Not possible. You need more than a 5% edge over the other players, because for every hand you win, the house is going to take a small cut, and for every hand you lose the house will take a small cut from other players. If there is not a big sucker at the table, the players will leave and look for a better game. Thery are not going to sit around dying a slow death of small rakes to the casino. And if you can't spot the sucker, it's you.
True. Limit Holdem heads up happens only at tournaments, and almost all online tournaments are NO limit. Unless you are playing a cash table, and it is your lucky day, the only other player remaining at the table is the drunken fish.
And most mortals will never travel to a location whgere they have this unusual tournament format, never mind making it to final 2.
So this poker robot seems mostly harmless, and have little value in the wild, except maybe as a practice partner for limit holdem play, to get a better feel for the strength of hands in that format.
If you don't know what I am talking about, buy any good book on poker theory. I am not saying anything other than what Jennifer Harman is saying, and she is considered one of the strongest limit poker players in the world, and wrote the chapter on Limit Holdem in Doyle Brunsen's Supersystem 2 book.
So let me toss that ball back to your court and ask why you think you know better than one of the best? Or if you were just guessing that you had an idea about proper Limit Holdem strategy.
Also, that it is LIMIT, dos not mean that we are talking about small money. It might be that the blinds are $100 and $200, and heads up, you have to decide if you want to throw another $200 in there, or $600 if re-raised to chase after the money in the pot. The pots can be just as big as a no limit pot. Except the blinds are so big that teh novice strategy of just sitting there and wait for a big hand will clean you out superfast. The heat is on, on every single bet. Since you can't raise by more than $200 it is much harder to bluff and scare away an opponent, and much harder to chase an opponent away from a medium hand. But you have to do it, or you will simply die the slow death of losing $100-$150 per hand. You might even have to lose a big pot on purpose and show your bluff, just to show the opponent that you are crazy, so that they will try to bluff against your strong hand, or call next time you have the nuts. Thinking that it being LIMIT makes it any easier or less risky, is the kind of ignorance that separates fish from their money.
In No limit holdem, the blinds will be much smaller. If you are a novice fish, you will play NL holdem this way: fold every weak hand, bet every big hand, and bet it all if you think you have the best cards. All that will gain you is that the sharks fold every time you have a big hand, so you never get paid off with your pocket aces. while the pros are stealing all the blinds in between to pay for their lunch. And if you ever run in to a really big hand, such as quads, and to your delight, you get called all the way, thinking you have made it big time, they will will take all your money with a straight flush.
In Limit Holdem, you can certainly not just play the cards, and heads up, you will have to play very aggressively, even mediocre cards, semi bluff hope to catch something, and if you miss, keep on betting hoping the other guy will fold. You also need to think about implied odds, that is not just the odds of hitting the next card, but the odds versus the size of the pot and the size of your bet. In a limit hand, if you want the opponent to follow, you can also make the hand un-foldable for the opponent by keeping the implied odds just right for a call., That's how you have to play against a human, and hopefully the human is not as good as you are. Against a robot, you have to play on the fact that he plays "optimal poker", which should make it significantly easier to put him on a hand. When you know what hand he has, then it is easier to pick your battles, and can avoid bluffing if it is against hand you know he can't fold.
While pshycology is not as easy as other medicine and physics, there is no doubt that it is a science, and that it uses the scientific method to evolve. The workings of the human brain is unfortunately an extremely challenging area to understand, an surely the field has attracted more than its fair share of sharlatans. It would be an ironic day when we let cult whackjobs like Tom Cruise or david miscarriage define science for us. The for-profit scam was founded by a failed science FICTION writer ferkrissakes. For some reason psychology makes them go ballistic. Because they are whackjobs? Mm?
