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$100,000 Poker Bot Tournament
Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos."
Everyone knows that the house always wins in the end.
I for one welcome our new poker playing robot overlords...
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Any poker player will tell you bluffing is where it's at. Without bluffing you play the odds and it just becomes a simple game of chance. The bluffing algorithms are were the interesting work will be.
I'm going to submit a modded version of Eliza. It will win by confusing the other bots into submission! :) :P
A friend of mine at MIT already found a simple mathmatical algorithm for winning at Texus holdum in partypoker.com. I'm not sure if he's using it because I haven't talked to him in a long time, but apparently the people at the $10 tables suck enough that you can just play very conservatively without altering your style of play at all and win.
"Cause the bot always wins. You play long enough, never change the stakes, the bot takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the bot." - Danny Ocean
Microsoft Poker on Windows 3.1. Just make a huge bet and all the computers Fold :P
1. Let openents Place you their bets.
2. Place a stupidly huge bet.
3. They fold.
4. Profit!
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
The chess machine is Deep Blue. It was created by IBM (AKA Big Blue).
someone mod him -1 redundant, (read post 2)
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Is it still accepting entries?
Video Production Support
Well, clearly he's not much of an engineer either. Let your program simulate all possible situations, and figure out the best choices like that. You can determine the best strategies based on statistics, not conventional wisdom.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Whilst its not actually explicitly against most online poker sites terms and conditions, I forsee this contributing to the problem of bot users on poker sites. As it is at the moment they are considered a problem amongst the low level players. Suppose a really good AI is invented. Whilst we wont know we are playing against a bot it will be making 100% correct decisions without the user having to do anything. Leave a few of them running over night and some people are going to get absolutely fleeced... by artificial intelligence. I dont approve.
Chess takes skill and can be played many different ways.. Poker is just getting random cards and betting on them.. Two sets of AI will just be drawing random cards and betting set amounts over and over untill one loses..
I like muppets.
Perhaps the winning program could be reconfigured to create business plans?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Whenever my poker bot goes "all in", my mudd bot somehow gets the idea that it's time to start slaying all of the other players.
I think what is required here is clear and concise rules on what kind of weaponry the bots get to wield.
Also, I don't think bots should get to wear sunglasses.
...that in this tournament counting cards will be permitted?
Beep beep.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
mafia poker. what does the house get when there are two houses?
I can see the commentary now:
And program one, dubbed guido, pulls into the lead as program 4, dubbed vinnie, goes all in on a lousy full house.
Madden esque voice: I still say that somehow they have found a way to pull binary cards from their sleeve's.
Gruden esque voice: What they are doing is a standard bit swap in the packet back to the dealer server tricking it into thinking it didn't really know what it dealt to the player client in question. It's a rather common method of attack.
Since Professor Jonathan Schaeffer was quoted in this article and I'm a UofA alumni, I feel obligated to link to Schaeffer's Chinook checkers playing program. You can actually play a (somewhat limited) version online.
[/shameless promotion]
Who needs the whole Eliza program just throw "this statement is false" as a default response. Just ensure that your robot has a built in catch for this statement otherwise it will be cuaght up in this conundrum.
It's only a matter of time until this starts to become widespread in its use on these online poker places. For now, I think these places are ignoring it, since they get the fees for each game anyway.
I think however, that there is going to be a big backlash soon against sites that tacitly allow these sorts of players... I wonder how they are going to stop them?
Perhaps a webcam-based poker site would be the best strategy. This also allows more strategy, since the whole bluffing angle is in play.
What would a computer program do with $100,000? Build a cluster to run itself on?
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Don't let the posters who say "just enumerate all possibilities" fool you.
The hardest part of playing poker is "reading" your opponents' hands -- learning how they tend to play, and inferring what cards they are likely to hold, whether they are bluffing or slow-playing, etc.
It may be easy to read a poker bot's style of play, but reading good human players is extremely difficult. So even if a certain bot crushes the competition in this tournament, it may not do so well against humans.
I heard that no-limit is much harder for a computer than limit poker. A player must calculate percentages with limit poker, and bluffing is obviously limited, thereby reducing the "human intuition" aspect and increasing the simple number crunching aspect. If the AI poker tournament is no-limit it will make things very interesting.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Give me a break, compare poker vs chess is the most stupid thing I've ever heard.
Poker is all about probability, and peharps and little of everything else.
Chess, is all about thinking, and calculating in advance, chess is much more sophiticated game IMO.
In no way those 2 can be compared with each other.
