Artificial Intelligence in Poker

Markian Hlynka writes "The University of Alberta's research into Poker AI is featured in this New York Times article. There is also detailed discussion of the game of Poker, and the 'new breed' of players who have honed their abilities online. See the U of A's poker project for more information."

No intelligence is nessasary

to Poker.

She'll probably want dinner first, though.

sign in front of a speak-easy:

Poker in the front, Liquor in the rear.

Another

New York Times article reviewed. Gotta put an end to this.

NYT WANTS TO STEAL YOUR THOUGHTS!

Please, please, PLEASE! I cannot stress this enough, never, ever, for any reason, register to read a New York Times story! THEY WANT TO STEAL YOUR BRAIN!

If you register online to read a story, their spybots automatically pin down your location using an algorithm based on the well-know scientifical principal that YOUR COMPUTER IS TRANSMITTING AN IP ADDRESS! Using this "IP ADDRESS", they can scan MSN mapquest [msn.com] and find out where you live. Once they have that information, it is a simple matter to send a priority override to point the NSA mind-control satellites (when they're not otherwise busy zapping agriglyphs into English wheatfields) at your house to read your mind. Then they steal your precious intellectual property, which they license to SCO!

Hmm

Great, now the machines will get to shake every last penny out of me too.

Strip Poker Games

If the AI is too good, we can't get the girls naked.

Mmm, EGA boobies...

Difference AI and live poker.

With an AI opponent you play so the opponent loses their clothes as fast as possible.

With a live opponent you play so you both lose your clothes at approximatly the same rate.

Got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em

And when to use a Beowulf cluster to simulate every possible strategy.

Poker AI? riight...

Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.

Daniel

Re:Poker AI? riight...

reading the article is too much I see.

it references that and points out how much of "reading the player" is overhyped and easily faked out.

whereas the real information is in the trade at hand - the exchange of money. watching the bets and the amounts in them at varying spots in the game.

I have a few friends that have won online tournaments and they approach it from a very mathematical point of view. They do very well in person or over the net.
Using the "read" approach, unless the read is of the play on the table, is only going to work with people that aren't aware of the read and therefore not faking the attributes.

I personally prefer to look for the security holes in the online software :)
(There was a famous one in '96 or so where the system was using the random function built in - I think in Turbo Pascal IIRC - they had it exposed by posting their random code on the net to prove that they were being fair. A consulting firm then exploited that to show that they only needed to see one or two cards beyond what was in their card to then show what everyone else in the game was holding... there is much higher security in it all these days, and better/smarter programming).

Another firend in college found a site that had a hole, not in the security, but in the method at which they gave out tokens - as long as you kept playing, there was a reward of some number of tokens as an incentive to keep you playing.
He then ran some numbers and proved that with that, they were open to an exploit of the Martingale system. He ran it on them for a good amount of time and it failed - he basically proved that their code was cheating on the inside.
He called them on it and after a few heated e-mails, got all his money back and was banned from the site.
I could go on and on - but that is going off topic.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

>he house, being a corporation, has an obligation to maximize its profits in any way possible

And when the last corporation uses the last gram of uranium to power the machine that sucks up the last drop of oil which they use to cut down the last tree on the planet to turn into paper money which they use to bribe the last honest politician, it will be a great comfort to us all that they are only doing it because capitalism obligates them to.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

He then ran some numbers and proved that with that, they were open to an exploit of the Martingale system.

What sort of 'exploit' of Martingale [guide2casino.com] is this? Martingale is ultimately always a losing strategy unless 1) there is no house limit and 2) you have an infinite supply of cash.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet

Except that people play a certain way and develop easily (especially for an AI) recognizable patterns. Those patterns are just as recognizable, perhaps even more so online where the number of hands played per hour is so much greater.

Players can get broken loosely (particularly for Texas Holdem, but also for other games) into a small group of profiles and their play patterned according to that.

While an academic study may be new, commercial software to do this has been available for years. In particular Turbo Texas Holdem from Wilson software does an outstanding job of simulating different types of players and play conditions

and if you really believe that people skills and not card or math skills are all that you need, I'd invite you to come to Atlantic City and sit in any of the games I regularly attend. We'd love to have you.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

Yes and no. For limit hold 'em, there is an (approximately) "correct" way to play based on pot odds, likelihood of drawing the hand you need, etc. Early rounds of no-limit tournies approximate this, with the occasional all-in raise to shake things up, but I'd have to agree with you that in later rounds against clearly competent players, no-limit is very much a social game.

