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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."
The chess machine is Deep Blue. It was created by IBM (AKA Big Blue).
Please, tell me more about confusing the other bots into submission. How often do you confusing the other bots into submission?
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.
The "catch" is that unlike house games, the casino is only in the business of taking a percentage of the winnings in poker, known as the rake. In poker, since you are playing against your peers, if you are able to achieve a winning percentage greater than the house rake (commonly around 5-10%), then you are still a profitable poker player.
In the poker world, the common standard for a profitable, solid player is to earn two big bets per hour, which covers both the casino rake and tip. In a $3/$6 texas hold'em limit game for example, the big bet is $6, which equals a $12/hr wage for a solid player. Online, where you not only do not have to pay a tip to the dealer, but also generally pay a lower rake and play about 150% more hands per hour than in a brick and mortar casino, it's very well possible to win nearly twice what you would by playing online.
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.
What would a computer program do with $100,000? Build a cluster to run itself on?
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Clearly you don't understand Texas Hold-'em. There is no card counting required, beyond to 6 (two in your hand, 4 on the table). Any player who is so bad that he can't read the board isn't going to be a challenge to anybody decent.
Since decks are made out of 52 cards, and you get two of them, it gets very easily to calculate probabilities for a human (mostly involves multiplying by 2).
Finally, making the probabalistic move every time will not do as well, because if you do that you would absolutely never bluff. A bot to be good in the long run must bluff, otherwise it is far too predictable and you can gain too much information from its bets and raises.
To give a quick example: If there's 100$ 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.)
Parent is somewhat right. Bluffing can be an integral part of the game, depending on the format of the game being played, along with the limit played (amount of cash wagered).
In a high stakes game or no-limit game, bluffing is very common, because every bet and action often involves a significant amount of money and little mistakes over the course of a session can end up costing large sums of money. Thus, bluffing becomes a viable weapon in these game formats because you can use your opponents' fear of making mistakes against him.
However, in a small stakes game, bluffing is often close to impossible, as many players are simply put, unbluffable. With the current poker boom, the skill level of the average player has decreased considerably; often causing poorly skilled players to play hands in a very losing fashion, such as showing Ace high at the showdown. Against these type of players, a bluff is generally quite ineffective and a losing proposition, since the theory behind bluffing is to force your opponent to fold a better hand. Thus, when your opponent simply does not fold, the point becomes moot.
As such, it would actually be easier to create a bot that plays low-stakes poker, as a non-bluff game involves simple math, decision trees and a bit of fuzzy logic. What it is not however, is a game of chance, as it is still a profitable game that has edges to be exploited.
This has been a bit off topic, but I wanted to clear up the notion that poker comes down to chance, when there is very solid mathematical theory behind it.
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..