As someone else pointed out, the main key to how successful bots will become in poker is the algorithms that conclude if a hand is "bet worthy". Obviously probability is easy for a bot to calculate; my high school students calculate card hand odds in my statistics class for homework. You can go even further by calculating rudimentary risk-reward odds to determine if the potential cash payoff for this current pot, combined with the probability you have for making your hand, combined with the probability the flop gives your opponents better hands than your own, etc.
The key, clearly, is the way your program "behaves" in response to opponent betting. You could code a program that only plays based on the probability of achieving a winning hand in a statistical sense. (IE, if my pocket has a 75% chance of becoming a hand that will beat 65% of all possible hands, then play it regardless) That wouldn't obviously play that well, since the bot won't consider opponent betting. However, if your bot regards opponent betting, it will easily become susceptible to power bluffing if the algorithm doesn't guard against it. (Hence, you have routines like poorly written cell phone games where you just have to come out of the blocks betting like mad and you'll 90% of the time bluff the bot out of the hand)
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more ingenious bots would be a medley of pure probability, observed opponent behavior (for trend matching with a fixed opponent), and a database of "real life" situations. If I were to design a bot for poker, and had the resources, I'd be sorely tempted to first host an online poker website and take a ton of samples from actual, online play. You have the advantage (right now, at least) of being able to record everyone's exact hands (at every stage of the hand) as well as everyone's betting. You could distill that into a form of database where you could try and match a bot's hand to a pre-existing condition case, and determine, along with your other ranking criteria, what a human player once did with that same hand, and whether that player won or not.
Londovir I could see bots taking over after awhile, but it's going to take some time...and even then, it should be entertaining to watch programmers trying to tweak their bot to beat another bot, sometimes without even knowing they are going up against another bot.
Londovir
"pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other" Wouldn't this be BORING though? You wouldn't get to watch the game, merely see the results of it afterwards. Part of poker is the emotions and the experience. This would just be algorithms and would execute uninterstingly fast.
Does anyone know how to enter this contest? Is registration closed yet? Do they have a website? It all sounds very interesting, but the article itself provides no helpful links :-/
"someone mod him -1 redundant, (read post 2)"
Read post 2? Try reading any other Slashdot article. It was redundant years ago. They're taking over Slashdot! "I, for one, welcome our overused-as-an-SNL-skit overlords."
"Derp de derp."
One approach to this is to assume that the other players are markov processes with unknown internal states (sorry for the PDF) . Gathering enough data (and probing the opponents with various betting strategies) helps estimate the internal patterns of the opponents. Humans are terrible at creating random patterns needed for perfect playing strategies. This approach can be used, for example, to create a hard-to-beat paper-rock-scissors game that quickly found the non-random patterns in human players.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I did a little bit of work recently at UofA with the poker group.
p ublications.html
Poker is a hard problem. The game tree is huge for even heads up limit (~ 10^18 leaf nodes). Ring games (3-10 players) are intractable via any game theoretic methods. The only feasible possibilities are searching parts of the game tree through intelligent sampling methods, and perhaps abstracting the game down a bit.
Work has focused on both solving abstracted versions of the game and exploiting opponent weaknesses. A publication concerning most recent methods involving bayesian best response will be available soon at the following link:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~finnegan/publications/
Just in case any one was wondering, calculating your raw chances of winning, dubbed "7 card roll out strength" is no problem at all once you harness the versatility of the gnu poker-eval library located on sourceforge.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
There's been a lot of postings about this tournament being bunk due to a lot of misconceptions about the game of poker. As a successful poker player of quite a few years and also a geek, I do believe I have an informed opinion here when I say that A) poker is profitable B) poker bots can and have been created C) the effort to code a high level poker bot is incredibly, incredibly difficult.
A team at the University of Alberta has been working on with a poker research group that has been researching and coding poker bots for years. One look at their page should tell you that there is definitely some high level thinking and analysis required to develop a poker bot. More importantly, is that fact that they *have* delivered a bot called Poki Poker that has an impressive record at beating human opponents in 1 vs 1 heads-up matches. Brian Alspach, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Simon Fraser University has also contributed numerous publications to the field, giving credence to the fact that there is a genuine science behind creating an AI that can play good poker.
So, before anyone else spouts off about poker being a game of chance or poker bots being mindless hundred line pieces of code, please do your research. A lot of people have worked very hard on this subject to simply have it dismissed as beneath them. Just ask yourself this: If you could create a poker bot so easily, one that could generate at the very least, a poker bot that made $2/hr playing the low limit games, what would stop you from launching thousands of these bots upon the online world? Because unlike a human, you can replicate a bot innumerable times, which in this case would be the equivalent of finding the goose that lays golden eggs. If you understand this, you may begin to understand why there is so much interest in the creation of poker bots..
I wonder if this will encourage programmers to actually intentionally obfuscate their code.
