Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

The most important piece of information seems to be missing. What's the stack depth? In the AAAI HUNL competition it's 200 big blinds which is significantly harder to be good at than 100 big blinds which is the standard for online HU play.

I think you can actually build a fairly competitive HU bot for 100bb games with very simple means (rules based with a bit of statistics thrown in, no opponent modelling or advanced features or learning). At 200bb it's a lot harder and researchers that approach it from an "understanding of the game" POV rather than a "pure computation" POV have a tougher time.

Edit: I only know Doug (aka WCGRider). Wish they would play against Ike Haxton, jungleman12, sauce123, Galfond or Durrr

>it's 200 big blinds which is significantly harder to be good at than 100 big blinds which is the standard for online HU play.

I'm quite surprised by this!

100bb has higher variance and therefore more luck, where 200bb has lower variance

So, I would say the 200bb tournament rewards skilled (human) players more effectively. As a skilled player, I would seek out the 200bb tournaments.

My immediate thought would be that a computer player would be rewarded better in the 200bb tournament.

But, even in the 200bb situation, players will have to play short stacked some of the time. Perhaps the difficulty for bots is the requirement of changeable modes here?

They're not playing tournament style. The blinds are fixed and I think the players stacks are reset before each hand.

The smaller the effective stacks, the better it would be for a bot. For instance, below 15bb stacks, a bot could just play nash equilibrium and be unexploitable. By definition, the human would have to do the same, or become -ev by deviating one way or another.

The fact that every hand starts at 200bb's in this challenge is actually very good for humanity.

On another note, it's very interesting to see that the bot found independently that huge overbets on the river are close to optimal. This is something that only recently some top HU pro's started incorporating in their games.

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