Maybe interesting I have built a backgammon bot in the past detailed history here https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-money-machine-dream-e4ab5...
I think you meant Xavier... :P
Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#32Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#33Former professional poker player here, no limit holdem cash games, mid stakes. NLHE cash games are considered the hardest to solve given the depth of the decision trees. Other formats like sit and gos, spin and gos, and tournaments can be modeled and solved in a more simplistic way. A group of us (cash game pros) discovered a group of players on the Ongame network around 2010. We combined our databases and found a fe…
> They made very annoying, aggressive plays that were difficult to counter, not taught anywhere in professional videos, forums or training sites Mind sharing more on these strategies? I'm curious about what sort of strategy a poker pro would find so unique as to not recognize it from anywhere
Sure. In poker you never play like you or your opponent(s) hold a specific hand, you always do the analysis against a range of hands. Every action (bet, call, raise) at any point (preflop, flop, turn, river) in the hand gives you extra information, which helps you narrow that range (more tightly define it) and help you make better, and hence more profitable decisions. Your range in every hand starts with all possible hands, and with each action gets more narrow.
The first strategy which we first noticed intuitively/by feel and then confirmed from stats, and which tipped us off to the whole thing, was that they would always fold or reraise (3bet) preflop. This was unheard of, as having a calling range preflop is incredibly important, as it has so many flow on effects for the rest of your strategy postflop (where the large majority of the hands play out). Most players (at least in 2010), had a polarized reraising (3bet) range, meaning they would mix very strong hands, with very weak hands, call with medium strength hands, and fold weaker hands. These bots had a very wide (higher %), and merged 3bet range, meaning they'd pick hands from the top down. It was mind bending to deal with as all of your experience, maths and theory away from the tables was wired to deal with a certain type and width of range and this was just so different.
The second main one was as follows. I've already described the situation where the action goes preflop raise, and reraise (referred to as a 3bet). You can counter this with a 4bet (yet another reraise), a valid and common strategy, again, ranges get even narrower here, but would still happen frequently (dozens of times a day). If each player started with $100, the action usual goes raise $3, reraise (3bet) to $10, reraise (4bet) to $22, then usually fold, call (very rare), all in $100 or reraise again ($30ish). The reraise is just so uncommon as it's difficult to make sensible range that isn't obviously strong. These bots would do this frequently. It's a very ballsy move, stops you in your tracks, and your only options are really to fold and give up your $22 and leave you scratching your head, or costs you $100 to call bullshit and go all in and find out if he's bluffing.
The last one that stood out off the top of my head was the river check raise. Check raising is when you act first in a hand, elect to check, let your opponent bet, then raise. You can do this both for value and as a bluff. It's an essential part of everyone's strategy, most frequently on the flop, less so on the turn and river. These guys would check raise the river a ton, and it was extremely effective. Again, it's a ballsy uncommon move (at the time) and was very profitable.
Here's the link from TwoPlusTwo (biggest and oldest poker forum) if you want more info.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/ala...
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#34Maybe interesting I have built a backgammon bot in the past detailed history here https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-money-machine-dream-e4ab5...
Here's a backgammon bot implemented in practise https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-Library for anybody interested.
It also contains highly optimised Blackjack bot. PartyPoker had a beatable blackjack due to bonus incentives they gave out (they've fixed it since).
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#35Former professional poker player here, no limit holdem cash games, mid stakes. NLHE cash games are considered the hardest to solve given the depth of the decision trees. Other formats like sit and gos, spin and gos, and tournaments can be modeled and solved in a more simplistic way. A group of us (cash game pros) discovered a group of players on the Ongame network around 2010. We combined our databases and found a fe…
What made you think that these groups of players were associated with each other? What made you think that they were bots, beyond just winning often?
There are software tools which aggregate huge amounts of data (hands) from Poker platforms, like Holdem Manager. That's where you can see player stats like pre-flop, turn, river actions, percentages and so on. Once you have 2 players who played a lot of hands (+10k) and have the exact same stats numbers you should be a bit suspicious.
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What made you think that these groups of players were associated with each other? What made you think that they were bots, beyond just winning often?
There are software tools which aggregate huge amounts of data (hands) from Poker platforms, like Holdem Manager. That's where you can see player stats like pre-flop, turn, river actions, percentages and so on. Once you have 2 players who played a lot of hands (+10k) and have the exact same stats numbers you should be a bit suspicious.