Case in point, one thing that some people think is worth doing in the first few rounds of poker is to intentionally lose or call as many hands as you can, just to determine your opponents' betting methods and/or tells. Could something similar be done with programs? For instance, measuring the number of clock ticks that an opponent takes to analyze a given hand. If identical flops show up in subsequent rounds, and identical intervals lead to identical bets, is it possible that you've figured out how your opponent likes to bet? Furthermore, would it be worthwhile to throw in an empty do() while loop of random length in order to throw off such attempts? But how about betting patterns themselves?
This is one thing I've always thought was missing in creating AI. It's not so much about coming up with "perfect" AI because so long as it follows a set pattern, it'll never be perfect. If it's consistent, either you'll figure out how to beat it, or you'll give up in frustration because you know you can never beat it. But create multiple different AIs that follow basic tactics, and then mix them up, there's the challenge.
The Tournament will begin at 9:00 AM, and the grand prize will be presented at 9:03 AM.
Bots can be surprisingly good at poker.
You are busted, Mr Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to augument an artificial intelligence
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Sheesh. What did we learn in CS now, kids? The total number of possible situations is static. So, a brute-force calculation of all possiblities has a constant running time. This is fabulous! Computer Scientists kill for running times like this! Who cares if the constant is huge! Heck, it's faster than a binary search in a perfectly balanced binary tree... Assuming the tree is really, really big. :P
The point of bluffing is to convince the other players that you ARE bluffing when you've actually got a good hand. Then you can milk them for all they've got. If you're bluffing a low hand, you should be prepared to lose. In fact, you should be expecting it.
There's a 'rule' in texas hold'em: If the other players are playing loose, you play tight. If the other players are playing tight, you find another table. Some games really can't be bluffed.
And I want to clear this up: an indivual game is still a game of chance. A bunch of games in aggregate have some theory to use.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Just force them to play really slow, and then have all those celebrities playing poker on TV act as faces for the bots. The programs would get to be associated with famous faces, and the famous faces would get to actually be good at poker.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that watching humans play poker is somehow not boring.
My cheating unit malfunctioned! You gotta give me a do-over!
Sorry, the house limit is three do-overs.
This is going to be the best prom ever.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The key here is to begin playing with a false-bluff, so that the algorithm thinks that it is playing against a player with less than perfect strategy. Then, you change your game and exploit the bot while it still thinks you're not very skilled. I'd love to see the code that could pickup on that, it would be very impressive.
This works in real poker-rooms too, a "false tell" is implemented by many Vegas locals in order to beat the tourists out of thier money.
Make sure that you include the 'climb stair' extension, or else you can evade it by just going upstairs...
Dalek sez: "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"
My father is a blogger.
Here's a list of the things that a poker playing robot needs to know:
1. When to hold 'em
2. When to fold 'em
3. When to walk away
4. When to run
5. Never count your money: When you're sitting at the table, there'll be time enough for counting, when the dealings done.
Case in point, one thing that some people think is worth doing in the first few rounds of poker is to intentionally lose or call as many hands as you can, just to determine your opponents' betting methods and/or tells. Could something similar be done with programs?
This is +Insightful, wish I had mod points.
-kgj
-kgj
1. Write a business-plan creating program.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Unlike other business plans, the hardest step here is step 1, not step 2. Random thought: could such a program be used to write itself? :-)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
This is a fake story. The LA Times, and Slashdot have been duped. I scrounged goldenpalace and searched google and could find nothing about this bot tournament. If I could, I would sign up for it. Does anyone have proof this is true?
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
http://www.pokercoaching.com/primatepoker/
If not, they don't deserve the prize!
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
For an interesting sci-fi take on AI, robots, and poker playing machines, read ME by Thomas T. Thomas. Possibly out of print...
In no limit Texas holdem, the form of poker played in most tournaments, a solid pre-flop all-in or fold strategy is almost unexploitable. That is, based on my first two cards and some other factors, I decide to bet all my chips right then, or fold. If the system is sound enough, I could announce exactly what I was doing and still no one could gain a significant advantage over me.
k ys-allin-strategy-revised-1701.htm
Of course a skilled player won't play like that; skilled players seek out and exploit their opponents' mistakes instead of playing an unexploitable strategy. In fact, because of these all-in strategies, many people want the World Series of Poker to be decided over a pot-limit game.
David Sklansky, probably the best poker strategy writer out there, has developed exactly such a system: http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/forum/skalans
The neat thing is that it'd be quite easy to program a computer to play this strategy.
Hey,
... yadda yadda yadda.
1) Is there some age 21 limit on this?
2) Where/how can I enter my bot?
