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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

And then there’s all the bots you aren’t spotting.

I'm sure there is some, but it's standard practice to keep at database of all your hands. I've sanity checked the winning regs (at my stakes) and they all make mistakes. I think it helps that in the US all the sites are geography based. It makes it harder and less financially viable to run a bot ring.

I don't know what a reg is but I would assume the first thing you do after you get your bot working is to add some imperfect play so that you don't get banned by the most trivial heuristics.

Yeah. Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. The hard part is making it look authentic and not emit any patterns or other signals that could be detected in the data.

So it's a cat and mouse game like most things, except the spread between the cat and the mouse is quite high but is still (somewhat) in favour of the mouse as the online poker world currently stands?

> Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot

Writing a winning poker bot is not trivial, you are unknowingly spreading false information.

Hmm… there are multiple variants of poker, at least one was weakly solved in 2015. I guess one could implement their algorithm. But I don’t know if the weakly solved variant of poker is popular?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheus_(poker_bot)

That bot only solved 1-on-1 poker ("heads up"). It's much more difficult with more players.

> Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot.

How so? It's not like the entire game state is visible to all players, and a big part of poker is playing the other players.

The best human poker players are able to calculate pot odds in their heads. Much of gambling is understanding when the risk of any given bet is actually worth it. Reading people and playing the other players is less important than understanding the likelihood of drawing the card you want and how that compares to the percentage of profit you’ll make on a bet.

It's exceedingly hard to play perfectly. Nobody knows how except in limited toy games, like heads up at 7BBs or less. And perfect play varies drastically from opponent to opponent, this isn't blackjack.

Reg means regular, ie someone who plays a lot. Usually but not always it implies someone who is a winning or at least attempting to be a winning player

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