Which leads to the larger issue: poker is a game of incomplete information; you don't KNOW what your opponent holds. You can make estimations based on past play and game conventions (eg, a bet from early position usually indicates AA, KK, or AK), but you don't know for sure, and this raises the possibility of deception.

The problem with that is, game theory generally models strategies to combat players who are playing (rationally) to win. Not all players play like this, or at least not apparently based on the strength of cards. I think most emulators are going to get screwed on bluffs.

But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help (Lee Jones: "generally, you're going to have to show down with the best hand to win"), so a decent AI could at least maintain a winning margin, and so could an actual human who played tightly enough to take advantage of this. I don't know. You sure can't make zillions playing cards online, and it's definitely a while before the "deep blue" of poker.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

> But still, in lower-limit games, people are loose enough that bluffing doesn't really help

I recently heard a serious poker player on the radio explaining why it's worth bluffing sometimes.
If you don't bluff and lose sometimes, then when you _do_ have a good hand, you won't win much with it. You need your opponents to think "he could be just bluffing again, it's worth raising".

He was playing in high-stakes games though.

Re:Poker AI? riight...

You're partly right. No-limit hold'em is about things like bluffing. The kinds of poker most people play in public cardrooms (mostly limit hold'em and stud) are more about the cards, although understanding your opponents is critical to doing well at either one. Either way, online poker has a lot to offer. It's still about understanding your opponents, you just don't get as much information by way of physical behavior. There are tons of bad players online -- players who make fundamental mistakes (i.e., don't play their cards well) and who don't adjust to their opponents well (both in failing to take proper advantage and in playing easily exploited strategies). It's true that the game isn't the same at all. But many of the differences are positive, and like live poker, it's still a game of skill (a fact that's well obscured by short-term variance).

(Blatant plug: I'm a little biased, the new edition of my book ("Serious Poker," an introduction to the serious game) has a chapter on online poker. But I do believe online poker has a lot to offer, and the sites do offer poker for play money as well.)

Re:Poker AI? riight...

Think that's frightening?

Check out this article [msoworld.com] on the Second International Roshambo (Rock Paper Scissors) Programming Contest. It's actually quite interesting to understand some of the justifications and rationalles that go into attemping to win at a normally un-winnable game:

Game theorists have analysed rock-paper-scissors and come to the conclusion that the optimal way to win a game of rock-paper-scissors is to play completely randomly; random play will win as many throws as it loses and hence draw every match. However, consider trying to win a tournament by drawing every match!

Therefore, when trying to win a rock-paper-scissors tournament, you should assume that players will be trying to win the whole event and hence will not be playing optimally. Therefore you shouldn't play optimally - instead, you should figure out how to play in order to beat your opponent.

Gem

I was following various links about the topic (artificial intelligence and poker) when I found this little gem. Wicked awesome site design, so I can only assume that his software building skills are as magnificent: POKER WITH AI-LEARNING [webepcc.unex.es]

I say we help him beta test not only his program, but also help him stress-test his web server.

If it's "Smart Poker"

Then does the AI cheat?

Article Text

For those who don't want to subscribe:

WHEN an accountant named Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million in the World Series of Poker last May, the chatter in the poker world wasn't focused on his skillful bluffing, his tremendous luck or even the aptness of his surname. Everyone wanted to know how a man who had never before sat down at a tournament table could clean out so many skilled professionals.

While the Las Vegas hype machine focused on the rags-to-riches tale of a man who parlayed a $40 entrance fee into a huge pot, many poker players recognized that the amateur's success signaled the arrival of a new age in the game. Mr. Moneymaker may never have been in the same room as other players in a tournament of Texas Hold'em poker, but he had played extensively online, where the game is faster but the money is just as real. He was as much a rookie as Ichiro Suzuki, who joined the Seattle Mariners after nine years in the Japanese major leagues.

The online poker saloons that nurtured Mr. Moneymaker, 27, are just the beginning. Many players hone their craft with simulation software that allows them to test strategies by playing out thousands or even millions of hands. Some researchers are building software opponents that use sophisticated concepts from economics and artificial intelligence to seek out the best strategy, then use the knowledge to beat human players. The experience of playing thousands of games in roadhouses and casinos is being eclipsed by a cyborg-like intelligence produced by humans weaned on machine play.