There seems to be little actual information on where to submit, what langauges are accepted,
Their AS division developed a very sophisticated poker playing bot which can be found on their website:
CARL poker bot
What would a computer do with a lifetime supply of chocolate.
Just assume the other players are doing the same thing. Then betting becomes all-or-none.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
requires that you completely trust the software that is electronically "shuffling" the cards not to cheat. Why would any sensible person make that assumption?
The thing about this is, I don't see where a bot that might do well against a set of humans would do at all well against other bots. Building a database of "good' human behaviour would be interesting but since other bots would not behave in that way I don't think it would really win. In fact the stupider bots, being incapible of being bluffed because they simply would fail to understand the concept, would possibly do better than some quite sophisticated bots.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most of the posters are missing the whole essence of poker. Poker is a non-cooperative multiway game of incomplete information. The whole point of the game is to create a mixing strategy(which bluffing is a part of) that gives you positive expectation over your opponents mixing strategy. A good mixing stratgey leaks little information about your hand, while at the same time adapts to exploit information leakage from your opponents. There is a question of whether there exists an optimal strategy for multiway poker(there is one for headsup), where your strategy needs not adapt to your opponents and any deviation by your opponent from the optimal strategy creates negative EV. I conject there isn't since it seems intuitively there is a different equilibrium for tight, passive game compare with loose aggressive games. Or in other words, a group of 3 players or more themselves can move the equilibrium point.
Blah Blah Tacos
Most of those posts above make the assumption that the bots will act solely on the odds of the cards. This is an unfair assumption.
Internally, odds are the only thing the bot can play. Fuzzy logic is how the bots would be implemented. But you'd need to assume the bots would maintain a history of each player's moves in particular situations, try to analyze patterns, identify loose/tight players, etc. etc.
I've heard tales of bots that play online casinos that maintain databases of all the other player accounts with stats on how they play. If PokerHottie6969 often goes all in regardless of her cards when she is near busting, you better believe that a good bot should recognize and take advantage of that.
http://brandonbloom.name
n/t
I've been working on a poker game just like this. A friend said the world didn't need another poker game, but now I'm not so sure. The problem is, I don't see anything in the article that says how to enter my program in the contest.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
Regrettably so much of the commentary here merely constitutes more all too typical blinkered nerdish nonsense. Take a rigidly codified closed-world game, remove everything which makes it remotely interesting, reduce and abstract it until the very point of the game goes missing, then build a program which implements that and claim another victory for technology.
I'll be impressed when the poker bots bring their own money.
Just like in real poker, you could enter several programs that collude with secret signalling. Other bots wouldnt stand a chance.
I still think that core wars is where computer programs should be duking it out.
32K of memory
2 programs start
1 program finishes
=)
is reduce it to odds. And completely leave the element of chance there. Chess, you can determine, authoritatively, the best move. In poker, you're not just playing against other people/computers, you're also playing a relatively randomised deck.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
"The point of bluffing is to convince the other players that you ARE bluffing when you've actually got a good hand. Then you can milk them for all they've got. If you're bluffing a low hand, you should be prepared to lose. In fact, you should be expecting it."
This is a ridiculous statement. You *might* be able to apply it to limit hold 'em, but certainly not no-limit games. The point of bluffing is to not only make it more difficult for your opponents to put you on a hand, but also (and more importantly, IMHO) to allow you to win pots when you do not have the best hand at the table. This is important in limit hold 'em and critical in no limit. If you think the point of bluffing is just to make you harder to read, I'd love to sit down with you at a table.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
That makes a lot more sense. In Omaha, you get four cards instead of two, and you have to use two cards from your set of four to make your final hand--whereas you can use all 5 from the table on Hold'Em.
Because of these differences, it's very easier and more frequent to find yourself in a position where you know you have "the nuts", the best possible hand, in an Omaha game. Whereas human players often miss some improbable hand (like thinking they're going to win because they have an ace-high flush, where a straight flush is possible) that's actually fairly likely in an Omaha game. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that a bot that just waited until it had the nuts and bet like crazy then could wipe some of the idiots that play on-line.
THE NATION
POKER-FACED
The opponent in the online card game might be a computer. 'Bots' are beatable because they miss human nuances, but they're learning.
By Joseph Menn
Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2005
Of the millions of gamblers who have rushed to play Texas Hold 'Em and other fast-growing poker games online, Roger Gabriel isn't the most intimidating.
The 30-year-old Newport Beach engineer started playing for money only a month ago. He lurks online at the tables for the chicken-hearted; even there, where the biggest ante is 4 cents, he can't win consistently.
But Gabriel has a potentially powerful alter ego. In his spare time, he's perfecting a computer program to go online and play the game for him.
