Personally, I'd rather see resources go into a robot that can cook for me but development follows the money I suppose.
Although Super System was written for all different types of poker, he is referring to no-limit holdem which still involves playing the player, with heavy math elements as well, but still much more psychology involved. Hence the name, you can bet any amount at any time changing the dynamic entirely. There is still no computer that is efficient at winning no-limit hold-em.
... and there won't be for a long time yet, as all hobbyist and academic efforts have been focused towards a consistently winning limit bot, because of the reason you outlined.
I'd settle for a robot that makes me a salad. That's one of the projects I might work on, once my current project, a robot that grows me a salad (automicrofarm.com), is successful.
A simple example, common stats software for poker will record what % of hands an opponent raises on the button if it's folded to him. If this figure is 80% you know his hand range is extremely wide. "Playing the man" simply is recognising that in this situation your opponents hand range is very wide so you can often raise the bet and take the pot without further resistance.
'Playing the man' is essentially building a mathematical model of one's opponent internally inside one's head.
Notice they tackle limit texas hold'em to keep the mathematics within reach. That's the time of crunching we're taking about. No-limit is impossible at this time. Not only will they need incredible computing power, but they also need the math to run it all, which remains unsolved. Could they use Sklansky's theory of Poker along with other optimal playing mathematics to win? Sure. But creating an unbeatable computer player? That is the incredible challenge.
Isn't this obvious?
Not at all. This article certainly doesn't imply it and it would be illegal.
Do you have any evidence of that being done?
You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...
No, I'm not.
>You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment?
No I didn't make that generalized statement. What I did say was that in this particular case that hypothesis is of low probability:
1) The people building the machines don't make money on poker playing, but by selling them to casinos
2) The article explicitly mentions that they actually have a machine that plays too well and that they've had to dumb it down to give players enough of an incentive to play. So there's no need to cheat.
3) Casinos are heavily regulated and their hardware is known to be verified more thoroughly than both ATMs and voting machines. You don't risk a billion dollar business to nickel and dime a few customers.
4) Casinos make their money milking gambling addicts, making sure they don't take their money fast enough that they'll give up. Fixing the games would only reduce their variance not their final outcome and they have enough scale that the variance isn't high at all.
>Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...
Adding a bunch of exclamations does not an argument make.
So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?
When I lose, how do I know? How can I be sure that it has not dealt itself favorably? It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me. It does not matter what the law says, which are the incentives, how they are generating profit, ... As long as the machine can theoretically deal itself a good hand, I am not playing it.
And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either.
Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.
No, I never said you could be sure of that. What I do argue is that no one has much of an incentive to cheat you in this case.
>It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me.
Don't change the subject. The discussion was around if they were doing it. We all know it could be done, that's why we discussed this in the first place.
>And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either. Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.
That's fine. You require 100% certainty of not cheating and this machine doesn't offer it. That is in no way an argument to say that they are in fact cheating. It's not even an argument to say that the probability that they are indeed cheating is very small (which is what I argued).
It's perfectly legal to make games that, bound by physics and probability, pay more to the casino than the players. There is no need to cheat, get it?
The only thing casinos need to work at is attracting a bigger slice of the pie to their games.
You, and nobody, will not notice small probabilistic variations. Whenever you discover it (let us say, 30 years from now), you will be told that there was a difficult to find bug in the random generator. Nobody will be prosecuted.
It could be a couple of lines of code in a subsystem somewhere, available only to a handful of engineers, and understood only by two of them - both of them with nice bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.
I suspect it does perfectly count cards that it has seen in its hand or community cards. This seems okay as well-trained human players can do the same. I suspect the machine would get even more play if this were obvious, maybe if it played at a table with a real dealer and could read community cards on the table. The technology to do this certainly exists.
The computer calls ... and deals itself a full house. I am bankrupt :( How do I know? How can I ever trust playing poker with a machine, when it is doing the dealing?
Or, let me put it this way: I will play any machine, no limit, if I can do the dealing (secretly, that is, as the machine is doing).
Another issue entirely is chess: no secret dealing going on. All are playing with the same in-game information.
A default position of mistrust when it comes to gambling is a healthy and safe attitude.
1) This is (fixed) limit Hold'em; you can't suddenly go all-in.
2) You ask how you could trust the machine. It would be trivial to keep track of all hands played and show that in the situations like the one you describe, the computer only makes a full house the expected ~9% of the times.