The changes in the nature of the game are both subtle and striking. The advantages of some well-understood strategies are being tuned, and others are being abandoned. Some online enthusiasts, for instance, are even suggesting that the value of any information gleaned from watching the opponent's body for telltale tics or gestures is overrated. These so-called tells are too easily manipulated. More information comes in the pattern of bets, raises and calls. The money, they say, talks.

The biggest factor propelling change may be the speed of technology. Players do not wait while someone shuffles and deals. Chips do not need to be counted or watched. Computers handle the accounting, often finishing hands in as little as 30 seconds.

Steve Badger, the editor of the Web site playwinningpoker.com and winner of the 1999 World Series in a game called Omaha Hi-Lo, says that online poker halls are appealing because of their convenience.

"You could play them every day," he said. "You're able to play two games at the same time. Or you can sit and read or vacuum or do any infinite number of things while waiting for the next hand."

The online halls also offer substantially better rates. Most casinos pay for the lights and the dealer by subtracting either a fixed amount or a percentage from the pot. This levy, known as the rake, is often about $3 to $5 a hand in physical casinos, but about $1 or less online.

The rake depends on the stakes, which can be lower than those at physical casinos. Some online tables have minimum bets as low as 25 cents, an amount that makes learning the game cheaper. The speed of the game, however, ends up raising the amount at risk because 60 to 100 hands can be played in an hour. Higher minimum bets of $5, $10 or more are also common at tables with the better players.

Gautam Rao, a well-known Canadian player, said he stopped going to casinos in 2000, not long after his daughter was born, "because of the smoke and distance.''

"I told my wife I had to find a way to play online," he said. Now, he is able to play every night between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. while his daughter sleeps in the next room.

"The rake is much less," he said. "The number of hands is much more. There are never any misdeals. There are never any issues related to tipping. The average cost of winning a pot is so much less. It's so much more efficient."

The speed of play lets players work through the thousands of apprentice hands faste

Sigh....

I'm a big fan of fair use. I hate the DMCA. But behavior like this just makes me wonder. The free registration at the NYT is not that much of a pain. Sheesh. The newspaper world is being very cool, at least compared to the music and movie business. Let them make a few bucks on the ads so they can pay me.

Why poker?

Q: Why is poker such a good topic for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research?

A: Excellent question! Please see the introductory sections of our academic papers, and Darse's M.Sc. research essay for a detailed explanation.

Excellent indeed! But how about a brief explanation for the impatient?

Poker?

Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?

Not always what you expect

I played strip poker with this computer I met in university once. Things were going great until I popped off the cover and found a positively ancient motherboard.

Gross! It was like I'd just walked in on my Walkman(TM) while it was rewinding.

It's all about the odds

To create a poker AI you just have to figure out what the odds are of getting something after your first hand. Then based on odds the computer will decide which cards to get rid of and which to go for. This will typically result in the computer not going for the long shot royal flush and instead going for the safer full house which is more likely to happen.

A computer theoretically could be as good or even better than the average human at poker. It is able to calculate the odds of winning and is therefore able to make the best choice possible.

What would be really amazing would be if the computer was able to calculate based on how many cards other players turn in and adjust itself as neccesary.

Can you imagine having to try to look at the computer and imagine if it is bluffing? Talk about poker face...

Re:It's all about the odds

Your thoughts on odds are valid. However, the AI here plays Hold'em, which is very different from Draw. In addition to calculating the odds it has to account for the betting of each player on the different streets. It would be interesting if it could tell if a player was playing slow or just limping in. It would probably be difficult to figure from just one hand but over the course of a session the computer (just like real players) is going to pick up on the betting habits of the players. When I get off work I'm going to go try this thing out. If it's better than me it can only help improve my game.

Poker face recognition

is it included?

Tells

You can never learn the true art of poker unless you can read the other players tells, and unless the computer also throws in virtual signs I doubt cyber players could ever climb the ranks.

Re:Tells

You should read the article. A computer isn't intimidated by bluffing or aggression, and it has a better capability to analyze betting patterns, pot odds, and drawing odds.

If you've got AK(s) and the computer has a pair of tens, your raising T$100,000 might scare some meat players out, but given the circumstances, the computer might just call you and win.

Tell me...

How do you bluff a computer?

