4 ms·

In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better

by mod 5y ago

In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it. Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play. I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.

tialaramex 5y ago
The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines. Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette. In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine. Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.
- mod 5y ago
  You've picked two of the easier games to solve--heads up games. More specifically, heads up games with specific stack depth There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and some competent players are 600BB deep and some other players are 40bb deep. It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute than we currently have in real-time. Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to 100BB. Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the actual game of poker, as it's currently played.
  - bskrobisz 5y ago
    >Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. To be clear about why this might be true for someone who doesn't know much of poker strategy--the AI is (I presume) going to optimize for strategies that can't be beaten by changing one's own distribution of plays (for (simplified) example, if the AI raises a given hand 20% of the time and folds 80%, it's doing so because even if opponent were to call 100%, fold 100%, or something in-between; it wouldn't change the overall expected value of that hand with that distribution of plays). Professional human players, on the other hand, will absolutely cotton onto a player whose distribution of plays is not optimal and can therefore be exploited for profit.
    - mod 5y ago
      Yes, and bluffing bad players generally doesn't work out as well as bluffing good players. The AI notoriously bluffs a lot, which many bad player types accidentally counter by calling too often. Good human players will also specifically exploit bad players, as you note, while the AI attempts instead to itself be unexploitable.
  - 5y ago

by mod 5y ago

tialaramex 5y ago

The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines. Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette. In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine. Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.

mod 5y ago
You've picked two of the easier games to solve--heads up games. More specifically, heads up games with specific stack depth There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and some competent players are 600BB deep and some other players are 40bb deep. It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute than we currently have in real-time. Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to 100BB. Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the actual game of poker, as it's currently played.
- bskrobisz 5y ago
  >Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. To be clear about why this might be true for someone who doesn't know much of poker strategy--the AI is (I presume) going to optimize for strategies that can't be beaten by changing one's own distribution of plays (for (simplified) example, if the AI raises a given hand 20% of the time and folds 80%, it's doing so because even if opponent were to call 100%, fold 100%, or something in-between; it wouldn't change the overall expected value of that hand with that distribution of plays). Professional human players, on the other hand, will absolutely cotton onto a player whose distribution of plays is not optimal and can therefore be exploited for profit.
  - mod 5y ago
    Yes, and bluffing bad players generally doesn't work out as well as bluffing good players. The AI notoriously bluffs a lot, which many bad player types accidentally counter by calling too often. Good human players will also specifically exploit bad players, as you note, while the AI attempts instead to itself be unexploitable.
- 5y ago