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Artificial Intelligence in Poker
Markian Hlynka writes "The University of Alberta's research into Poker AI is featured in this New York Times article. There is also detailed discussion of the game of Poker, and the 'new breed' of players who have honed their abilities online. See the U of A's poker project for more information."
Now, he is able to play every night between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. while his daughter sleeps in the next room.
If this was UT or Quake, this entire article would be about how he was destroying his life, and getting ready to go on a rampage.
But instead, its just a game of cards, and he's gambling with his family's money, but thats OK.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet
Except that people play a certain way and develop easily (especially for an AI) recognizable patterns. Those patterns are just as recognizable, perhaps even more so online where the number of hands played per hour is so much greater.
Players can get broken loosely (particularly for Texas Holdem, but also for other games) into a small group of profiles and their play patterned according to that.
While an academic study may be new, commercial software to do this has been available for years. In particular Turbo Texas Holdem from Wilson software does an outstanding job of simulating different types of players and play conditions
and if you really believe that people skills and not card or math skills are all that you need, I'd invite you to come to Atlantic City and sit in any of the games I regularly attend. We'd love to have you.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
You should read the article. A computer isn't intimidated by bluffing or aggression, and it has a better capability to analyze betting patterns, pot odds, and drawing odds.
If you've got AK(s) and the computer has a pair of tens, your raising T$100,000 might scare some meat players out, but given the circumstances, the computer might just call you and win.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
You're partly right. No-limit hold'em is about things like bluffing. The kinds of poker most people play in public cardrooms (mostly limit hold'em and stud) are more about the cards, although understanding your opponents is critical to doing well at either one. Either way, online poker has a lot to offer. It's still about understanding your opponents, you just don't get as much information by way of physical behavior. There are tons of bad players online -- players who make fundamental mistakes (i.e., don't play their cards well) and who don't adjust to their opponents well (both in failing to take proper advantage and in playing easily exploited strategies). It's true that the game isn't the same at all. But many of the differences are positive, and like live poker, it's still a game of skill (a fact that's well obscured by short-term variance).
(Blatant plug: I'm a little biased, the new edition of my book ("Serious Poker," an introduction to the serious game) has a chapter on online poker. But I do believe online poker has a lot to offer, and the sites do offer poker for play money as well.)
> But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help
I recently heard a serious poker player on the radio explaining why it's worth bluffing sometimes.
If you don't bluff and lose sometimes, then when you _do_ have a good hand, you won't win much with it. You need your opponents to think "he could be just bluffing again, it's worth raising".
He was playing in high-stakes games though.
rant
I'm a big fan of fair use. I hate the DMCA. But behavior like this just makes me wonder. The free registration at the NYT is not that much of a pain. Sheesh. The newspaper world is being very cool, at least compared to the music and movie business. Let them make a few bucks on the ads so they can pay me.
Read Caro's Book of Tells for a good introduction to how to read people. You'll notice that some of the most powerfull tells give you information about how that player plays the game (tight, loose, passive, aggressive, etc.). A computer could get this information by keeping tabs on what its opponents do, and crunching the numbers. The only information it would lack is the tells people give off to inform you of what they are holding right now.
The edge you get from being able to read these "what do I hold right now" tells moderately well is a very slim one. It is an edge, and it will let you win money in games where you would otherwise lose. But knowing the odds, and reading what your opponents have based on the way they bet, and based on what hands you have seen them play in the past, are the fundamentals of the game. A good AI could master these fundamentals, and could probably challenge some of the better poker players in the world.
Note that I said the edge is slim if you can read these tells moderately well. Some of the people I see playing in the WSOP seem to be brilliant at it. I'm not qualified to talk about what kind of an edge it gives them, so I won't.
>he house, being a corporation, has an obligation to maximize its profits in any way possible
And when the last corporation uses the last gram of uranium to power the machine that sucks up the last drop of oil which they use to cut down the last tree on the planet to turn into paper money which they use to bribe the last honest politician, it will be a great comfort to us all that they are only doing it because capitalism obligates them to.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's about low stakes Texas Hold'em. As I'm preaching to people who don't follow links, I'll explain that in hold'em, your hand is drawn from the best five out of your two personal ("pocket") cards, plus five common ("board") cards that everyone can see and use. You can even just play the five common cards if they're better than that 8 in your pocket. You tend to get strong hands, but then again so does everyone else. Hold'em is generally played with big tables, so chances are that someone has a strong hand each round. You don't get extended rounds of raising, and there are no huge wins to be made. Coming out on top of a night of hold'em involves long term risk management, not a single guts-or-glory Hollywood dramatic climax.
As for bluffing, go ahead and try. There are only four rounds of betting on each hand. Experienced players will fold early, so you won't get much of their money anyway, and excitable noobs will tend to stick it out and call you out with their regular full houses and flushes, making it expensive for you to try to bluff. You'll quickly find yourself playing to your hand, not to the other players, and you won't (indeed, can't) get yourself into a steely eyes, car-keys-in-the-pot ego clash.
I wish, I wish, oh how I wish people wouldn't predicate their discussions based on what they've learned from Mel Gibson movies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.