His BlackShark software is still a work in progress, but Gabriel has no doubt that such programs eventually will be championship quality. "In the future," he said, "robots are going to take over."
Gabriel is one of an increasing number of computer professionals who design poker robots, or "bots," that pose as human gamblers but can play endlessly without tiring or losing concentration -- for real money.
Though not yet good enough to beat skilled humans consistently, these programs are seen as a threat by online casinos -- all based outside the U.S. and out of the reach of American laws -- and the gamblers who spend billions of dollars chasing big pots.
"There are already lots of robots playing online, and that's definitely unethical. They should identify themselves," said Paul Magriel, a veteran professional poker player.
The march of the machines will be celebrated in Las Vegas next month with the world's first money tournament for robots -- and the $100,000 prize is drawing a handful of coders out of anonymity.
The emerging technology does more than raise the stakes for real people and online casinos. It also raises fundamental questions about how far computers have come in mimicking and improving on human behavior, and about how far they can go in the future.
Computer programs have conquered checkers, chess and, most recently, backgammon. By rapidly evaluating plays more moves ahead than a person can, computers routinely beat the strongest human players in those games.
This was demonstrated most dramatically in the classic 1997 match between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, a 1.4-ton supercomputer built by IBM. The machine's victory marked Kasparov's first professional loss, and many took it as a depressing event for mankind. Even Gabriel, then studying artificial intelligence at UC Irvine, had been rooting for Kasparov.
Backgammon programs, which had to adapt to the random element of dice, grew so good by the late 1990s that they changed strategic wisdom built up over 2,000 years, influencing how the best humans play the game.
But poker -- popularized recently by televised tournaments for pros and celebrity amateurs -- is a far more human game, one in which psychology matters as much as probability.
That's why in poker there's no such thing as an absolutely correct play, except in retrospect. If someone, or something, bets heavily with a lousy hand and everyone else folds, that was the right bet.
This makes poker bot design fascinating to academics like Jonathan Schaeffer, a computing science professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who for 14 years has headed a project to build poker programs.
Schaeffer said cards were more likely than chess to produce computing approaches useful in the real world because poker players must deal with incomplete information. But before such research can contribute dramatically to solving real-world problems, Schaeffer said, it has to solve the challenge of poker -- and that's several years away.
For now, only the poker players with the poorest skills -- people like Gabriel, for instance -- have much to fear.
Typically, a user signs on to an online game site manually, launches the poker bot and le
...welcome our new quine business overlords.
Duh. Use it as stake money and enter poker tournaments.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Bluffing is something that comes naturally to humans, but is very hard to program an effective bluff in AI. The reason being that patterns of behavior are easy to recognize in computers.
I think the most effective pokerbot may just be one that is poorly written. Like many have posted, following probability guidelines will not win the tournament. I'm wondering what the most effective way of bluffing a bot would be. Probably by displaying an easy to follow pattern for a series of rounds and then hammering away when the odds look to be in my favor. Even then, when playing bots, you have to imagine that several will be calling your final bet when most humans would shy away.
My best day of poker ever was winning 12 hands in a row. I just kept throwing out the max bet without looking at my cards because I was too busy stacking my chips from the previous win. When people were bold enough to call, I happened to have a lucky hand and won anyways. 8 of those hands were won because everybody folded though. You can't program that kind of ludicrousity.
My one and half cents.
I think any discussion of decent bot design has to begin with a decision of whom it's playing and for what duration.
First let's assume... the bot has no capability of deriving tells beyond the cards and delay of play. (i.e. analysis of players through thermal, visual, audio or other methods). Also let's assume bankrolling is also not an issue (since it often determines betting strategy).
Next who is the opponent?
A bot designed to win against world class players (with known playing styles that can be analyzed prior to play.) in a single poker tournament will work much differently then one set up to suck dry 10000 unknown poor players... or 1000 intermediate players playing online.
Players have what we might call a "style"... but really what it is in logical terms.... every human player has a unique range of algorithms they play by (or else they are just playing randomly and thus we can assume in the long term ineffectively)
The "Here is my wallet" type play emotionally and will lose in the long term based on the fact that no matter what style they play... they tend to be predictable. Many could make a solid living off these players (as long as you've identified them correctly) and as long as you're patient and follow straight mathematics. They tend to bet way too much or too little.
