Champions Declared In AI Poker Tournament

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Champions Declared In AI Poker Tournament

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 26, 2012 @08:43AM from the best-way-to-win-is-to-cheat-on-judging dept.

the_newsbeagle writes "The annual computer poker competition has just wrapped up, in which artificial intelligences battled each other over the (virtual) Texas Hold 'Em table. A researcher who worked on one of the top programs, the University of Alberta's "Hyperborean" program, has blogged about this year's competition and entrants for IEEE Spectrum. His first post explains the rules of the game and why it's tougher for a computer to win at poker than at chess; his second post describes Hyperborean's strategies, and the third gives the results and takes stock of Hyperborean's performance."

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Mindgames by Toe,+The · 2012-07-26 08:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

According to the human players, poker is largely about mind games.
In AI poker, the competitors should be able to send files to each other, or somehow exchange non-game information.
1. Re:Mindgames by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 08:51 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  According to the human players, poker is largely about mind games.
  In AI poker, the competitors should be able to send files to each other, or somehow exchange non-game information.
  The object is to hide you "tells" and bluffs. Maybe the programs should try and hack each other while they play. The program with the weakest security exposes his cards.
2. Re:Mindgames by Archangel+Michael · 2012-07-26 09:05 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Hiding tells and bluffs are nearly impossible for even skilled players. The real trick is to show a "tell" or "bluff" when you aren't. But that means you must know yourself as well as anything else.
  I play poker, I have a huge number of "tells". Take video of yourself playing poker and learn your "tells" and figure out a way to mimic those tells at will. Natural Tells are really really hard to fake, and take much practice to imitate. When you can imitate your own tells at will (accurately), then you'll have also mastered your tells. I can't fully hide my tells, but I can fairly accurately represent them when I want.
  The greatest skill of poker is remembering everything you have ever seen. Knowing how players play (tendencies) over time also helps. Knowing their personality also can expose when their tells are real verses "practiced" ones.
  Lastly knowing the Odds is hugely beneficial. As is Gaming Theory.
  
  --
  Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
3. Re:Mindgames by betterunixthanunix · 2012-07-26 09:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  According to the human players, poker is largely about mind games.
  Really? The pros I have heard have spoken about probabilities, trying to determine your opponents' strategies (are they betting conservatively? do they bet on weaker hands more frequently than expected?), and measuring expected returns quickly. Tells and psychology seem to be a small part of their strategy, and unsurprisingly, professional poker players defeat the AI players despite the fact that computers have no psychology to play against.
  
