6 ms·

Seriously, even a phone without internet seems like a massive opportunity to cheat. Simply create a custom app that allows you to input all available informatio

by umvi 7y ago

Seriously, even a phone without internet seems like a massive opportunity to cheat. Simply create a custom app that allows you to input all available information via accelerometer input or volume button clicks which is fed to a poker engine and the then the app communicates the result of the engine's decision via vibration pulses. Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.

wallace_f 7y ago
If it's an inside job, the phones are not even necessary. Body language could communicate the state of competitor's hands against his. And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.
manav 7y ago
A poker engine wouldn't really help you since it can't read players and intentions, also most decent players can calculate odds in their heads.
ar_lan 7y ago
It sounds like your idea is just calculating odds - this is a slight advantage, but most pro's have learned to do this in their heads already. Poker math isn't very complicated.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but really? people can just computer large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads fast enough to participate in the game? I had always thought that knowing the odds exactly just wasn't that useful because there was a lot of missing information and it was more important to read one's opponents.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    only recently have very powerful computers gotten better at poker than good humans. a phone probably can't do it yet. but a phone could be used as a way to do various kinds of digital spying or communicating with other people etc.
  - jcampbell1 7y ago
    There are a total of 169 starting hands and at most half are relevant. Most people you can put on a range of 40 or fewer hands. All the math you need can be inferred from about 100 things you need to memorize, most of which are fairly intuitive.
  - femto113 7y ago
    It's usually not anywhere near that complicated. To use an example from the article he folded a QJ against a QT with 89J on the board with no flush possibilities. In this case there are not very many hands that can be beating him: the pocket pairs AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 99, 88, stuff that makes two pair like J9, J8, 98, and the straights QT and T7. Overall this is going to be close to the chance when holding 77 that your opponent has a higher pair, which most professional players will "just know" is about 3-4% because they memorize tables of such facts[1]. This means he should believe he's a pretty substantial favorite and why the fold was so unexpected. [1] https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-starting-hands-vs-probability-of-opponent-having-a-pocket-pair https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-s...
    - appleshore 7y ago
      It is that complicated if you’re trying to factor accurate ranges, card removal and bet sizing. He’s obviously not doing this because he’s playing an exploitative style. In otherwords, he’s guessing perfectly based on his perceptions. For the mathematically perfect, they spend hours studying solvers which takes considerable processing power to generate the trees. A human player can calculate aspects of it but they can really only memorize what the solver would do. And some high stakes online players are using custom software to augment their decisions. Depending on the bet size, the solver could call the turn a % of times. And depending on blockers, unblockers and the bet sizing, the solver could advocate to call/raise/fold.
- zone411 7y ago
  I expected better from this site than multiple commenters spreading false info! This is wrong. Making optimal decisions IS very complicated. Just a heads-up no-limit match between the two best players in the world is far from the Nash equalibrum (a game theory-optimal solution). In the 2017 Humans vs AI match, a bot destroyed very good humans by 14.7 big blinds per hand. This is without caring at all about what strategies others play. If you analyze other players and you find what mistakes they make, you can do better and it's even more complicated. And vs multiple players like here, it's more complicated again (optimal strategy can only be calculated assuming there is no collusion). A 6-person game was only finally beaten a few months ago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9 Source: used to play poker (up to the main event WSOP and $5/10 level during the poker boom) and wrote a simple game-theory optimal solver for fun.
  - cepth 7y ago
    As an addendum to this very good comment, that Nature article had a couple of big asterisks. * Bet sizes were restricted. E.g. humans and the the bot could only bet fixed bet sizes, like 1/4 pot, 1/2 pot, full pot etc. Creative bet sizing is one of the skills that distinguishes top pros. * Stack sizes were reset after every hand. E.g. every player in the hand was given the same amount of chips at the start of every hand. How you performed previously in the session thus did not matter. Anyone who has played poker knows that this is highly unrealistic. Larger stack sizes convey an ability to bully smaller ones, and stack sizes greatly affect what range of hands you can reasonably play. The point being, even a supercomputer running the most efficient heuristic based poker decision making programs has not yet been able to beat humans in a game that resembles what a real 6 or 9 person table would reflect. --- Just as reference, on a four-year-old quad-core/8-thread Intel i7-based desktop with 32GB of RAM, to solve a SINGLE hand in PioSolver (the most popular poker solver) from flop through the river takes my machine about 7 minutes. The game tree alone takes up 4 GB of RAM, and in this scenario there are only two players, and each player is restricted to 3 bet sizes. The idea that this kind of computation can be done on a phone is ludicrous.
    - kevinwang 7y ago

by umvi 7y ago

wallace_f 7y ago

If it's an inside job, the phones are not even necessary. Body language could communicate the state of competitor's hands against his. And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.