The "I can hold my own" players are tricker since they can change "styles/algorythms". They will pay attention to you. They will understand the odds somewhat. They'll notice you're playing tight and adjust play. These players don't really make money (except against the "I can't pay my mortgage this month" players) They tend to simply rotate the money around the table and ultimately lose since the house sucks them dry. I would guess (I can't say for sure.. as I'm probably one of these types... but asking a professional player will solve these types)
The last category I would call the 40bucks/h players. These are actually the guys playing on TV for millions but really all they can do is just play slightly better than the intermediate players. (The figure is not arbitrary... this is coming from Daniel Negreanu)
I can't say how effective their game would be against players with no tells, but I would guess these players are like computers. They are constantly adjusting and have a big database in their head of previous games, styles and players. The advantage you might get with these "world class" players... is that you can create an even better long term database of all their previous matches. I'm not sure how you would beat them but I'm sure it could be done if the db is well populated with moves from other matches. However there is a caveat. Even were it allowed...I'm not sure if it is really "winning" since defacto the bot is cheating. (i.e. a player would not be allowed to sit down in a casino with access to a db) Kasparov's main beef with Big Blue was exactly that.
I suppose you can create a program that can beat all three type of players. The success of the program would probably depend on how quickly it determined the player category and we must assume that the designer is "telling" it in advance
If the bot is designed to win once in a high stakes publicity stunt tournament... I suspect the play would be much different then one designed suck the life blood from thousands of Poker "Stars" on the net.
If the bot ultimately is designed for mass consumtion on the net, we can assume it will ultimately undermine betting since players will stop gambling if they are always losing. This will undermine the online casinos. It makes far more economic sense for them to keep the players winning equally then biasing the play.
I image what will end up happening is you'll have a bunch of bots competing against a bunch of other bots like some existing automated stock exchanges. I would be surprised if some people weren't already doing this manually with high end off the shelf poker programs already.
Congratulations, you fucked it up again. Better luck next time cockgobbler.
That's right. Most people think that bluffing, slow playing etc. are beyond mathematics, but actually they're part of the strategy of games of incomplete information. In order to play any game where you can profit by your opponent's misreading of your hand, you have to bluff and slow-play (act as if your hand is worse than it is) some percentage of the time otherwise your actions give away too much information. Any good strategy for Poker doesn't specify that you should have a given action in a given situation, but rather specifies that in a given situation you should have a given probability distribution of actions so as to maximize the trade off between taking advantage of probabilities and the advantage of not being readable. Beyond this there are two kinds of strategies: 1. Strategies that involve trying to figure out your opponent's method of play (ie. guess the algorithm) and take advantage of it's weaknesses. This is called a maximal strategy. Obvious finding a maximal strategy is a very very hard problem. 2. Finding best strategy that doesn't depend on your opponent's strategy. This is called an "optimal" strategy. It has the following properties: a) It's an equilibrium in that there is no strategy that beats it on average. b) It's the best strategy that you can use while still telling your opponent exactly what your own strategy is. c) As I said in the intro it's the best strategy that doesn't take the opponent's strategy into account. Note that Chess programs and the like try to find optimal strategies not maximal strategies - which I think makes them a bit boring. A good chess player can take advantage of my weaknesses as a chess player and humiliate me much faster and more completely than a chess program that assumes that I may make a brilliant move at any second, despite all past experience! Anyway there are programs out there that find optimal strategies for games like poker. Texas hold um is a bit large a game to analyze that way but no doubt there will be programs that find optimal strategies for hold em or at least almost optimal ones. But opponent modeling and maximal strategies are more interesting... Beyond that there's a whole level to table stakes poker (is that what it's called?) that makes it hard to analyze. The fact that the range of bets you can make is so large is hard to analyze... Also I think the math that's been used breaks down for more than two players at a table. Beyond that there's analysis of the flow of money around the table over multiple hands. For instance it's better to lose to a loose player than to a tight player because you're more likely to get your money back from a loose player (this may not matter for tournament rules where you play till only one contestant is left).
Does a Smith&Weson beat a royal straight flush?
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A perfect strategy should be zero-sum game.
Making the bet, the bot should make a probabilistic bet around the "value" of the cards. He can bet much higher (bluff) or lower (hoping someone else will bluff) than their real value. Likewise, when calling/raising a bet, a bet is considered the result of many possible sets of cards.
To make an example:
Two pairs ->
$5 5%
$10 25%
$15 50%
$20 15%
$25 5%
On the opposing side, $15 ->
Nothing 5%
One pair 20%
Two pair 50%
Three equal 20%
Straight 5%
He will bluff exactly so often as is optimal. Likewise, he will call a bluff exactly so often as is optimal.
As an opponent:
call more often -> too many non-bluffs
call less often -> gets away with too many bluffs
bluff more often -> called too much
bluff too little -> fold too many hands
Obviously, it is quite a bit more complex than that (bet given the cards, call/raise given multiple other bets) but that is the basic idea.