Firstly, this is exactly the kind of solution the climate change and energy crisis deniers have in mind when they say that science will one day solve their problems. that way we will continue to burn fossil fuels until earth is a smoldering smoke stack. and for our energy needs, while the last drops of oil is pumpwed up, the densiers will say cold fusion is going to happen any day now.
energy conservation, renewable energy, reuse and recycling, population control, sustainable food production etc. etc. are by far the cheapest ways to solve all these problems.
climate engineering will be too little too late, akin to peeeing your pants to stay warm. an net longterm side effects likely to be much worse than any short term gains.
the computer would clean out a novice, but not a pro. because it plays"perfect" poker the pro will always have a very good idea exactly what hand the robot holds. the ori can then eaily trick the robot to fold winning hands, and call ir rause with losing hands. that's almost as big handicap as having someone peak at you cards.
it doesn't. what it knows is what the expected value in the long run of each possible action, fold, call,raise. for example folding 2 7 is worth minus 50 cents. calling with 2 7 is worth minus 10 dollars, raising with 2 7 is worth minus 8 dollars. those dollar values would come from millions of simulated card deals and bidding actions.
exactly. as a poker robot, it is rather useless. it would make some money in heads up limit against weak amateur players. it would lose big against PRO players, because it has a tell. the tell is that he plays optimal poker, which means we know what hand he has. he will never fold has 2 pair aakk if we can convince him we hold qqq, even tho we only hold 2 7. and contrary to popular belief, in limit poker you have to force yourself to even more gut wrenching aggressive play than in no limit poker. you have to keep on throwing money in that pot, long after your gut screams to you that you must slow down.
heads up limit is useful for last 2 players in a limit tournament. so that is almost never.
according to the summary, this research used brute force, which means the must have simulated all possible permutations for each given situation. then, whichever outcome with the highest expected value would be chosen. since they had already solved it. the robot might just be looking up the opimal call for any situation from the database.
so there might be no probability calculations at all, just lookups.
this is a big handicap, because if you know the robots mind, you also know what cards he has, based on his bids, and you can make him believe you have a stronger or weaker hand than that, by projecting a hand based on your bidding actions.
heads up limit Holdem is something you in practice never play, unless you are in the last table in a limit tournament.
besides, being able to beat or play even with the perfect player will in fact make you broke in the long run. the casino rake will clean you out , it is just a matter of how many hands.
the only claim to fame this robot could make is that it is the best ever limit heads up novice. there have been plenty of pokerbots before, making good money, playing low stakes online poker. it does not take much to consistently beat the weak. maybe 100 lines of c code with simple heuristics.
anyone who knows knows anything avbout winning poker is that you play the players, not the cards. your winning is dependent on making the other players make the wrong decision, folding winning hands and betting losing hands. weak players make so many bad decisions, you just can play straight. in addition to decisions on each hand, one must take into account how the decision will help in the overalll strategy. you might want to get caught in a bluff. you might want to keep your nuts secret, or vice versa. and then you have to play your streaks, as we'll as the streaks of other players. taking money from very weak players is easy, but to play poker at profesionnal level you need to be a lot better than average, in order to stay ahead of the casino rake.
And don't forget another success factor. Don't expect a quick win. Just keep doing what you're doing and hope the other guy screws up and you don't. Just wait for the top dog to miss a step. That's how Sybase database died. They released a buggy version of their DB that caused a lot of data losses. Instead of the enterprise scale DB market being a mostly 2 horse race, it became a 1 horse race with just Oracle(and a couple of also-rans).
With Web browsers, you could say netscape eventually killed itself. Eventually it became more and more buggy, crashing more often, and did not not perform well, as web pages became more and more heavy to render.
Let me rephrase that question. And why do you think the Western man has a fundamentally different attitude towards counterfeit items than the rest of the world? eBay also sold tons of counterfeit items. craigslist sells tons of counterfeit items, as well as contraband. The flooding of the market with counterfeits only has the effect that the pricing of the genuine items go down to compete against the ripoffs. Western man has been buying cheap chinese products from Walmart for decades now, and if I am not much mistaken, the products are nearly 100% chinese made, and most product had a US equivalent brand that is more expensive, or the cheap chinese product is indeed now the US branded product, but made in china using extremely cheap labor and inferior raw materials.
Alibaba should be taken as a serious competitor, most of all because the chinese are simply ruthless. They will break any and all laws to make a few bucks more. Anti-corruption laws, anti-dumping laws, international trade agreements, human rights, are routinely just ignored. They will simply not compete using the same playing ground, which will force every one to become just as dirty, or just surrender. They'll pay off any african greedy president to get access to local mining or oil rights. The president will in turn make sure to follow all chinese demands, such as not talking to Dalai Lama. The Chinese and Russian are not that very different I guess, except the chinese are just much bigger and craftier when it comes to commerce.
I have seen first hand how they operate, how deals are won and lost.
