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Artificial Intelligence in Poker

Posted by michael on from the deep-blue-calls-your-bluff dept.

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."

8 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Poker AI? riight... by KDan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem
    1. Re:Poker AI? riight... by AssFace · · Score: 5, Interesting

      reading the article is too much I see.

      it references that and points out how much of "reading the player" is overhyped and easily faked out.

      whereas the real information is in the trade at hand - the exchange of money. watching the bets and the amounts in them at varying spots in the game.

      I have a few friends that have won online tournaments and they approach it from a very mathematical point of view. They do very well in person or over the net.
      Using the "read" approach, unless the read is of the play on the table, is only going to work with people that aren't aware of the read and therefore not faking the attributes.

      I personally prefer to look for the security holes in the online software :)
      (There was a famous one in '96 or so where the system was using the random function built in - I think in Turbo Pascal IIRC - they had it exposed by posting their random code on the net to prove that they were being fair. A consulting firm then exploited that to show that they only needed to see one or two cards beyond what was in their card to then show what everyone else in the game was holding... there is much higher security in it all these days, and better/smarter programming).

      Another firend in college found a site that had a hole, not in the security, but in the method at which they gave out tokens - as long as you kept playing, there was a reward of some number of tokens as an incentive to keep you playing.
      He then ran some numbers and proved that with that, they were open to an exploit of the Martingale system. He ran it on them for a good amount of time and it failed - he basically proved that their code was cheating on the inside.
      He called them on it and after a few heated e-mails, got all his money back and was banned from the site.
      I could go on and on - but that is going off topic.

      --

      There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
    2. Re:Poker AI? riight... by wmajik · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not a personal attack, but I'm assuming you are not a poker player.

      At heart, poker is a human game where your ability in the mental martial arts dictate your ability to succeed. That being said however, this purity usually only shows at the highest levels of poker, heads-up (1v1) no limit poker; as showcased in the World Series of Poker (WSOP).

      In the average poker game at the local casino or with your buddies on Thursday night, the 'mental game' usually falls along the wayside along with the beer bottles. A main caveat of playing perfect poker is to play as if you could see what everyone else at the table is holding. The better you are able to put a man to his hand (figure out what his/her cards are) the better your play becomes, theoretically speaking. I say theoretically because like it says in the article: "Game-theory models usually assume that every player uses the best possible strategy, something that rarely if ever happens with humans."

      Many times, you can have a table filled with players who have no idea what they are doing and betting blindly with an ace high. In this scenario, against a good player holding ace high, you would know to re-raise him even if you were holding garbage, as ace high is not a strong enough hand to call with. Against a weak player, they may even re-raise you back not realizing that they are making a terrible play according to game theory, BUT, a play that happens to actually work in reality. Only in poker can you tell someone that the only reason they won was because they played terrible :)

      Anyhow, my example was meant to illustrate that in poker, sometimes you play the person and other times you play for the best hand. Being able to do both and knowing when to mix it up is what separates a true professional from the average player.

      Then again, talking is very theoretical too for that matter. But then you have to realize there are many people who make a profit playing online (myself included), so don't take my word for it, look at my stack of chips :grin:.

      If anyone is interested, I play at Party Poker.

      Good place for beginners and they'll add $25 to your account if you sign up with the code MAGIC.

    3. Re:Poker AI? riight... by gehrehmee · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Think that's frightening?

      Check out this article on the Second International Roshambo (Rock Paper Scissors) Programming Contest. It's actually quite interesting to understand some of the justifications and rationalles that go into attemping to win at a normally un-winnable game:

      Game theorists have analysed rock-paper-scissors and come to the conclusion that the optimal way to win a game of rock-paper-scissors is to play completely randomly; random play will win as many throws as it loses and hence draw every match. However, consider trying to win a tournament by drawing every match!

      Therefore, when trying to win a rock-paper-scissors tournament, you should assume that players will be trying to win the whole event and hence will not be playing optimally. Therefore you shouldn't play optimally - instead, you should figure out how to play in order to beat your opponent.

      --
      "You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
  2. Gem by mao+che+minh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I was following various links about the topic (artificial intelligence and poker) when I found this little gem. Wicked awesome site design, so I can only assume that his software building skills are as magnificent: POKER WITH AI-LEARNING

    I say we help him beta test not only his program, but also help him stress-test his web server.

  3. Re:Tell me... by Gorm+the+DBA · · Score: 3, Interesting
    RTFA...One of the things covered is that bluffing and reading tells, although effective at taking the occasional hand and a marginally winning strategy, is not as effective as it is given credit in the Poker Community. A better long term strategy is just playing strong hole card positions (especially in Hold-em, where 5/7 of the ending hand is the same between all players.)

    Now, they also say the machine has to be able to bluff, but the trick was to get it to do it the right amount, and at the right time postionally. Reading the opponent isn't as important as seeing the right situation in the cards.

  4. Re:Tell me... by rkent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You RTFA:

    Peter Muller, a friend of Mr. Rao's who has played against the same bot, said the approximations in the game-theory model left a weakness and limited the bot's chances to do more than break even. Game-theory models usually assume that every player uses the best possible strategy, something that rarely if ever happens with humans.

    "An optimal game theoretic strategy might ensure that you don't lose, but it won't be effective at exploiting an opponent's weaknesses," Mr. Muller said. "The best players learn how to exploit predictability, but don't do it often enough so that the opponents catch on."

    In other words, it's easy to bluff a computer; you just play strongly and it'll assume you have a good hand and probably fold to you. Unless it's got a good hand, in which case you're screwed. Or if it has adoptive modelling that remembers how often you bluff, then you're REALLY screwed. Generally, though, it sounds like the Alberta AI just plays tightly, using "classes" of hands to avoid getting confused by the billions of possible hands, which does limit losses, but doesn't generally win big.

  5. For non-robots, a simplified poker method by RobertB-DC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have never been any good at poker... in high school, playing nickel-ante poker, I lost about $25 to just one of my friends. Typically, after about 15 minutes of play, everyone was playing with "my" money.

    But recently, I spent some quality time with a hand-held poker game, and played the "hundreds or thousands" of games as described in the article. Not enough to become an expert, but I did come up with a technique to make my 100 credits last longer.

    I hacked away as much complexity as I could. The heart of my method is to forget about the effect of getting two cards you need. The chances of getting two specific cards is something like 1/52 * 1/52 = 1/2704 -- too small to care about. So the entire method is about the next card.

    Of course, I put it online: How To Lose Less At Video Poker. At the risk of slashdotting my own server, I'm curious if anyone can find any obvious flaws in the method.

    I found this Java-based tutorial that purports to generate the "optimum payout" -- it often disagrees with me, presumably because it's trying for big payouts. My method doesn't promise profit, only smaller losses.

    An important disclaimer: I've never used my method with any non-trivial amount of actual cash. Here in Texas, there are video poker machines in every Quickie Mart, but I just don't see the appeal. Now, if they would put in a Pac-Man machine...

    --
    Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.