Of course, this only finds the optimal strategy - i.e. one that will not lose. It is quite another thing to find a strategy to exploit opponents' sub-optimal strategy. One-on-one, it can't be beat. In a tournament (unless you play "to the bitter end" with only one bot standing, where the last round should be one-on-one) other strategies might be better for exploiting other bots and getting the most cash.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's a version of the Poki bot that can be played online, at www.pokibot.com. Haven't tried it myself, but from what I've heard, it plays well on low-money tables.
You want to prey on the bad players - the ones that wouldn't in a million years recognise someone playing with mechanical precision, and that have all sorts of bad idiosyncracies in their play that can be picked up automatically.
And you want to lose every now and again to draw people in. Even intentionally, against players the bot "knows" reacts well (i.e. bets more, gets careless) by winning the occasional large pot.
Bots playing humans is as much (or more) about psychology and past history of the players as it is about odds.
http://www.wsopr.com
They have apparently hand-picked chosen six "of the finest" computer scientists in the world to compete. I know there have been a few people posting in this article asking how to enter. Well there you have it. You can't. I hope you are as upset as I am.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I don't think you understand. Of course us programers would like to see our creations battle live opponents outside of sample testing, but if they work and make us tons of money, I think I'd be happy enough =p
If you are writing programs, you can raise you odds against the house by betting when there is a probability of a shortage of low cards, because the house has rules of when they are allowed to fold.
This is called card couting, easy enough for someone who trains hard at it, erm, very simple for computers!
Poker: Having watched TV poker whilst stranded with my family one christmas, I realise that you have 3 areas you can take advantage of:
Knowing what is on the turn, and what cards you have and knowing what cards have gone, you may realise that noone could beat you in certain hands (if the cards have passed)
Mapping someones betting habits isn't a good idea, because this would leave a weakness in a system that could be exploited.
Simply bet to probability. Down to the button. (the other machine would know the same probabilities as you,and understand from your value bet how much you had, unless you did put a bluff in there)
Sometimes an inital bet is more to see what cards the others have than to give away any indication of what cards you have.
A weak bet on a strong raise for a good player means he has a good hand, and wants to bite you, or he is going to bluff, and wants to lure you into thinking he has a good hand, OR (etc).
Poker is cool.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
In the sense that the house profits because the edge favors them, not at all true. That's the beauty of poker; you're pitting yourself against the other players, not the house.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
You need to tip your dealer, people. Not every time you drag a pot, necessarily, but if
-the pot was particularly big, or
-you won it by luck and are in a good mood
The dealer gets no part of the rake, but a wage. A kinda pitiful wage if you consider the training and experience a good dealer requires, and the kind of shit they have to put up with sometimes.
Tip. No, it does nothing to increase your chances, but neither does tipping a waiter
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The risk/reward ratio just isn't there.
Additionally, programs like Poker Tracker are contributing to analyses of hands from all the major sites. We're talking about millions of hands analyzed. If there was a significant probability shift away from the expected results, someone would see it and cry foul.
And that simply hasn't happened. It's not in a poker site's interests to muck with the RNG or to encourage bots or collusion, either by tacitly approving or not actively hunting them.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I agree it'd be not-hard to code a bot that made 1BB/100 by playing tight. But unless you sit this thing down at 50/100 or higher you're not making much money from it. You'd need a small army of such bots, and as parent says this would be hard to hide. The alternative would be a bot that could make 5+ BB/100 at, say 5/10 and 10/20 tables .. I suspect this would be a very advanced machine. But it is theoretically possible.
Remember that one reason Big Blue beat Kasparov is that the human's previous games were all available for analysis by the computer. It had been *programmed to *beat *Kasparov.
A computer making serious cash against an ever-changing field of unknown quantities in a casino would require actual intelligence. The strategic environment is MUCH more dynamic in poker.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
...and not one mention of the japanese.
I call bluff, can't be true.
About the closest thing to a bot I've seen so far is Texas Calculatem. It doesn't play for you...well, it reads the cards at the table you are playing and tells you the odds of the hand you have. It suggests what to do I guess. Here http://www.calculatem.com/
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
Every game of poker, whether played in real life or on computer, is played with a standard 52-card deck
I agree the original poster doesn't know what he is talking about. You however are wrong here. Many of the games which became popular in the 1980s (like draw, pai-gow, lowball) use a 53 card deck (joker which has wild capability). Games in the Stud family (holdem and omaha included) use a 52 card deck and since most games that are popular today evolved from stud....
Alternately Mexican poker (which is spread heavily in California) is played with 4 decks.
