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$100,000 Poker Bot Tournament
Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos."
Any poker player will tell you bluffing is where it's at. Without bluffing you play the odds and it just becomes a simple game of chance. The bluffing algorithms are were the interesting work will be.
Perhaps the winning program could be reconfigured to create business plans?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Clearly you don't understand Texas Hold-'em. There is no card counting required, beyond to 6 (two in your hand, 4 on the table). Any player who is so bad that he can't read the board isn't going to be a challenge to anybody decent.
Since decks are made out of 52 cards, and you get two of them, it gets very easily to calculate probabilities for a human (mostly involves multiplying by 2).
Finally, making the probabalistic move every time will not do as well, because if you do that you would absolutely never bluff. A bot to be good in the long run must bluff, otherwise it is far too predictable and you can gain too much information from its bets and raises.
To give a quick example: If there's 100$ in the pot, and the bot bets 10$, I need to believe I'll win 1/11 times in order to justify my call. If I know that the bot never bluffs and only bets there when he's best, I can fold every time and save 10$. If the bot bluffs 1/11 times though, I suddenly have an actually complicated decision. And note if I fold those complicated decisions every time I lose more money, because he is betting more hands and I am folding each time he bets.
So no, straight up probabilities simply won't cut it.
(For more information, see Sklansky's Theory of Poker.)
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.
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