. But you can do a lot of solver work to get reasonably close.
I won a tournament on a cruise against a guy who I think was doing this. He was one of the people at the table who had a consistent tell and that helped me beat him heads up.
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I read doyle's Super System back in the day and used that as the basis for my poker strategy from high school to mid-twenties. In talking to some friends who play competitively, they say SS is just super out dated and you would get eaten alive at any cash game. I'm curious what, in your opinion, is the "standard" playing strategy that is most effective in today's poker rooms? I'm curious if that answer is different o…
Super System is old, but I wouldn't call it outdated. Definitely still worth a read. The more books you've read, the bigger your tool set. The key here is that it works in both directions because each style you learn, is a style you may recognize other players using. The pitfall of Super System, is by now, everyone's read it, and it's quite easily recognized: - limp-shoving under the gun - always trying to go on runs…
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Cash games in person are pretty bad too. Casinos need to make money and they only get it off rake, so they have lately turned a blind eye to collusion. The only safe poker (except among friends) is tournaments, in person, so they randomize the tables properly.
Collusion in live poker games in casinos is not a widespread problem. There is a problem with poker where people always think they are being cheated every time they lose. If you are playing in a casino in person it is very unlikely you are being cheated. If you are playing in a regulated website online that verifies the identities of the customers it is also unlikely you are being cheated. The vast majority of people…
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> Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot Writing a winning poker bot is not trivial, you are unknowingly spreading false information.
Hmm… there are multiple variants of poker, at least one was weakly solved in 2015. I guess one could implement their algorithm. But I don’t know if the weakly solved variant of poker is popular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheus_(poker_bot)
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Doesn't mean bots aren't widespread. It just means you're better than the breakeven player.
I'm a software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I'm also a poker player that has a very deep understanding of the game. Writing a poker bot that can beat the game is absolutely not trivial. There are "solvers" that use counterfactual regret minimization to solve a constrained version of the game for specific scenarios. These are useful for understanding the principles of the game but they are not the cheat shee…
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I'm a software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I'm also a poker player that has a very deep understanding of the game. Writing a poker bot that can beat the game is absolutely not trivial. There are "solvers" that use counterfactual regret minimization to solve a constrained version of the game for specific scenarios. These are useful for understanding the principles of the game but they are not the cheat shee…
I'm an ex online poker pro. You probably don't have the deep understanding of the game you think you have. Bots were already destroying the field up to mid-stakes 10 years ago.
Please explain to me how you think these bots work? Do you think they are literally hooked into solvers and solving these hands in real time? If you actually understood poker you'd understand that the winrate from GTO is not good enough to make real money playing poker without a massive sample size, the game is all about exploiting players when they deviate from GTO. Explain to me how you program your poker bot to know intuitively that a player has too many bluff combinations when a flush arrives on the turn after they check back on the flop therefor you should call wider than standard? There are a billion little unique situations where people don't bluff enough, bluff too much, call too much or call too little and that is where the winrate from poker comes from.
This is the difference between having a 3 bb / 100 winrate and a 10-15 bb / 100 winrate. Maybe there are a bunch of shitty poker bots winning at 1 bb / 100 but if they are winning it's because some players suck really really bad, not because they are playing perfect poker.
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Collusion in live poker games in casinos is not a widespread problem. There is a problem with poker where people always think they are being cheated every time they lose. If you are playing in a casino in person it is very unlikely you are being cheated. If you are playing in a regulated website online that verifies the identities of the customers it is also unlikely you are being cheated. The vast majority of people…
I used to play poker back in the 2000s. The online game was getting harder then and I can only imagine it's gotten worse? Also GTO solvers are a thing now? I don't know what stakes you are referring to but I feel like the overall quality of poker play has never been higher.
Having a poker solver isn't enough. Let's say you play tournament poker, just having a basic understanding of concepts like ICM give you a massive edge. Let's say you take it a step further and understand concepts like "future game" and actually study them using tools, you're edge has expanded further.
There are a bunch of charts out there that tell you what hands to go all in with if you have 15bbs or fewer. None of those charts take into account ICM. Also how do you adjust the charts if your opponents are calling with too many hands? How do you adjust them if they call with too few hands?
Let's say we are just talking about cash game poker, it's not enough to have a solver, you need to understand how to actually study with the solver. People try to use them like a cheat sheet that tells you what to do, not understanding that a slight change to the inputs of the solver can drastically change the output. The purpose of a solver is to understand how different ranges interact at different stack depths on different boards.
ie: Playing 100bbs deep, on a KK3 flop with a flush draw, what hands should i check or bet as the preflop raiser? What happens if that 3 is a 7? What if it's a J? What if it's 33K instead of KK3? What if I'm 200bbs deep instead of 100? What if the opponent calls too much? What if they call too little?
Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.
Probably a dumb question but when I watch poker on TV I see that the aggressive players tend to win, so why do the losers let themselves get intimidated?