Thus, the only "catch" here is that by creating a successful poker bot that can play as well as a solid human, it may very well upheave the online poker industry as a whole. After all, if you could spawn near unlimited instances of an application that could pull in a meager $2/hr playing the $0.50/$1 low limit tables, that still means an insane amount of money. Whether or not it's legal.. that's another issue
.5/1 24/7, and they grossed roughly $1200/week. About 18 months ago, my bot income took a huge hit as the number of pokerbots began to skyrocket. The sheer number and better AI of the newer bots have left me unable to compete.
Too late.
I started doing exactly this four years ago. I ran 4 clients at
It was fun while it lasted and got me the down payment on my house, but I wouldn't recommend trying to jump into the game at this point unless you have something really special.
If you really want to give it a go, you'll need about $3-5K to get started with one client. Find a good offshore hosting site, and expect to lose a chunk of money in testing and tweaking. There are a ton of stupid little gotchas that can't be hammered out offline.
The "trick" isn't computing the probabilities.
That's step one of the decision algorithm; compute the raw probabilities.
Step two is to look at the actions of all the other players at the table, and compare to previous actions, and determine the probability based on that (and the cards showing) of them having a better hand.
That's something that's REAL hard for a computer to do. There's a ton of fuzzy logic and unknowns, especially considering that mucking is legal.
You *could* go about it by analyzing all the possible hands, comparing their betting strategy to each, and determining the likelihood of each hand being part of the betting strategy. On a fold, analyze the behaviours of all the raisers and determine the liklihood of each bluffing, creating probability spreads for all possible hands, and assume that the folder believes he was beat by the most likely probaiblity from at least one player (the one with the best hand) and assign a probability spread to that player based on that assumption.
As you can see it quickly gets complicated. I think a "default" neural network with online trainer would be simpler to code and just as effective (given how unpredictable the problem is anyways)
When a new player logs in, use previous training data from aggregate play styles and start training every hand (the training algorithm is simple; a "win" is a positive... a "lose" is a negative) Organize it into subnetworks... then feed the outputs of those nodes into a decision network (which is the same for all players)... ideally the end result is that (with enough time and information) each individual player's network is able to reverse engineer their hand from their actions (of course this is impossible in RL but a good goal)... but even a close guess should be enough to tip the scales for an otherwise perfect statistical strategy...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I don't understand why the fuzziness of bluffing is such a challenge? It seems the computer just needs to: 1) be able to determine the odds based on the cards on the table. 2) have some ability to look at the other player's play style to identify patterns. 3) Use the patterns from 2, along with 1 and a look at the bids, to move the odds a little bit in each direction, thereby giving a fuzzy view of the odds encompasing the cards, the bids, and the playstyles. 4) add some randomness to the computer's bids to keep other players from being able to read the computer's hand based on its own bid. Why is this so hard? The patterns do not seem as compicated as chess or the game of go. Clearly poker is a phychological game to humans, with a lot of emotions involved. But to a computer, the bidding should be reducable to another signal, to be processed based on probability and past experience. In fact, against a very very good player, it might be best to simply go back to the odds + some randomness and ignore the bids. Cause the bid of a very good player is just not going to offer a lot of information? To quote one of my favorite films: It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear... and it absolutely will not stop. Ever.
But my guess is you need bigger weaponry to beat a royal straight flush.
The LA Times article was lacking in detailed information. Does anyone have any more information on this tournament? I googled and found nothing.
Thanks
AC
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how he described it. He even used the words "the nuts". Poker terminology is weird...
The mods are decidingly undecided this time around. It's insightful, troll, underrated or overrated. C'mon, folks? Be consistent! :P
That this is going to be one hell of a boring spectator sport. I mean, have you ever tried to watch the poker championship on ESPN? That's bad enough. But having to watch a bunch of programs compete against each other, that has potential to be severely, severely boring. Looks like a perfect candidate for ESPN 8 daytime, I guess.
How long before the online casinos employ their own bots to win money back? Not only does it create the appearence that the casino is popular (lots of users) but if the bots are profitable then the casio could make a lot of money.
Whether this is illegal or not is the question, along with the ethics doing it.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Chess program was named Deep Blue. Big Blue is IBM.
There are at least 3 angles at work here, which require 3 different strategies (solutions): probablities (relatively easy); interactive competition (Multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma); bluffing (neural networks to deal with random -- or deliberate -- variations in other players' deviations from TitForTat). Each of these respectively requires a meta-level 'awareness' relative to the previous angle.
I daresay that solving this *overall* problem would require good (but not necessarily optimal) solutions to each of these 3 separate angles. So... who is going to host the First Slashdot Pokerbot Competition?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
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I'm not convinced that a poker bot could consistantly beat a professional, or even a compete amateur for that matter.
Unlike chess poker has a huge human element which computers would find hard to simulate.
http://www.morepoker.net/