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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

#21

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

I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.

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

#23

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

Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.

Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.

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

#25
post #12

Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.

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…

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.

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

#26

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

You can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots.

The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.

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

#27
post #3

Yup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is having a viable business, not the software development of X.

our industry has existed on the cutting edge doing what's hard since its inception. it's just that there was a time when sending a piece of text across a wire was hard. Now that's easy, so we do more with the tools that make that easy. When what's hard today becomes easy we'll do that quickly with the tools that make it easy and then do more hard stuff. We can say we've achieved AGI when the tools are doing better on…

Exactly. This is how it's always been. LLMs make it easy to spit out boilerplate code, which drives the price of boilerplate down to free. But good engineers will add a lot more value to that which raises the bar for everyone. The things you can create with an LLM become boring and worthless (honestly they mostly already were before coding agents came out) and the hirable skills become everything else that engineers need to do.

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

#28

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

Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.

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

#29

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

I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a…

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.

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

#30

Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.

> I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown

Are today's online tables simply impossible to win? (bots, collusion)

Or are players simply too evenly matched and the house rake/fees kills you anyway?

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