  --
  Palm trees and 8
4. Re:Mindgames by mythosaz · 2012-07-26 10:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I was initially going to just mod this informative and/or insightful, but I wanted to add on instead. There's certainly some value to understanding tells: Does your opponent look back at their hole cards when a middling card hits the board? Do they reflexively look at their chips when the flop comes out? Do they make a bet and give a speech about why they're betting? Are they quiet when they weren't before? Are they sitting upright when they were slouched before? All of these mean things - and they all mean different things coming from different players of different experience and skill... ....but none of those things are as important as understanding bet sizing and hand ranges and putting that together with a player's history. The glint in your opponent's eyes isn't nearly as important as the fact that he re-raised out of the small blind when defending against a raise from the cutoff. What hands do this and why? How often does he do this? What does that say about his cards -- or what does it at least say about what cards he's representing. What does it mean when the early limper gets raised and then HE re-raises? Sure, players lie, but bets speak WAY louder than tells. Side note: A number of top game pros take beta blockers. Most of their edge comes from understanding the game, but they'll do everything they can do protect the remaining part of the puzzle that is tells -- especially the impossible to prevent ones that adrenaline rushes cause (and beta blockers prevent).
5. Re:Mindgames by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 11:12 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  There is no "real trick" to poker, although there are certainly tricks that will work against specific types of opponents. To be a good poker player you have to acquire a lot of very different skills and knowledge some of which you may already have a talent for and most of which you must learn. You need to know about pot odds, expected value, stack sizes, position, outs, hand ranges, odds against making a drawing hand, and a bunch of other very basic ideas just to get started. If you have a talent for math and probability you will be that much farther ahead, but you don't have to be a maths wiz to be a poker pro. I would recommend Dan Harrington's "Harrington on Cash Games" for a beginner. The strategies for tournament and cash poker (i'm assuming we're talking about No Limit Hold'em) are very different. If you want to play tournaments you'd want to get Harrington's "Harrington on Hold'em" series of books.
  Body language and tells become important when you are playing against live opponents, but you still have to be able to figure out what the observed tells mean, and whether they are genuine. You can read Navarro's "What Every Body is Saying" for a good review of body language stuff. After that you can start working on controlling your emotions at the table so you don't "go on tilt" and lose all your chips.
  The math you need to play poker isn't difficult you just have to practice doing it in your head, and learn shortcuts so you're not staring off into outer space trying to solve complicated math problems at the poker table. Being able to easily memorize things would be helpful, but you don't have to be a savant.
  The math isn't going to do you a lot of good if you can't employ logical reasoning skills. The most valuable piece of information in the game of poker is the knowledge of the cards your opponent holds. The better you are at determining what cards your opponent holds the better decisions you can make. To accomplish this you need two things:
  1. information
  2. logical reasoning skills
  You take the information you have (the way your opponent has played the hand, any physical tells you might think you've picked up on, the way you think your opponent generally plays, etc.) and you apply logical reasoning to sort through the information and determine why your opponent is behaving the way he is and what cards he might have. Usually your opponent will be on what poker player's call a "level". A level just describes how a particular player thinks about and plays poker. Once you know what level your opponent is thinking on you will have a good idea of how he plays and you can better predict what range of hands he might hold, and exploit him. Likewise, if an opponent figures out how you think you should be prepared to adapt.
6. Re:Mindgames by ceoyoyo · 2012-07-26 11:48 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Depending on tells is what people who watched Quantum of Solace too many times do. Good poker players base their play on a) a solid game themselves and b) determining their opponents' play style. Does the guy usually check a raise? Does he bet the flop or pocket pairs or a pocket ace more than he should?
  Most professional poker players these days play online most of the time, where tells are almost nonexistent.
7. Re:Mindgames by patchmaster · 2012-07-26 13:41 · Score: 2
  
  While all of Harrington's books are excellent, they aren't the best place for a real beginner to start. They assume the reader has pretty good knowledge of the game to begin with.
  I'd start with Lee Jones' "Winning Low-Limit Hold'em" or something along those lines, then move on to Harrington once you're familiar with the basics of the game.
I am the greatest by Chemisor · 2012-07-26 10:03 · Score: 5, Funny

By these criteria, I'm the greatest poker player alive. I have no "tells" of any kind. When I look at my cards, I haven't the faintest idea whether the hand is good or bad, so I couldn't tell you even if I tried. With my 10 luck stat and a silver dollar, I am unbeatable.
Limit should be solvable by GoodNewsJimDotCom · 2012-07-26 10:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

I believe Limit is actually soft solved by computers, in that it is profitable vs most players in the world.
No limit is difficult to solve vs players who change their gears a lot. Players that don't change gears, you just gotta see their play style and play counter to them. However if I was just going to write a program who played NL, I'd start by just playing my own cards and being conservative. I believe the conservative NL player can still win online.

Poker is a very complex game, but appears forgiving on the outlook because even bad players win occasionally. The trick is to be profitable. And even when you're profitable, you want to keep becoming more skillful because it helps your short term and long term profits. Anyone who hasn't tried this game, I recommend you play in freerolls(never use your own money when you have less than 1500 hours of experience), and work your way up. It is like a long and difficult RPG.
I'm quite good at Texas Holdem myself and I'm profitable over the long run. I've played about 4,000 hours though. If you go with the motto: Never risk any of my own money, and my Holdem Bankroll is separate from my liferoll, you can play. But if you don't respect your money and treat it like gambling, you could destroy your own life.

