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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

#41

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.

And then there’s all the bots you aren’t spotting.

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

#42
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bot would realistically be GPT interacting with the web application and calling out to a poker engine for any calculations/decisions.

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

#43
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think that might be oversimplifying what software creation is which is being able to explain to a computer what it is you want. I think of Cursor as Python was to C. It's a higher level language but you still have to be able to think like a hacker, which will always be a rare skill.

And the best hackers at any level abstraction will always be the ones that actually understand what's going on in every lower layer in order to diagnose when the abstraction is failing them. Anyone that thinks you can be up at the level of vibes without understanding how an LLM thinks, without knowing how to review and factor your vibed Python or whatever high-ish level language, can make it performant without knowin…

I love it! This is what I was trying to say but you said it much better.

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

#44

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?

Aggression generally wins the day but pay attention to the size of the bets and their position. Generally, you want to make a lot of small bets to show action (they can fold for a minimal investment) and leverage table position to make other players make hard decisions.

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

#45

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…

Bots mostly don't play fair. One strategy I've seen is having multiple bots play passively to minimize losses, unless at least 2 get placed in a single game. In that case the bots can share information bully the rest of the table by playing aggressively.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And then there’s all the bots you aren’t spotting.

I'm sure there is some, but it's standard practice to keep at database of all your hands. I've sanity checked the winning regs (at my stakes) and they all make mistakes. I think it helps that in the US all the sites are geography based. It makes it harder and less financially viable to run a bot ring.

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

#48

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

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

I heard it was poker-sites banning the (human) sharks

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

#49

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.

Sites have very a strong incentive to make you believe this. Otherwise no human would join anymore.

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

#50
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.

The more software there is, the more maintenance and willingness to build more software will be.

On top of that, LLM output is so mediocre that even marketing firms are doing most “copy(s)” by hand.

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