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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."
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.
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.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Have you ever played poker?
Have you ever watched poker on TV? Did you notice that the same few people seem to be at the final table a disproportional percentage of the time. It's because although the cards themselves are random, the game is not. Every bet and every action is a subtle piece of a conversation about your perceived strength of your own hand versus your perceived strengths of your opponents.
There's a lot of skill. It's not simply high card wins. The really good poker players willoften win without the best hands, because they know when their opponents are weak and will be willing to give up on a pot.
So, yeah, a poker bot could replicate this.
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Granted, bluffing is definitely a good thing. That's why a really good poker bot absolutely must bluff. I presume these bots use game theoretical algorithms to decide when and how often to bluff.
If two bots were identical and one bluffed 3% of the time (and didn't bluff away all of his chips), in the long run the bluffing bot should win. Because the non-bluffing bot will believe the bluffing bot has a hand those extra 3% of hands, and thus the bluffing bot will in the long run win more than half of the hands and do better in the long run.
The interesting question is how often one should program the computer to bluff in what situations. . .
Anyone who thinks the best poker stategies are dictated by statistics has no idea how to play poker. That won't make much of a poker playing strategy. The trick is representing stength and guessing what kind of hand your opponent has despite what they are representing.
Against real players the primary way of determining this is through the unconscious betting patterns almost every player has. Bots with some AI could do well at this. Bots against other bots is potentially an even more difficult problem.
What I fail to see is why anyone who had a well functioning bot would enter this kind of contest. There is far more money to be made without getting yourself the undue notoriety of this sort of success.
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.
Without bluffing you play the odds and it just becomes a simple game of chance
Not true at all. To be a successful player, you must detect patterns in your opponents' play so you can infer whether you are likely to be ahead of them, and how to maximize the pot when you think you're going to win. This is very difficult for computers to do, even with sophisticated learning algorithms.
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.
And likewise, any poker player who thinks poker is only about representing false strength and putting your opponent on a hand has no idea how to play poker. The real trick is a balanced approach. The best poker players are great at both reading hands and psychological warfare, but you had also better believe they know exactly what odds the pot is offering and whether finishing a draw is a positive or negative play.
If you disagree, you're more than welcome to join our weekly game.
I am also an ulumni of the U of A. More specifically I did my research in the games department, although not specifically on poker. I was sort of suprised the article never mentioned Darse Billings who is one of the main people behind poker agents at the U of A.
Here is a relevant link: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/
Hey, you worked with the U Alberta group; cool. One question: how come they never put up the academic paper about vexbot? That seems to be the most interesting project from a theory point of view, and the most successful practically.
About your sig: it is highly unlikely that any form of prime factorization is NP-complete. The reason is that the problem is contained in both NP and co-NP. So if it's NP-complete, then NP=co-NP, which nobody seriously believes is true and would be very surprising.
A strategy I often use when playing new poker players is to get them to think that I bluff a lot.
I bluff a lot early in the night, then I start playing tight later in the night.
Then, when I get a really good hand, and bet hard, I get a few people to come in with me, because I've got them into the mindset that they have me figured out. They "know" I'm bluffing.
It's all about letting them think they have you figured out.
"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.
Not (entirely) true. I have followed research in poker programs and I can tell you that programs that bluff play consistently worse than programs that don't. That is, if bluffing is interpreted as "rating your own hand as a lot better than it actually is, in the hope of getting your opponent to fold". The problem is that you are overbetting your hand when you bluff, and if you get called on it, you lose BIG.
The trick is not to just bluff, but to bluff when the hand is worth it, and when you are fairly certain your opponent will fall for it. This means that a good poker program is not one that bluffs, but one that is very good at opponent modelling.
Opponent modelling is in a completely different ballpark than chance bluffing. While there is some research into this, not much has been published. That is why research groups as the one of Jonathan Schaeffer (mentioned in the article) have a far better chance of winning the prize than individuals working on poker programs. I know where I bet my money.
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
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
I've played online poker plenty of times and every time an "inexperienced" player stays in to see the river and wins with some obscure hand like three 2's (because the river was a two) the "professional" players always complain about them not playing "real poker" or telling them they are doing it wrong. The people staying in until the river and winning on the obscure hands do end up losing in the long run but to see self-proclaimed professionals tell them they are playing wrong because they lost a hand...doesn't seem right. Wouldn't the game be boring if everyone had the same exact playstyle?
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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.