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Author here. There are CFR implementations and even open source implementations of Pluribus. A google search shows me many such implementations. The tough part

Author here. There are CFR implementations and even open source implementations of Pluribus. A google search shows me many such implementations. The tough part is not implementing the bot or replicating the research(Noam Brown mentions in the linked AMA that it just cost couple hundred dollars for its training). The hard part is the infra for cheating. Setting up multiple accounts on the website (bypassing KYC checks) and getting reliable cashouts (poker sites do a ton of AML checks). Its easier to do it in lower stakes but the cost of running the bot will eat up the win rate. On the flip side, the chances of you getting caught are very high when you play high stakes.

joelthelion 3y ago
I'm not looking to cheat, but to simply play against strong AIs to train. However I haven't found any complete ready-to-play implementations. There are a few simple implementations of CFR on github, but that's a long way from a complete poker bot.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Ah then, just go buy any of the training tools like GTO+, GTOBase, Vision(by run it once), GTOWiz, PLOMastermind tool by Jnandez etc. They are essentially coaching software to learn the game(powered by a solver) and a ton of them have a practice section where you can play against an AI. One of the earliest Poker solver devs Oleg Ostroumov made this back in 2013 or so: https://holdem.olegsolvers.com/ https://holdem.olegsolvers.com/ . You can play with that. On a side note, he also wrote about his story of building the first productized solver here: https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/worlds-first-poker-solver-6b1dbe80d0ee https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/worlds-first-poker-solver-...
  - joelthelion 3y ago
    Oleg's solver is fantastic, thank you! It's only for heads up, though. I'm still surprised by the difference with the chess world where all the strong engines are free and open-source. Maybe poker is less attractive to developers, or maybe poker devs are simply more inclined to make money (which I completely understand!)
    - whoami_nr 3y ago
      It’s the latter. All the best engines are closed source. It makes more sense to capitalise on it by deploying it for coaching/playing.
    - CrazyStat 3y ago
      > I'm still surprised by the difference with the chess world where all the strong engines are free and open-source. FWIW, this is a fairly recent thing in chess (within the last decade). Before 2015 or so closed source commercial engines were better than open source options.
- actionflop 3y ago
  You may be interested in https://actionflop.com/ https://actionflop.com/. It lets you play heads up no limit holdem against a game theory optimal bot (solved by CFR). It keeps track of your profit as well as your loss from making mistakes. It's a work in progress, and a coming feature will show you precisely what mistakes you made in each hand.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    How do it know that an action given a hand and state is a mistake? It's quite rare for a play to be 0 probability in a strategy, so any action might be considered optimal. The tool need to know your "probability distribution" for the state and action?
    - actionflop 3y ago
      Right now, it's only keeping track of the mistakes where you pick a play which you should pick 0% of the time (for example, you should fold or raise but never call). These kinds of mistakes may not be quite as rare as you would think. For example, today, over about 1400 hands played against the bot, players have lost about 1350 in expected value by making these kinds of pure mistakes. This amounts to about 48 big blinds per 100 hands. (Granted, people might be playing haphazardly and not trying to play perfectly.) I am currently thinking about how to also measure mistakes which involve the player's distribution of choices when the best play is a mixed strategy. One possibility is to keep track of the player's distribution over time. This would probably require too large of a sample size, so one possibility would be to merge similar situations in the game tree when assessing this kind of mistake. Another possibility is to have the player somehow actually choose a mixed strategy when making a decision.
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Ok interesting. I think I way underestimated the amount of "always bad" actions.

joelthelion 3y ago

I'm not looking to cheat, but to simply play against strong AIs to train. However I haven't found any complete ready-to-play implementations. There are a few simple implementations of CFR on github, but that's a long way from a complete poker bot.

whoami_nr 3y ago
Ah then, just go buy any of the training tools like GTO+, GTOBase, Vision(by run it once), GTOWiz, PLOMastermind tool by Jnandez etc. They are essentially coaching software to learn the game(powered by a solver) and a ton of them have a practice section where you can play against an AI. One of the earliest Poker solver devs Oleg Ostroumov made this back in 2013 or so: https://holdem.olegsolvers.com/ https://holdem.olegsolvers.com/ . You can play with that. On a side note, he also wrote about his story of building the first productized solver here: https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/worlds-first-poker-solver-6b1dbe80d0ee https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/worlds-first-poker-solver-...
- joelthelion 3y ago
  Oleg's solver is fantastic, thank you! It's only for heads up, though. I'm still surprised by the difference with the chess world where all the strong engines are free and open-source. Maybe poker is less attractive to developers, or maybe poker devs are simply more inclined to make money (which I completely understand!)
  - whoami_nr 3y ago
    It’s the latter. All the best engines are closed source. It makes more sense to capitalise on it by deploying it for coaching/playing.
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    > I'm still surprised by the difference with the chess world where all the strong engines are free and open-source. FWIW, this is a fairly recent thing in chess (within the last decade). Before 2015 or so closed source commercial engines were better than open source options.
actionflop 3y ago
You may be interested in https://actionflop.com/ https://actionflop.com/. It lets you play heads up no limit holdem against a game theory optimal bot (solved by CFR). It keeps track of your profit as well as your loss from making mistakes. It's a work in progress, and a coming feature will show you precisely what mistakes you made in each hand.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  How do it know that an action given a hand and state is a mistake? It's quite rare for a play to be 0 probability in a strategy, so any action might be considered optimal. The tool need to know your "probability distribution" for the state and action?
  - actionflop 3y ago
    Right now, it's only keeping track of the mistakes where you pick a play which you should pick 0% of the time (for example, you should fold or raise but never call). These kinds of mistakes may not be quite as rare as you would think. For example, today, over about 1400 hands played against the bot, players have lost about 1350 in expected value by making these kinds of pure mistakes. This amounts to about 48 big blinds per 100 hands. (Granted, people might be playing haphazardly and not trying to play perfectly.) I am currently thinking about how to also measure mistakes which involve the player's distribution of choices when the best play is a mixed strategy. One possibility is to keep track of the player's distribution over time. This would probably require too large of a sample size, so one possibility would be to merge similar situations in the game tree when assessing this kind of mistake. Another possibility is to have the player somehow actually choose a mixed strategy when making a decision.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ok interesting. I think I way underestimated the amount of "always bad" actions.