Yeah this. Dozen's of them with this weird strategy with a few very identifying features.
Edit: I can't recall the exact figure, but we had a few million hands combined.
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#37i worked in anti-fraud for a large online gaming house for about six years from 2003 to 2009 so my information is not current. At that time, there were no bots (whether in the wild or in academic, eg, University of Alberta) that could competitively play no-limit, likewise for tournaments (which account for a large portion of the total hands played in online poker Sites). Anyone know if this has changed?
Limit Hold'em Heads-up is 'solved'. Over the long run, the AI will break even no matter who the opponent is (rake excluded, of course). IIRC this involved making precalculations for the entire sample space, which is massive, but tiny compared to no-limit full-ring.
It wasn't solved.
It was "practically solved" - not a very scientific term put by the authors of that project (http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/). This means that the approximate solution is exploitable for about 0.1bb/100 hands. This is very close to the real solution but "solved" is a bit misleading as that term means something different when referring to games.
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#38I know a guy who was talking about the roulette prediction thing. He was an MIT guy, but a few years ago smartphones weren't that sophisticated and besides you'd have issues using them at a casino. Rough plan: - You can identify both the ring of the roulette table (transforms into an ellipse), the ball (shiny), and the green zero on the spinner (it's different from red and black). - You can use a Kalman filter to gue…
The Newtonian Casino talks about some students who designed a predicting computer, and smuggled it into a casino in their shoe. It was published in 1985, so anything they built would have been considerably less powerful than a smart phone, even one that several years old. (It's a great book, and probably available). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-Scie... One interesting part of the book was t…
Here's the TV episode from "Cheating Vegas" on them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWHcpU6snM . This show was pretty interesting if you're into finding out how people tried to get an advantage on the casinos.
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#39Maybe interesting I have built a backgammon bot in the past detailed history here https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-money-machine-dream-e4ab5...
Here's a backgammon bot implemented in practise https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-Library for anybody interested. It also contains highly optimised Blackjack bot. PartyPoker had a beatable blackjack due to bonus incentives they gave out (they've fixed it since).
It seems that Party was a popular target back in the day ;) I was too ashamed to put code on github.
Re: Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They made very annoying, aggressive plays that were difficult to counter, not taught anywhere in professional videos, forums or training sites Mind sharing more on these strategies? I'm curious about what sort of strategy a poker pro would find so unique as to not recognize it from anywhere
Sure. In poker you never play like you or your opponent(s) hold a specific hand, you always do the analysis against a range of hands. Every action (bet, call, raise) at any point (preflop, flop, turn, river) in the hand gives you extra information, which helps you narrow that range (more tightly define it) and help you make better, and hence more profitable decisions. Your range in every hand starts with all possible…
I used to do a lot of this in real life. Not to say these aren't bots, but I seem to have discovered unconventional strategies in Chess and Poker due to never having had formal training - and I want to describe the rationale. They would work as effectively in real life as these bots did online:
When I had, say, suited connectors, I'd often reraise preflop (in late position). Why? So people would put me on a high hand. Since I was in late position, they'd be afraid to bet the flop, letting me see more cards cheaper than if I had not reraised preflop (the preflop betting usually isn't super large). By the time the turn arrives, I'd know if I had a pretty good chance to make a flush or straight on the river (or may have already done so).
Meanwhile, they still had me on high cards from the preflop raise so I represented it as such. If high cards came out on the flop and everyone was timid I could steal the pot by making a large bet bluffing that I had made a set with high cards and slowplayed the flop (that's how "confident" I was of my hand on the flop). If a high card came out on the turn I could also steal the pot by the even more believable story of preflop reraise followed by checking the flop and then "hitting" the right high cards on the turn.
But the biggest payoff would be when low cards came out and I would check, checkraise. Since I was late position, and representing high cards that didn't hit, I had people betting medium amounts on the flop to push me out. Often I'd be one card away from a flush or straight and just call them, "as if" waiting for a high card. If the turn completed my draw then I was all set for a call on the turn followed by a checkraise on the river.
In early position, I would definitely avoid raising with suited connectors because I wanted the maximum number of people in the hand, many with high cards, to suck out a large pot. Calling passively and checkraising the river. This last strategy netted me the most money. Also made people think I'm a lucky fish for giving them such a "bad beat"... but it was all in the stats involved in having a lot of people in the hand.