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Comment by czzarr | Hacker News Reader

That is very unconvincing as 49k hands is really nothing and not enough to iron out variance unless the edge is really big (which doesn't seem to be the case). Any serious poker player will tell you that. They should play 1-10 million hands (depending on the edge) in order to get a decent idea of where this is going.

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Yes, I'm wondering if anyone is tracking the relative strength of each player's hands. In the end, the bot should be declared the "winner" only if its winnings were disproportionately high in relation to the strength of its hands.

The usual way they reduce variance in these man vs. machine poker showdowns is to do "pairs" play. You have two humans playing simultaneously in isolated locations. The decks for both humans are the same, but player 1 and 2 are swapped for one human. That way, the bot strategy has to play both hands.

It does totally eliminate variance, but they also take that into account and correct for it when looking at final outcomes usually. Right now the bot is up by something like 800K over 60K (out of 120K) hands. If that rate continues, it will win by around 1.6M or 400K per human. The blinds are 50/100, so that would equate to roughly 33 millibets (thousandths of a big blind per hand). That isn't too far off from standard win rates in bot vs. bot tournaments [1].

I'd say it's likely that the results of this tournament will be a statistically significant win for the bot.

[1] http://www.computerpokercompetition.org/downloads/competitio...

That trick doesn't change the variance at all if decks are the same.

Typical winrates in human vs human are between 1-5ptbb/100 where 1ptbb = two big blinds. At 1ptbb the variance is pretty big and north of 1million hands are probably necessary to establish an edge, whereas at 5ptbb the variance is much smaller and 100k hands are usually enough to converge to the expected value

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