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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."
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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.
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.
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It may be that current bots can beat some of the worse human players, but it's not clear how many of the human players are that bad, and it's not clear how good the companies that run the servers are at detecting bot behavior.
One thing I'm still wondering about is human-human collusion. It's a big concern in breathe-the-same-air games between humans who don't know each other. Not sure about online poker, however -- do you get thrown in a table with randomly chosen players, none of whom you're likely to know? What about collusion between bots? E.g., you could be the only player at the table, not realizing you're playing against 6 bots, each of which knows what cards the others have.
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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.