Ask HN: Does anyone play poker or program a poker bot/engine?
Random thing here but I've never really played poker or really knew how the game worked - on a whim learned the hand rankings and played online (free) for a couple hours last night. It is very fun and a lot more interesting than I gave it credit before.
The first thing that jumped out at me are the AI/bot considerations when playing online. I was surprised the bots weren't betting bigger when they had good hands. And also curious the logic they consider when human players are playing "aggressive".
I'm not a gambler or much of a gamer at all (cribbage is fun with friends) but poker has been sort of a breath of fresh air into my mind. I don't intend to start playing for money or anything crazy but just wanted to see if other folks play and maybe the format they use (online, with friends, professionally etc.)
The website I was using is 247freepoker.com and didn't really feel there was much variance in the AI behavior between easy/medium/hard modes (compared to something like chess) - but am also curious what programming considerations would be made in different AI difficulty levels.
This is a broad submission but what the heck i'm going all in on it. Any thoughts or tips for online playing/ways to mix things up/ or general strategy (for playing or programming a bot) are welcomed
Cheers