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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

They at least used a couple very good heads up limit players this time, rather than Phil Laak and some other guy nobody has heard of.

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Would you agree with me that they are playing a different game?

If you remove the human element, the players can't use one of their skills.

Different than live, really similar to online.

Heads up limit hold'em is also a tiny subset of poker, and (so I've been told) the easiest to program a good AI for. Get that bot beating top players at a 9 handed NL table and I'll stop playing online entirely.

I think 5 card draw is the easiest game (for humans and computers alike).

Hmm, that may be true, but there probably aren't five humans left who still play it for the bot to face.

Actually I'd think 5 card stud would be far easier still.

Exactly. When playing against a machine, a human can't use one of his skills but it doesn't apply anymore. There's no need to read an opponent or employ deception because a machine doesn't understand this.

Any serious poker player knows that the best strategy for winning is to make your opponent make mistakes while minimizing your own. One of the primary tools for accomplishing this is the use of deception.

Once the game is reduced to calculating the odds at any given moment and betting when they're in your favor, even a simple machine should be able to beat a human as long as it makes reliable calculations.

It should really come as no surprise that a machine can beat a human at a task that machines are really good at.

You clearly don't have much of a grasp about what makes computer poker difficult. Read the U of A papers on poker AI:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/AIJ02.html

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/ICML99.html

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/papers/davidson.msc.h...

Oh c'mon. Good poker players know all the odds of all hands with an error of at most 2%. Especially in heads-up.

If it's just about number crunching then the first computer AI would be in Omaha Hi-Lo or 7 card stud - because these poker variants have much more complex odds.

Hmm... Maybe poker AI is about more than number crunching. Anyway... Interesting tidbit: craps is structured so that the pass line bettor will lose 50.7% of the time. That 0.7% provides casinos with billions in profits every year. I would think that any decent poker player would have to be able to calculate odds with better than a 2% error rate.

Poker is not craps, and it's certainly not a game where people sit around a table and whoever calculates the odds best gets the money. There's absolutely no parallel there whatsoever.

Have you ever even played?

It calculates odds by assigning a range of holdings to you based on your play, so deception is still very useful.

Not necessarily. Basically, the only deception available is overplaying or underplaying a hand. There are also other factors that determine whether it's worthwhile to bet. I'm no expert, but I think the size of the ante or current bet relative to the pot is going to make a bigger impact. A human can manipulate some of these factors to affect the way a machine plays, but this is at a great risk and various human mistakes are inevitable. The machine may be tricked into betting or folding when it shouldn't, but it can be counted on to get the arithmetic right every time. I'm not sure the risk is worth the potential reward in this situation. I'm thinking a human is going to make far more mistakes than the machine.

Deception isn't twisting your Oreo cookie one way when you've got the nuts all night, then doing it the same way later when you're bluffing. Deception is playing every hand the same way, such that your opponent can't deduce what you hold from your betting patterns. For instance, though it would clearly be a losing strategy, if someone raised at every possible opportunity, their range would always be 100% of all possible hands and you'd never have the slightest clue what they hold.

This is no less relevant against a bot than it is against a human. Odds are no more relevant against a bot than they are against a human.

The math is so trivial to calculate as to be irrelevant. And if you think humans make far more mistakes than machines, you should try downloading poki and playing a full ring game.

Either you play optimally OR you (semi)bluff.

You can't have both. If you play optimally you lose. If you only bluff you lose. So you have to find a balance. And when you've found it, the other player will change his style so you're in the dark once again.

And the deception also affects your image (your perceived playing style). So the bets you make affect future hands, and the expected profit from future hands. That's what makes the game interesting.

What you describe is a game where you play against one of N players each hand, and you don't know which one. And every hand you get a different anonymous opponent. So basically you have no prior knowledge about your opponent, and your opponent doesn't know you. That would be a really boring game, and mostly number crunching.

So the bot can probably play optimally better than a human, but optimal play just ends up in a draw (or a loss if there's rake) for both parties.

It sounds like they've finally gotten the bot to where it can exploit human tendencies. If so, that's seriously impressive.

Game theory dude.

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