Re:Tell me...

You have to type in little poker face emoticons. :-/

Re:Tell me...

RTFA...One of the things covered is that bluffing and reading tells, although effective at taking the occasional hand and a marginally winning strategy, is not as effective as it is given credit in the Poker Community. A better long term strategy is just playing strong hole card positions (especially in Hold-em, where 5/7 of the ending hand is the same between all players.)

Now, they also say the machine has to be able to bluff, but the trick was to get it to do it the right amount, and at the right time postionally. Reading the opponent isn't as important as seeing the right situation in the cards.

Re:Tell me...

You RTFA:

Peter Muller, a friend of Mr. Rao's who has played against the same bot, said the approximations in the game-theory model left a weakness and limited the bot's chances to do more than break even. Game-theory models usually assume that every player uses the best possible strategy, something that rarely if ever happens with humans.

"An optimal game theoretic strategy might ensure that you don't lose, but it won't be effective at exploiting an opponent's weaknesses," Mr. Muller said. "The best players learn how to exploit predictability, but don't do it often enough so that the opponents catch on."

In other words, it's easy to bluff a computer; you just play strongly and it'll assume you have a good hand and probably fold to you. Unless it's got a good hand, in which case you're screwed. Or if it has adoptive modelling that remembers how often you bluff, then you're REALLY screwed. Generally, though, it sounds like the Alberta AI just plays tightly, using "classes" of hands to avoid getting confused by the billions of possible hands, which does limit losses, but doesn't generally win big.

Addiction?

Now, he is able to play every night between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. while his daughter sleeps in the next room.

If this was UT or Quake, this entire article would be about how he was destroying his life, and getting ready to go on a rampage.

But instead, its just a game of cards, and he's gambling with his family's money, but thats OK.

The Algorithm

while(handSucks)
{
screen.displayPopupAdForPorn(); // distract user
hand.throwWorstCardUnderTable();
hand.pullAceFromSleeve();
}

Of course, the bot doesn't cheat:

"""Q: Why are the bots such filthy rotten cheaters?!?!

A: Poki does not cheat. Poki connects to the online server just like any other player, and does not have access to any other player's private cards. The server's random number generator is sound (although not as sophisticated as most online servers). Any weird or suspicious outcomes are simply the result of luck . This is a normal part of poker. If you believe otherwise, you are more than welcome to play somewhere else.""" (from the FAQ)

I mean, come on - it's a normal part of poker :)

I limit my online gambling to two games:

knock hockey
curling

Never knew how many people don't RTFA...

Wow... Almost all the top-level posts on this article can be replied to with RTFA...

I didn't realize just how bad the problem was..

For non-robots, a simplified poker method

I have never been any good at poker... in high school, playing nickel-ante poker, I lost about $25 to just one of my friends. Typically, after about 15 minutes of play, everyone was playing with "my" money.

But recently, I spent some quality time with a hand-held poker game, and played the "hundreds or thousands" of games as described in the article. Not enough to become an expert, but I did come up with a technique to make my 100 credits last longer.

I hacked away as much complexity as I could. The heart of my method is to forget about the effect of getting two cards you need. The chances of getting two specific cards is something like 1/52 * 1/52 = 1/2704 -- too small to care about. So the entire method is about the next card.

Of course, I put it online: How To Lose Less At Video Poker [littlecutie.net]. At the risk of slashdotting my own server, I'm curious if anyone can find any obvious flaws in the method.

I found this Java-based tutorial [wizardofodds.com] that purports to generate the "optimum payout" -- it often disagrees with me, presumably because it's trying for big payouts. My method doesn't promise profit, only smaller losses.

An important disclaimer: I've never used my method with any non-trivial amount of actual cash. Here in Texas, there are video poker machines in every Quickie Mart, but I just don't see the appeal. Now, if they would put in a Pac-Man [salon.com] machine...

"Artificial Intelligence" in Poker- INDEED

"Artificial Intelligence" is common in home poker games-Its called BEER

The trick is to make sure your opponents are sufficiently fueled by "Artificial Inteligence" and you will come out way ahead

The New York Times

Can Slashdot please do one of the following:

• Not cover stories from the New York Times; there are plenty of other web news sources that don't require registration
• Arrange with the NYT so that links from Slashdot don't have to register
• Put an option on users' preferences page so that they have an option never to see any story with a link to the NYT.

