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Comment by noambrown | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the poker world would be happy with us if we did that. Heads-up limit hold'em isn't really played professionally anymore, but six-player no-limit hold'em is very popular.

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It depends who you ask. I think it's inevitable that it's released one day. By not releasing you're just delaying it.

All the top high stakes players already have solvers that they've spent a lot of money developing and studying privately. They would definitely be upset with you, but by releasing the code you are democratizing the information to all the midstakes pros who want to study but don't have the resources to pay developers and solve the game privately.

If you're already using programs to help you, I don't see how you can be upset if someone else is cheating better than you are.

Someone watch this guy and see if he buys any fancy watches or nice cars in the next few years. ;)

Doesn't that make it a rather poor candidate for a scientific paper? Chest-thumping without data and code is, well, chest-thumping without data and code.

Have you thought about open sourcing the non-AI pieces? It would be great for other researchers so they wouldn’t have to build the poker pieces from scratch

There is some open-source code in this area, and hopefully there will be more going forward. Here's one example: https://github.com/EricSteinberger/Deep-CFR

a. Is CFR applicable in single player hidden-information games? (e.g. state is initially hidden, gradually revealed to the agent, but there is not adversary)

b. How much more efficient is the improved search algorithm? the $150 number sounds like a couple of order of magnitudes..

a. There was this paper a couple years ago applying CFR to single-agent settings: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11424

b. It really depends on the game and the situation. It can be several orders of magnitude in six-player poker. In other games, it can be even more.

Why are you concerned about the happiness of the poker world?

Well if they upset the poker world do you think they would have top pros willing to go on record endorsing them?

Top pros will endorse whatever they're paid to endorse.

This is falsifiable by any number of cases, but Isaac Haxton spurning PokerStars is probably one of the best examples so others see your comment is not universally applicable.

https://upswingpoker.com/isaac-haxton-pokerstars-partypoker/

>However, Haxton isn’t accepting PokerStars’ olive branch as he was among the victims defrauded by the online giant for millions of dollars.

I'm not sure the really provides strong opposition to the GP's claim.

PokerStars offered to make him - and him alone - whole through sponsorship dollars. Haxton used to be their lead pro and is widely considered one of the very best players in the world.

It could just be for ethical reasons. I think anbop has a good reason even for unethical folks: hitting the best players hard in their wallets will definitely make it harder to recruit them for comparisons that validate these experiments. My prediction is that releasing this software will lead to profitable cheating like what people do with Blackjack at casinos.

Why not run the bot, post its proceeds transparently online, and donate everything to charity?

By not releasing it, you're ensuring a higher concentration of money in the hands of a few, IMO.

Anyone with access to this source code could run a bot themselves, or employ someone to do so.

Plus, if you've accomplished this, no doubt someone can replicate it.

By not releasing it, it doesn't validate the experiment. How can we be sure there wasn't human support?

As other commenters have said, I do too think you're delaying the inevitable but releasing now would mean you get credited with the first free solution.

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