It seems to me that security at the venue is extremely inconsistent. They care enough about cheating to time-delay the stream (even to the announcers), but players are allowed to have phones and keys and things at the table? Maybe don't allow that?
Most poker rooms also allow you to use your phone, as long are you're not a participant in the current hand. The alleged cheater (Mike Postle) is said to have hid his phone under the table, in his crotch area. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard for other players and the dealer to check for that at that angle.
In the end, the no-phone rule in most poker rooms is going to be largely an honor-system based thing.
Edit:
Jason Somerville, who founded one of the most popular poker streaming companies (Run It Up), has described how stringently the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects casinos that are hosting streams. E.g. multiple inspections of the streaming equipment, a requirement for a guard at the streaming booth, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk). He mentioned that California does not seem to have the same level of on-site scrutiny.
Edit2:
On TwoPlusTwo (the popular poker forum), long time players at Stones Gambling Hall (where the alleged cheating took place) mentioned that their poker room did not institute a no-phone policy until sometime into the alleged cheater's crazy run of success.
It's a bit like saying that ASLR and stack canaries are security theatre because they can be defeated by information leaks.
Let's boot the semtex filled laptops right in the middle of the most crowded, heaviest choke point at the airport. Right next to the 30 gallon trash cans filled with liquid explosives and other combustibles we force people to discard.
250:1 kdr. Gg no re. See you later alligator, after 'while crocodile, don't forget to write.
But seriously though, 250:1 kdr at the tsa checkpoint wouldn't have the same effect as a plane being taken down and a much lower kdr. If a clever terrorist was going to create such a device they'd better have a better choice of detonation button than the power switch.
There also better off with one of those monstrously bulky windows gaming laptops than a MacBook air.
Also a bit disappointed the Blaine the mono reference went unnoticed
Or the classified images from Jason Bourne's personnel file.
My only other option was to forfeit my computer. Since I like my computer and don't do anything illegal I allowed them to violate my privacy so I could keep my computer. After they had a good look I was on my way.
From what I understand, the process has changed. These days they just image your hard drive and you're on your way after that. Then they upload your drive to a cloud system that looks through it for illegal activity. No joke. Again, you can forfeit your computer or phone but they will still try to image the drive.
What environment do devices with explosives instead of batteries boot into? Windows or *BSD?
Source: played thousands of hours of high stakes live games, and I'll bet that some of the regulars are among the best Angry Birds players in the world.
Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.
And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.
I had always thought that knowing the odds exactly just wasn't that useful because there was a lot of missing information and it was more important to read one's opponents.
[1] https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-s...
For the mathematically perfect, they spend hours studying solvers which takes considerable processing power to generate the trees. A human player can calculate aspects of it but they can really only memorize what the solver would do. And some high stakes online players are using custom software to augment their decisions.
Depending on the bet size, the solver could call the turn a % of times. And depending on blockers, unblockers and the bet sizing, the solver could advocate to call/raise/fold.
Top pros play millions of hands and if you truly have a knack you remember... everything.
a) most situations that come up in poker just aren't that complicated -- if you're good at mental math, you can compute the exact odds for the most common situations in your head with some practice
b) there are some simplifications/heuristics you can apply if you're willing to be off by a small margin of error -- e.g. "if you have x outs, you have approximately 2x% to hit one by the river for each card remaining" is accurate enough for most players in most situations
c) this math ends up being extremely useful in practice, because "reading" someone (which is usually just logically deducing reasonable possibilities for what is in their hand) is only useful if you can then use the information to determine whether it is profitable to make/call a bet, which requires knowing your likelihood of winning.
As far as computing "large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads", I don't know what makes you think that that's what poker math entails. It's nearly all just basic statistics.
honestly I've never played much poker, but I remember doing lots of poker odds problems from my discrete math class in undergrad.
The hard part is calculating the implied odds: there you need to play out scenarios of what your opponent might hold, and what cards would cause them to bet or call with a losing hand.
Tells are overrated in poker. It's all about implied odds and grinding it out.
This is wrong. Making optimal decisions IS very complicated. Just a heads-up no-limit match between the two best players in the world is far from the Nash equalibrum (a game theory-optimal solution). In the 2017 Humans vs AI match, a bot destroyed very good humans by 14.7 big blinds per hand. This is without caring at all about what strategies others play. If you analyze other players and you find what mistakes they make, you can do better and it's even more complicated. And vs multiple players like here, it's more complicated again (optimal strategy can only be calculated assuming there is no collusion). A 6-person game was only finally beaten a few months ago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9
Source: used to play poker (up to the main event WSOP and $5/10 level during the poker boom) and wrote a simple game-theory optimal solver for fun.
* Bet sizes were restricted. E.g. humans and the the bot could only bet fixed bet sizes, like 1/4 pot, 1/2 pot, full pot etc. Creative bet sizing is one of the skills that distinguishes top pros.
* Stack sizes were reset after every hand. E.g. every player in the hand was given the same amount of chips at the start of every hand. How you performed previously in the session thus did not matter. Anyone who has played poker knows that this is highly unrealistic. Larger stack sizes convey an ability to bully smaller ones, and stack sizes greatly affect what range of hands you can reasonably play.
The point being, even a supercomputer running the most efficient heuristic based poker decision making programs has not yet been able to beat humans in a game that resembles what a real 6 or 9 person table would reflect.
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Just as reference, on a four-year-old quad-core/8-thread Intel i7-based desktop with 32GB of RAM, to solve a SINGLE hand in PioSolver (the most popular poker solver) from flop through the river takes my machine about 7 minutes. The game tree alone takes up 4 GB of RAM, and in this scenario there are only two players, and each player is restricted to 3 bet sizes.
The idea that this kind of computation can be done on a phone is ludicrous.
Stack sizes were reset to keep the research minimally scoped, taking stack sizes into account likely does not require a quantum leap in research.
This is getting pretty off topic, but the computation could be done online.
I went back and re-read the pre-print here (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~noamb/papers/19-Science-Superhuman.p...). On page 2:
> To reduce the complexity of forming a strategy, Pluribus only considers a few different bet sizes at any given decision point. The exact number of bets it consid-ers varies between one and 14 depending on the situation. Although Pluribus can limit itself to only betting one of a few different sizes between $100 and $10,000, when actually play-ing no-limit poker, the opponents are not constrained to those few options. What happens if an opponent bets $150 while Pluribus has only been trained to consider bets of $100 or $200? Generally, Pluribus will rely on its search algorithm, described in a later section, to compute a response in real time to such “off-tree” actions.
Good catch, and thanks for the correction.
Regarding the effect of stack sizes, I'm not certain on this, but my intuition is that there is some effect on perceived ranges of the other 5 players at the table if stack sizes vary. Since Facebook AI will not be releasing Pluribus code or pre-trained models/weights, we can't be certain, but things like stack-to-pot (SPR) ratio would seem to matter.
Of course, you could always make the argument that human players in a cash game can re-up/refill to the maximum buy-in whenever they're short, but that's another discussion altogether.
Just interested to see your approach as I’m in the middle of writing my own my own.
There are super tiny hidden in-ear earbuds that would easily go unnoticed unless someone really looks for it. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E~0AAOSwqABbH4mT/s-l640.jpg Or vibrating devices hidden anywhere else on the body. This paired with some information from the RFID stream, either through some insider or by hacking the Wifi.
As you say there are also lots of other items brought in and worn by the players, looking at the video i see people wearing hats, shades, bags and bulky clothes where you could easily hide all kinds of equipment.
Using phones at poker tables, especially ones without RFID systems, isn't really a risk.
The fact RFID is observable wouldn't make much difference then.