They were not first to market with ebook readers. But kindle WAS a very well executed product, perfect for reading books. And their propriatary browser and server side caching technology is innovative. Looks like you're making your argument by throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. To me it just looks like the fire phone was just a bit too ambitious, and slightly missed the targeted market. It is not the end of the world for the company. Maybe they will revise and try another phone launch, or abandon that market and try something else. I am sure they will both fail and succeed at many future ventures with and without Jeff Bezos being personally vested in each.
Because for now, it is still far more important to become a more and more dominating player in commerce than it is to make a big short term profit. In most categories, you can buy a product on amazon, with free 2-day shipping at a 10% discount compared to most local shops. The revenue flowing through amazon is mindboggling. Sure they could shrink that discount a bit, and grab a larger margin. That would make it possible for other players to move in on amazon's market, and slow the company's growth. The fact is that wall street, and amazon's investors are strongly supportive of the huge cash flow and slim profit margins of the company. This is evidenced by the amazon shares sharply dropping every time the company makes a real profit. Investors still wants the company to grow, not make a profit. And they have proven to be right. Some hack report in a trade rag won't change that.
What a short sighted midget. How do you think Amazon ended up as on of the world's largest companies, completely dominating all retail ecommerce, and being the sole leader in the booming cloud industry. If Bezos had asked VCs, banks or or anonymous cowards for advice advice he'd probably be the operator of a couple of walgreen's or McDonald's stores now. Or maybe owner of Blockbuster franchise. You can't build something new and successful if you don't take a few risks.
Nothing is worse than a deeply principled person with absolutely no scruples. They can and will justify anything. Paving the road for the billionaire who openly carries a private nuclear bomb and then goes postal. Or the precocious 6 year old bringing a full class set of plastic guns to kindergarten.
Slashdot Mirror
Not possible.
You need more than a 5% edge over the other players, because for every hand you win, the house is going to take a small cut, and for every hand you lose the house will take a small cut from other players. If there is not a big sucker at the table, the players will leave and look for a better game. Thery are not going to sit around dying a slow death of small rakes to the casino. And if you can't spot the sucker, it's you.
True. Limit Holdem heads up happens only at tournaments, and almost all online tournaments are NO limit. Unless you are playing a cash table, and it is your lucky day, the only other player remaining at the table is the drunken fish.
And most mortals will never travel to a location whgere they have this unusual tournament format, never mind making it to final 2.
So this poker robot seems mostly harmless, and have little value in the wild, except maybe as a practice partner for limit holdem play, to get a better feel for the strength of hands in that format.
If you don't know what I am talking about, buy any good book on poker theory.
I am not saying anything other than what Jennifer Harman is saying, and she is considered one of the strongest limit poker players in the world, and wrote the chapter on Limit Holdem in Doyle Brunsen's Supersystem 2 book.
So let me toss that ball back to your court and ask why you think you know better than one of the best? Or if you were just guessing that you had an idea about proper Limit Holdem strategy.
Also, that it is LIMIT, dos not mean that we are talking about small money. It might be that the blinds are $100 and $200, and heads up, you have to decide if you want to throw another $200 in there, or $600 if re-raised to chase after the money in the pot. The pots can be just as big as a no limit pot. Except the blinds are so big that teh novice strategy of just sitting there and wait for a big hand will clean you out superfast. The heat is on, on every single bet. Since you can't raise by more than $200 it is much harder to bluff and scare away an opponent, and much harder to chase an opponent away from a medium hand. But you have to do it, or you will simply die the slow death of losing $100-$150 per hand. You might even have to lose a big pot on purpose and show your bluff, just to show the opponent that you are crazy, so that they will try to bluff against your strong hand, or call next time you have the nuts. Thinking that it being LIMIT makes it any easier or less risky, is the kind of ignorance that separates fish from their money.
In No limit holdem, the blinds will be much smaller. If you are a novice fish, you will play NL holdem this way: fold every weak hand, bet every big hand, and bet it all if you think you have the best cards. All that will gain you is that the sharks fold every time you have a big hand, so you never get paid off with your pocket aces. while the pros are stealing all the blinds in between to pay for their lunch. And if you ever run in to a really big hand, such as quads, and to your delight, you get called all the way, thinking you have made it big time, they will will take all your money with a straight flush.