--
God spoke to me
1. Re:Limit should be solvable by mythosaz · 2012-07-26 11:04 · Score: 2
  
  Poker is, indeed, like playing a long and difficult RPG... ...in HARDCORE mode. Make a few mistakes, and you're back farming all of your equipment again :(
2. Re:Limit should be solvable by greg1104 · 2012-07-26 12:12 · Score: 2
  
  Conversative no-limit is only profitable given the existence of players who lose money against that strategy. I do agree that many on-line players play no-limit in a way that does well again.
  The fact that you're profitable is based on the same thing: being more skilled in some way than the other players who you happen to be playing against. After a few thousand hours of play myself, I concluded that by far the most valuable skill for online play is being able to read whether there are players I can make money against at the table. There isn't necessarily even an outcome where some people are winners and some are losers for playing. Given an equal enough match of skills, in the long run a series of poker games leads to money flowing solely toward the house. Everybody else leaves with slightly less money than they started with.
3. Re:Limit should be solvable by GoodNewsJimDotCom · 2012-07-26 14:55 · Score: 2
  
  One of the MANY dangers of Poker is someone farming their way up from low stakes, getting a bunch of money, then when they bust it all, they think they're a really good player and might as well use a bunch of money to buy their old place again. This danger is 2 fold when you realize the personality type that'd do a skyrocket(Bet more than your bankroll sustains, in order to win a bunch of money at once) would also fall prey into thinking they're good. Poker has many many many dangers. I typically don't want to be a poker evangelist because I know in so doing, I might lead more into a destructive lifestyle. But if Poker is respected, it is actually a fun,and challenging passtime.
  
  --
  God spoke to me
Re:I want a half-CPU and half-EGO based competiton by mythosaz · 2012-07-26 11:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

This already happened. It was called, "every large poker site on the internet," as they all had bots playing on them. They were, by large, profitable at low limits playing high volume against mediocre players. If you'd like to play head's up poker against a computer, it's available at many casinos: http://www.slotmachinesforum.com/showthread.php?5792-Texas-Hold-em-Heads-Up-Poker-(IGT
Re:So coming back to the age-old question by greg1104 · 2012-07-26 12:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

Texas Hold'Em is a game of statistics. In any short-term run, luck might triumph over skill. But if you play long enough, there are a variety of strategies that consistently prove to be better than naive play. The simplest one to model is deciding whether to go all-in pre-flop. That's straightforward enough that papers like Universal statistical properties of poker tournaments have worked on distilling it down to a simple function.
My favorite example of odds-based play involves completing a flush. If the 3-card flop comes out, and you have 4 cards to a flush, the chance you will complete that flush is 35%. Many new players think "I have a 1/4 chance of getting a card of any one suit each time, so the odds I'll finish this flush are 50/50". That's wrong; it doesn't take into account that you already have 4 of the 13 cards in the suit. You have to play a fairly large number of hands to distinguish that the odds are really closer to 1/3 than 1/2 though. That's why someone who is betting based on an incorrect assessment of odds will bleed money over time to someone who bets appropriately, the edge of skills over luck here. It is a long-term edge though, and luck dominates the short-term game.
David Sklansky's writing is a good starting place filled with statistics based poker observations. The Theory of Poker is the standard text on odds-based play. Sklanky's career training was as an actuary, which is one reason his numberic analysis of the game is so strong.
Re:So coming back to the age-old question by patchmaster · 2012-07-26 13:55 · Score: 2

It varies with the specific poker game, but I've read estimates that Texas Hold'em is about 60% skill, 40% luck. That's considered a nearly ideal split for skilled players. Any more tilt to the luck side and there's no percentage in it for the good player. Any more tilt to the skill side and unskilled players seldom win and don't find the game fun. Ideally, the unskilled players will donate most of the time, but will win just often enough to keep them interested. As they say, you can shear a sheep many times, you can only skin it once.