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I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

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Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a profitable poker player but on the strategy side, and this is very oversimplified, but you should be folding a lot of the time other than when you get AA-22, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, QJ, JTs, T9s, 87s you call or 3 bet pre-flop because you have good odds. When you're up against tight players you can make a small bluff on the flop and scare them away most of the time,…

> No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a profitable poker player but on the strategy side Sorry, why are you answering a question if your first response is “no idea”? Am I missing something? If you have little information, my feeling is that your response is at best just BS? I know that sounds very rude, I’m sorry for that.

I think the poster you replied to is just a recent poker player wishing to discuss his hobby.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#152
post #56

I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?

Online poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.

Poker is "solved" for low level and high volume which is what a bot would be good at.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was the tell? And separately, why do you suspect he was playing GTO?

Maybe not GTO specifically, but I got the impression that he was playing the math and doing it well (especially since it came down to the two of us at the end).

The tell was a very common one. Anytime he liked what he saw, either hole cards or on the flop, he would quickly glance at his chip stack (thinking about a bet). Probably didn't even realize he was doing it. When it got to head to head, if he glanced at his chips...I'd fold early. If he didn't, I'd bet into him until he eventually folded.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#154

> Then I started building my own Python script automations to export my hand history from PokerStars, import it into PokerTracker 4, check my balance, stuff like that. If it works like it did with ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) back in the day, then doesn't the app now have all of your decision bias? Restated, isn't the app a reflection of how you play poker, not how an AI would play if it were truly artificially…

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Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

after reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding. at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thin…

took me a week to build a poker bot in 2006 that earned me $1000 a week during college, and that was self imposed because I didn't want to raise any flags. It was based on a world of warcraft bot that I modified, and I learned a lot during the process. What you call wasted mechanical work I call the foundations of a career that changed my life. Take away the AI and this guy has nothing but an idea. An old idea that h…

Just to make a small addition to my comment, which also addresses the sibling and child replies.

I 100% agree that any good professional still needs (with or without AI) the "design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints". I'm not arguing against that. Those are, in fact, part of what I find most fun about programming, and the reason why I fought through the typing boredom since I was 13. I'm also not a vibe coder.

I'm just saying all of that is somewhat orthogonal to the typing of code itself. With strong typing (as in type theory - I still write the types, sometimes signatures for interfaces, etc) and other tooling, you really can get a lot done by delegating the bulk of the implementation to these tools.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#156
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. The hard part is making it look authentic and not emit any patterns or other signals that could be detected in the data.

> Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. How so? It's not like the entire game state is visible to all players, and a big part of poker is playing the other players.

The best human poker players are able to calculate pot odds in their heads. Much of gambling is understanding when the risk of any given bet is actually worth it. Reading people and playing the other players is less important than understanding the likelihood of drawing the card you want and how that compares to the percentage of profit you’ll make on a bet.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a current online poker pro but probably not for much longer. Bots are a serious and real problem and they do beat the games for a good winrate. But it's still possible to make money even in environments with some bots as long as you can find games with fish. And some games on geofenced sites (the OP said they play in Michigan) or other small pools don't appear to have bot problems.

If a sufficiently good bot exists it must be highly profitable and since its software it would be easy to port to every site. Surely you could just get an address in Michigan cheaply and would have financial incentive to. I feel like there was (or will be, if it somehow hasn’t yet occurred) a very short gap between one site being unwinnable and all sites being so.

There's a lot of complexity here that you're overlooking. First of all, the sites have KYC and require geolocation software so it's not trivial to play. Especially not for the bot developers which have tended to live in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. They'll just go wherever is easiest to make money so it doesn't necessarily follow that every site would be overrun.

Second of all, poker is fairly capital intensive and whenever your bot account gets banned the site will confiscate your funds, so there's risk involved as well. And every time you get banned you need to create a new account with new KYC etc.

Third of all, bots play differently from humans and many of them are detected and caught by the players in addition to the site security. Further adding to the challenge is that the community of professional online players in the US is pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else (we're all on Discord together, basically). So new names appearing at high stakes out of nowhere get scrutinized more.

Fourth, even if you're playing against a bot or cheater, you can still make money, since winrate is entirely driven by fish. You might lose a little against the cheater but as long as you're winning far more from the fish you'll still make money. This separates poker from other competitive games.

I don't mean to imply the bot and cheating issues don't exist, they're real and serious and existential, and every online pro these days spends a lot of time worrying about it, worrying if a certain opponent is cheating, etc. But I think the bigger issues facing online poker are actually regulatory (in the US, an unregulated market has sprung up since the pandemic that is now struggling with a lot of legal changes; Europe has a lot of anti gambling laws these days and more every year) as well as general game quality (fewer recreational players wanting to gamble large amounts of money online and more pros than ever trying to split that smaller pie).

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#158
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be another somewhat interesting perspective - not sure how filling in the details from my summary above could be big news. But sure, I’d write it up if it seems interesting enough to someone.

By and large it is not proven that bots exist in any large scale. The operator running his bots would be a betrayal and probably end the business of the poker site involved.

This was early in the online poker hype. I worked there for about a year, and they didn’t last long after I left the company. Forum posts from when they were still in business showed players suspected bot activity. The company wasn’t all that big, and I’m sure the lack of player trust did them in.

Maybe it’s worth a couple hundred words.

Re: I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.

The decline of poker started when I woke up on Black Friday to FT, PS, and UB all having the DOJ logo on them.

Yup, this was a much bigger deal than bots.
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