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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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