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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions randomness, incomplete information, and how often to bluff, but I don't see anything about tells. Unlike humans, computers are excellent at hiding their bluffs and their excitement at holding a royal strait. Hiding tells doesn't matter in checkers or chess, but it's essential in poker.

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Tells, in the sense of ticks and such, are mainly ignored by good poker players. The board situation is where the info is at. A good player won't go thinking "its sweety! he could bluff", but instead "his range based on previous hands on this position is X so I estimate a chance Y for him to bluff".

Computers do have a great advantage by ignoring the whole psycho layer and focus on data only.

That's not true. I played and studied poker for a many years, and I will say for certain that physical cues is a huge part of live games, and definitely not ignored by good players.

It's not ignored, but it's not a 'huge part' of the game.

It's one of thousands of factors that weigh in, and in my mind, one of the least important factors.

I've played several million hands of poker fwiw.

The usefulness of physical tells has been wildly exaggerated to make poker in TV/movies more interesting. They can be useful, but betting patterns are far more important.

Not really. If the goal is to maximize profit then tells allow you to make (game theory) suboptimal plays to maximally exploit your opponent. Something the bot would never do. A real player could thus win more money off players with tells, or weaker players in general.

The bot just plays an unexploitable strategy where at best you break even against it, given you never make a mistake.

In online/computer poker, there are a lot less tells. In fact the only tells are bet sizing (which is static in limit hold 'em, which is the main reason it is easier to solve), and the timing of bets/checks/folds.

Tells in online poker amount to bet sizing and bet timing tells. Both of which good humans find easy to hide.

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