Unix friendly online rooms?

Okay, I know this is a lil' off topic, but as one of the (presumably) many slashdot readers who play poker...has anyone found an online poker room that you can play for real $$$ where I don't need to download some windowsware to play?

I've toyed around with the java-based yahoo rooms (which last I checked, didn't have a real $$$ option). All of the big name poker rooms that I've seen through friends require a windows based client. I've been dying to give it a try.

I'd also be interested in anything anyone wants to post under this thread about poker room security. Are there many malicous online poker room opponents out there? I've seen a few cases where someone was about to sweep in a hold'em hand, holding the nuts(*), only to be booted off the game at the last second...any thoughts?

(*) Attn Trolls: This is an actual poker term.

Oh this is great

now we got Uniblab. Next we get the little jet cars that fold up into a briefcase? The nine hour work week, though - now that's science fiction.

Good, let's forget about chess...

Chess "AI" is really pointless. All that is needed for playing chess is a fast computer and lots of stored moves, mainly because the number of possible moves is quite finite.

While poker is an interest game to tackle, I think I'd have to agree with others here that it is more of a people game and hard to a machine to understand the nuances of "bluffing" and other things that we silly humans do.

What I'd really like to see is computer AI able of playing the Japanese/Chinese board game called Go at advanced levels.

As it is right now, the best Go AI is only at intermediate levels it terms of skill. Here is a URL comparing Chess to Go...

http://www.villagenet.com/users/bradleym/Compare.h tml [villagenet.com]

At The Sands

Bad enough I have to play with newbies at the blackjack tables, now I have to play with HAL at the poker table...

"Fold Dave..."

How Computers can win at poker

Poker is primarily an odds game, that is to say it is all math. There are three places where a decision has to be made. The first decision is, "Should I pay to see the next card?" This is called Drawing. The second decision is, "I have a decent hand, but my opponent raised me. Is he bluffing?". The third decision is, "Should I try to bluff?".

Odds come into play everywhere. When you are Drawing, you must have the correct odds or else you will lose money in the long run. That is to say, if you have a 1 in 4 chance of hitting your straight on the next card, you must have at least 3:1 odds to Draw. (The pot must have $3 for every $1 you pay). There is also the concept of "implied odds" - predicting how much will be in the pot at the end of the hand and not just at the present.

When deciding whether or not to bluff, you must know the odds of your bluff succeeding, and add that to the odds of you hitting your out on the next card. At that point the calculation becomes the same pot-odds calculation described above. This involves some reading of your opponent; you have to know how often he will call, and how often the bluff will be sucessful. Luckily, computers can be pretty good at modeling and seeing patterns, probably much better than humans. It seems that Neural nets and other well-developed AI techniques would be very good at modeling these behaviors and predicting future ones. Calling bluffs will require the same type of knowledge.

Some have asked how it's possible to read patterns on the internet. Some people don't really have patterns in their game, they just call everything. These people will lose because they put too much money in the pot, they don't have the odds for the bets and calls they're making. Mostly, decent players have patterns in how they bet, for example they will bet when they only have 4 out of 5 flush cards. (A Semi-bluff). Computers have an advantage here because they can introduce a random element that humans cannot reproduce.

The recent winner of the World Series of Poker, Chris Moneymaker, had never played in a live game until the WSOP, he had only played internet games. This probably gave him good fundamentals in reading people based on their bets, and good math fundamentals.

Some have also questioned the wiseness of playing internet poker, since it is just "gambling". Well I'll tell you a little secret, poker isn't really gambling, poker is a skill game and especially with so many bad players out there who think it is just luck, hoping they'll get lucky, it's easy to win money. That's why the same players consistently win thousands of dollars online. For more information on poker strategy and reviews of online casinos, see this site: PokerTips.org [pokertips.org]

Poker!!!

Markian Hlynka! That's not a REAL name. I call your bluff.

It could be harder than one could imagine...

Some people I have spoken with few days ago about this research told me they are worried that if the intelligence is too high this AI could refuse to risk its money gambling... I am not quite sure if they were serious though.

A Poker Computer Program That Bluffs

In "Poker playing computer will take on the best," the Edmonton Journal wrote last June (the article is no longer available for free) that there was a new poker player in town "that never sweats, never gets tired, never tips a hand and can still bluff with the best of them.