In Limit Holdem, you can certainly not just play the cards, and heads up, you will have to play very aggressively, even mediocre cards, semi bluff hope to catch something, and if you miss, keep on betting hoping the other guy will fold. You also need to think about implied odds, that is not just the odds of hitting the next card, but the odds versus the size of the pot and the size of your bet. In a limit hand, if you want the opponent to follow, you can also make the hand un-foldable for the opponent by keeping the implied odds just right for a call., That's how you have to play against a human, and hopefully the human is not as good as you are. Against a robot, you have to play on the fact that he plays "optimal poker", which should make it significantly easier to put him on a hand. When you know what hand he has, then it is easier to pick your battles, and can avoid bluffing if it is against hand you know he can't fold.
While pshycology is not as easy as other medicine and physics, there is no doubt that it is a science, and that it uses the scientific method to evolve. The workings of the human brain is unfortunately an extremely challenging area to understand, an surely the field has attracted more than its fair share of sharlatans.
It would be an ironic day when we let cult whackjobs like Tom Cruise or david miscarriage define science for us.
The for-profit scam was founded by a failed science FICTION writer ferkrissakes. For some reason psychology makes them go ballistic. Because they are whackjobs? Mm?
Most young males have a car-driving fetish.
At least the pictures from his famous historectomy. Think it can be found at goatse something.
Firstly, this is exactly the kind of solution the climate change and energy crisis deniers have in mind when they say that science will one day solve their problems. that way we will continue to burn fossil fuels until earth is a smoldering smoke stack. and for our energy needs, while the last drops of oil is pumpwed up, the densiers will say cold fusion is going to happen any day now.
energy conservation, renewable energy, reuse and recycling, population control, sustainable food production etc. etc. are by far the cheapest ways to solve all these problems.
climate engineering will be too little too late, akin to peeeing your pants to stay warm. an net longterm side effects likely to be much worse than any short term gains.
to win in limit poker, bluffing is more important than ever. limit poker requires a lot of ice in the belly and huge stones, especially heads up,
nope. seems he has been slashdotted.
the computer would clean out a novice, but not a pro. because it plays"perfect" poker the pro will always have a very good idea exactly what hand the robot holds. the ori can then eaily trick the robot to fold winning hands, and call ir rause with losing hands. that's almost as big handicap as having someone peak at you cards.
it doesn't. what it knows is what the expected value in the long run of each possible action, fold, call,raise. for example folding 2 7 is worth minus 50 cents. calling with 2 7 is worth minus 10 dollars, raising with 2 7 is worth minus 8 dollars. those dollar values would come from millions of simulated card deals and bidding actions.
exactly. as a poker robot, it is rather useless. it would make some money in heads up limit against weak amateur players. it would lose big against PRO players, because it has a tell. the tell is that he plays optimal poker, which means we know what hand he has. he will never fold has 2 pair aakk if we can convince him we hold qqq, even tho we only hold 2 7. and contrary to popular belief, in limit poker you have to force yourself to even more gut wrenching aggressive play than in no limit poker. you have to keep on throwing money in that pot, long after your gut screams to you that you must slow down.
heads up limit is useful for last 2 players in a limit tournament. so that is almost never.
according to the summary, this research used brute force, which means the must have simulated all possible permutations for each given situation.
then, whichever outcome with the highest expected value would be chosen. since they had already solved it. the robot might just be looking up the opimal call for any situation from the database.
so there might be no probability calculations at all, just lookups.
this is a big handicap, because if you know the robots mind, you also know what cards he has, based on his bids, and you can make him believe you have a stronger or weaker hand than that, by projecting a hand based on your bidding actions.
heads up limit Holdem is something you in practice never play, unless you are in the last table in a limit tournament.
besides, being able to beat or play even with the perfect player will in fact make you broke in the long run. the casino rake will clean you out , it is just a matter of how many hands.
the only claim to fame this robot could make is that it is the best ever limit heads up novice. there have been plenty of pokerbots before, making good money, playing low stakes online poker. it does not take much to consistently beat the weak. maybe 100 lines of c code with simple heuristics.
anyone who knows knows anything avbout winning poker is that you play the players, not the cards. your winning is dependent on making the other players make the wrong decision, folding winning hands and betting losing hands. weak players make so many bad decisions, you just can play straight. in addition to decisions on each hand, one must take into account how the decision will help in the overalll strategy. you might want to get caught in a bluff. you might want to keep your nuts secret, or vice versa. and then you have to play your streaks, as we'll as the streaks of other players. taking money from very weak players is easy, but to play poker at profesionnal level you need to be a lot better than average, in order to stay ahead of the casino rake.