manav 7y ago

A poker engine wouldn't really help you since it can't read players and intentions, also most decent players can calculate odds in their heads.

ar_lan 7y ago

It sounds like your idea is just calculating odds - this is a slight advantage, but most pro's have learned to do this in their heads already. Poker math isn't very complicated.

leetcrew 7y ago
maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but really? people can just computer large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads fast enough to participate in the game? I had always thought that knowing the odds exactly just wasn't that useful because there was a lot of missing information and it was more important to read one's opponents.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  only recently have very powerful computers gotten better at poker than good humans. a phone probably can't do it yet. but a phone could be used as a way to do various kinds of digital spying or communicating with other people etc.
- jcampbell1 7y ago
  There are a total of 169 starting hands and at most half are relevant. Most people you can put on a range of 40 or fewer hands. All the math you need can be inferred from about 100 things you need to memorize, most of which are fairly intuitive.
- femto113 7y ago
  It's usually not anywhere near that complicated. To use an example from the article he folded a QJ against a QT with 89J on the board with no flush possibilities. In this case there are not very many hands that can be beating him: the pocket pairs AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 99, 88, stuff that makes two pair like J9, J8, 98, and the straights QT and T7. Overall this is going to be close to the chance when holding 77 that your opponent has a higher pair, which most professional players will "just know" is about 3-4% because they memorize tables of such facts[1]. This means he should believe he's a pretty substantial favorite and why the fold was so unexpected. [1] https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-starting-hands-vs-probability-of-opponent-having-a-pocket-pair https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-s...
  - appleshore 7y ago
    It is that complicated if you’re trying to factor accurate ranges, card removal and bet sizing. He’s obviously not doing this because he’s playing an exploitative style. In otherwords, he’s guessing perfectly based on his perceptions. For the mathematically perfect, they spend hours studying solvers which takes considerable processing power to generate the trees. A human player can calculate aspects of it but they can really only memorize what the solver would do. And some high stakes online players are using custom software to augment their decisions. Depending on the bet size, the solver could call the turn a % of times. And depending on blockers, unblockers and the bet sizing, the solver could advocate to call/raise/fold.
zone411 7y ago
I expected better from this site than multiple commenters spreading false info! This is wrong. Making optimal decisions IS very complicated. Just a heads-up no-limit match between the two best players in the world is far from the Nash equalibrum (a game theory-optimal solution). In the 2017 Humans vs AI match, a bot destroyed very good humans by 14.7 big blinds per hand. This is without caring at all about what strategies others play. If you analyze other players and you find what mistakes they make, you can do better and it's even more complicated. And vs multiple players like here, it's more complicated again (optimal strategy can only be calculated assuming there is no collusion). A 6-person game was only finally beaten a few months ago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9 Source: used to play poker (up to the main event WSOP and $5/10 level during the poker boom) and wrote a simple game-theory optimal solver for fun.
- cepth 7y ago
  As an addendum to this very good comment, that Nature article had a couple of big asterisks. * Bet sizes were restricted. E.g. humans and the the bot could only bet fixed bet sizes, like 1/4 pot, 1/2 pot, full pot etc. Creative bet sizing is one of the skills that distinguishes top pros. * Stack sizes were reset after every hand. E.g. every player in the hand was given the same amount of chips at the start of every hand. How you performed previously in the session thus did not matter. Anyone who has played poker knows that this is highly unrealistic. Larger stack sizes convey an ability to bully smaller ones, and stack sizes greatly affect what range of hands you can reasonably play. The point being, even a supercomputer running the most efficient heuristic based poker decision making programs has not yet been able to beat humans in a game that resembles what a real 6 or 9 person table would reflect. --- Just as reference, on a four-year-old quad-core/8-thread Intel i7-based desktop with 32GB of RAM, to solve a SINGLE hand in PioSolver (the most popular poker solver) from flop through the river takes my machine about 7 minutes. The game tree alone takes up 4 GB of RAM, and in this scenario there are only two players, and each player is restricted to 3 bet sizes. The idea that this kind of computation can be done on a phone is ludicrous.
  - kevinwang 7y ago