University of Alberta artificial intelligence researchers bet their new poker computer program will be the best player in the world, perhaps within a year." And why will it the best player? Because it bluffs.

"You have to bluff," says Jonathan Schaeffer, who heads up the university's Games Research Group and who already has a world-champion checkers computer program under his belt. "If you do not bluff, you're predictable. If you're predictable, you can be exploited."

This kind of program could be used whenever you have to deal with imperfect information, like buying a new car. You can find more details and references in this summary [weblogs.com].

Why Not Have the Computer Play for You Perfectly?

I've wondered why no one has come up with a system to play online casino poker with a "perfect" algorithm.

Start it with $50 bucks and let it play...

If the case is that you would always lose, even playing "perfectly" what are your chances playing imperfectly?

If you win more often than not... let it play nightly and up it's bets.

What am I missing?

From the code download page

This is not the full source code to Pokibot. Do not ask us for it. If it is not posted here, it is not open source.

Not open source? <saltyPirateVoice>Man yer battlestation maties! We'll slashdot'em into submission </saltyPirateVoice>

please, please put down the computer!

Invite several people over, buy a deck of cards and a pack of beer, and play. Just turn off the computer if you feel the need to code a quick AI in lisp. It will be there for you later, ready to greet you.

Poker isn't Blackjack

You're missing that the bot is playing against people (presumably). Don't think of poker as being like blackjack, think of it as being like chess. There is always a right play in blackjack. In poker, as with chess, there are plays that are better than others but not necessarily a right play. The randomness of the cards is not a significant factor (the poker bot would only make "good" bets (reward>risk)), but the randomness of the players is. A check-raise bluff might be a good move, but a bot can't predict whether the player who is on tilt is going to call, re-raise or fold. Nor can it force players to play rationally and therein lies the problem. Look at players like Gus Hansen and Dan Negreanu who are completely unpredictable but win money because they can bully the table around.

A bot could run disadvantaged blackjack (you can't count cards online, so the best you can do is play perfect basic strategy and eat the ~0.5% house advantage), but that's an inherently losing proposition (and the casinos have banned them now anyway).

Texas No-Limit Hold Em

Poker has had quite a resurgence as of late, both due to online play and media coverage. Chris Moneymaker was on Letterman one night and the World Poker Tour [worldpokertour.com] can be caught on the Travel Channel and sometimes older ones on ESPN or ESPN2. It's actually fairly enjoyable to watch. Nothing like seeing a guy go all in with for 800 grand on a stone cold bluff whilst his opponent has a pair (you see the hole cards on the tv broadcasts, at least on the Travel Channel). Some talk smack, some wear sunglasses, some play conservative, though most are fairly aggressive. I've learned quite a bit by watching them play. As others have mentioned and as the article alludes to, the game is more mathematical than reading your opponents, but that's not really what I've seen from watching the pros on the WPT. It's all about the people, the chips, the cards, and the math all seem secondary to your read on your opponent and your style and reputation. It's all very interesting, I suggest you catch a broadcast.

Ro-Sham-Bo

This reminds me of strategies for programming Ro-Sham-Bo (Rock, Scissors, Paper). The "safest" strategy would be to randomly choose rock, scissors, or paper every time. Your winning percentage would approach 50%, but so would your opponent's. Ah, but if you're competing against other pairs of players, and they're all following that strategy, then it's just dumb luck who will win. For there to be any point to the competition, you have to assume your opponent has some non-random strategy, such that you could beat it and get >50% wins if you could figure out what it was. Of course, your opponent is making the same assumptions about you. And so begins a world of strategies on how to make your opponent think you're being predictable, when you're really just fooling him into making a choice you can predict. Of course, if your opponent knows you're fooling him, he will then know you're intention and gain the advantage. And so on and so on (similarities to the Iocaine Powder sequence from the Princess Bride are more than coincidence [ualberta.ca]).

I just wanted to point that out as a counter to the posts advocating a purely statistical approach in which the program folds anything not likely to win. In the optimal case (there is no house rake, no ante, and no bluffing) it is as interesting as flipping a coin to see who wins. And even a small amount of bluffing will cause it to lose.

Does anyone play checkers anymore?

No, it's not a troll. :-)

But a few years ago, checkers was solved as a mathematical problem. There is a computer program that can play a perfect game of checkers, all the time. That project was headed by Jonathan Schaeffer, one of the people involved in this Poker AI project.