Here taxies are generally not driven by the owner. Taxies are hired out in 24 hour shifts, and most drivers work 24 hours on 24 hours off.
Even in the most liberal, capitalistic and free societies, ist he regulation of taxies and the handling of taxi licenses often a very corrupt process.
using words like doucey is just as douchey and should be cause for instant expultion from any proper HOA.
and now you are just being silly.
And don't forget another success factor.
Don't expect a quick win. Just keep doing what you're doing and hope the other guy screws up and you don't.
Just wait for the top dog to miss a step.
That's how Sybase database died. They released a buggy version of their DB that caused a lot of data losses.
Instead of the enterprise scale DB market being a mostly 2 horse race, it became a 1 horse race with just Oracle(and a couple of also-rans).
With Web browsers, you could say netscape eventually killed itself. Eventually it became more and more buggy, crashing more often, and did not not perform well, as web pages became more and more heavy to render.
and performed
Let me rephrase that question.
And why do you think the Western man has a fundamentally different attitude towards counterfeit items than the rest of the world?
eBay also sold tons of counterfeit items.
craigslist sells tons of counterfeit items, as well as contraband.
The flooding of the market with counterfeits only has the effect that the pricing of the genuine items go down to compete against the ripoffs.
Western man has been buying cheap chinese products from Walmart for decades now, and if I am not much mistaken, the products are nearly 100% chinese made, and most product had a US equivalent brand that is more expensive, or the cheap chinese product is indeed now the US branded product, but made in china using extremely cheap labor and inferior raw materials.
Alibaba should be taken as a serious competitor, most of all because the chinese are simply ruthless. They will break any and all laws to make a few bucks more. Anti-corruption laws, anti-dumping laws, international trade agreements, human rights, are routinely just ignored. They will simply not compete using the same playing ground, which will force every one to become just as dirty, or just surrender. They'll pay off any african greedy president to get access to local mining or oil rights. The president will in turn make sure to follow all chinese demands, such as not talking to Dalai Lama. The Chinese and Russian are not that very different I guess, except the chinese are just much bigger and craftier when it comes to commerce.
I have seen first hand how they operate, how deals are won and lost.
They were not first to market with ebook readers.
But kindle WAS a very well executed product, perfect for reading books.
And their propriatary browser and server side caching technology is innovative.
Looks like you're making your argument by throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
To me it just looks like the fire phone was just a bit too ambitious, and slightly missed the targeted market.
It is not the end of the world for the company. Maybe they will revise and try another phone launch, or abandon that market and try something else.
I am sure they will both fail and succeed at many future ventures with and without Jeff Bezos being personally vested in each.
Because for now, it is still far more important to become a more and more dominating player in commerce than it is to make a big short term profit.
In most categories, you can buy a product on amazon, with free 2-day shipping at a 10% discount compared to most local shops.
The revenue flowing through amazon is mindboggling. Sure they could shrink that discount a bit, and grab a larger margin.
That would make it possible for other players to move in on amazon's market, and slow the company's growth.
The fact is that wall street, and amazon's investors are strongly supportive of the huge cash flow and slim profit margins of the company.
This is evidenced by the amazon shares sharply dropping every time the company makes a real profit. Investors still wants the company to grow, not make a profit.
And they have proven to be right. Some hack report in a trade rag won't change that.
What a short sighted midget.
How do you think Amazon ended up as on of the world's largest companies, completely dominating all retail ecommerce, and being the sole leader in the booming cloud industry. If Bezos had asked VCs, banks or or anonymous cowards for advice advice he'd probably be the operator of a couple of walgreen's or McDonald's stores now. Or maybe owner of Blockbuster franchise. You can't build something new and successful if you don't take a few risks.
Nothing is worse than a deeply principled person with absolutely no scruples. They can and will justify anything. Paving the road for the billionaire who openly carries a private nuclear bomb and then goes postal. Or the precocious 6 year old bringing a full class set of plastic guns to kindergarten.
What if we invented a system that would display a different application in each segment of the screen.
Let us call it doors or something like that.