Just a footnote, to let you all know that this group has some serious history in gaming AI.

An advantage?

Since the guy would won the World Series of Poker, was strictly an internet player, wouldn't this be an advantage?

None of the other players would have had time to study him and know his habits, yet he would have alot of experience playing poker.

Then again I rarely play poker, so I could be missing something.

Thoughts?

God damn it, read the article before responding

It's about low stakes Texas Hold'em [thepokerforum.com]. As I'm preaching to people who don't follow links, I'll explain that in hold'em, your hand is drawn from the best five out of your two personal ("pocket") cards, plus five common ("board") cards that everyone can see and use. You can even just play the five common cards if they're better than that 8 in your pocket. You tend to get strong hands, but then again so does everyone else. Hold'em is generally played with big tables, so chances are that someone has a strong hand each round. You don't get extended rounds of raising, and there are no huge wins to be made. Coming out on top of a night of hold'em involves long term risk management, not a single guts-or-glory Hollywood dramatic climax.

As for bluffing, go ahead and try. There are only four rounds of betting on each hand. Experienced players will fold early, so you won't get much of their money anyway, and excitable noobs will tend to stick it out and call you out with their regular full houses and flushes, making it expensive for you to try to bluff. You'll quickly find yourself playing to your hand, not to the other players, and you won't (indeed, can't) get yourself into a steely eyes, car-keys-in-the-pot ego clash.

I wish, I wish, oh how I wish people wouldn't predicate their discussions based on what they've learned from Mel Gibson movies.

better feature..

A better feature would be a tutorial on how to count cards. If you don't know how to count cards or use decent strategy, the old crappy poker AI has a pretty good shot at winning.

Wow, that's kinda neat...

The first ever complex program I wrote was, in fact, an attempt to make an intelligent poker player. It was written in BASIC for an IBM with an 8086 processor and about 7-feet long when printed out. It made ASCII representations of the cards and I had my own random number generator that used the time the program started as the "seed" value. It had an independent routine for "bluffing" and made it's more rational decisions based upon what I was to eventually learn was a pretty decent implementation of "fuzzy logic". ...problem is, it played lousy poker...and I could never figure out why. At least it followed the rules though.

helluva poker face

I had to say it: A computer would have a helluva poker face. No really, I am not going to bother reading the article now (maybe later), but is this article about probability factoring on a card deck, or are we talking about a computer that plays poker? Knowing what cards your opponents hold is half reading the cards, half reading the opponents.

nice little game

realpoker [realpoker.com] is a pretty nice little online poker game. They don't tell you what hand you got, so you've gotta analyze things yourself... and you see when the other players are checking their cards so there's still some body language going on.. wish they had more avatars tho but still... good place to get some practice before going to the real thang! i've only played play money tho.. so players probably play more aggressively than they would in a real money situation..

Loki

There was a large push made by some great mathematicians in coordination with poker proffesional to make a poker "robot" they called Loki. What they found was over a large period of time it could be profitable at low limit tables, playing limit hold'em. However, once the game changed to no-limit, there was simply no way for it to deal with the fluctuating betting amounts. It could pick up on patterns and beat many online limit players.

I would be willing to bet that they could design a sophisticated enough program to beat even higher-limit limit hold'em games, but I'm guessing right now they weren't quite confident enough to trust it with a serious bankroll!

A poker bot which could play in no-limit tournaments would be almost impossible to program, as anyone who has played in no-limit tourneys know, its very different from cash games. Sorry if anyone allready posted about this, I didnt have time to read everything...

samantha fox

when this is released to consumers, i will use the poker AI to beat c64's 'samantha fox strip poker'!

Listen - they want a REAL test?

Give the thing 10 grand US and send it to Binion's for the World Poker Championship...

THEN we'll see how intelligent it is.

(Of course, the computer will probably show up late, hung over and broke, it being his first time in Vegas, after all....)

Re:very interesting

really? Do you have any more information about this? Deep Blue has extra instructions for dealing with facial expressions? Please provide some additional information -- as far as I can tell, Deep Blue is a pure chess program. The IBM technicians type in "b2 - b4" and Deep Blue responds "g7 - g5," etc. Does it have a camera? Or do the IBM techs type in "Kasparov grimaces. b4 - b5." Or are you totally full of shit?

Re:Rubbish

Don't forget Data, now there's a robot who can play poker.