10 ms·
I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI
- sans_souse 1y agoCool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.
- reillychase 1y agoNice! It's legal here in Michigan and a few other states, where are you from?
- fallinditch 1y agoProbably a dumb question but when I watch poker on TV I see that the aggressive players tend to win, so why do the losers let themselves get intimidated?
- reillychase 1y agoOversimplifying for sure but if you're loose and aggressive against a tight aggressive player, you're going to make them fold most of the time and win a small amount by applying pressure on bluffs but every once in a while if you get too aggressive and they call you because they have a monster hand then you get wrecked
- SaltyBackendGuy 1y agoAggression generally wins the day but pay attention to the size of the bets and their position. Generally, you want to make a lot of small bets to show action (they can fold for a minimal investment) and leverage table position to make other players make hard decisions.
- hawk_ 1y agoIn poker, like in trading, the key is knowing when you have an edge and being aggressive but also knowing when you have a losing have and cut your losses. It's the balance that makes a good player/trader.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> the key is knowing when you have an edge and being aggressive but also knowing when you have a losing have and cut your losses So basically "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away, know when to run." :)
- skulk 1y agowhat do you think about OP's 40% VPIP? It seems to me that in low-stakes online play you'd want to play tighter than that, but I know very little about poker strategy beyond what I've absorbed from seeing people talk about it.
- rokkamokka 1y agoI mean, according to the graph he's losing money, so not that great I guess? :)
- reillychase 1y agoYes this was going to be my reply lol
- jjxw 1y agoTo be fair, 1k hands is a pretty meaningless sample - I think most pros would say you need at least 50k if not 100k hands for the results to be any reliable signal as to whether or not a player is actually winning or losing in the long run.
- splonk 1y agoIt's a fairly meaningless stat without knowing the number of the players at the table. At a quick glance he seems to be playing 6-max, but sometimes 3-handed. In any case 40% is within the reasonable range for 6-max.
- reillychase 1y agoThis is true, when I played live poker with full ring I got destroyed, you can be much more loose with 6 or less
- vmg12 1y agoAssuming they are playing 6 max with full tables 40% vpip is egregious and I do not see how they could have a winning strategy playing like that. (Looking at their results they are not winning).
- niwtsol 1y agoI read doyle's Super System back in the day and used that as the basis for my poker strategy from high school to mid-twenties. In talking to some friends who play competitively, they say SS is just super out dated and you would get eaten alive at any cash game. I'm curious what, in your opinion, is the "standard" playing strategy that is most effective in today's poker rooms? I'm curious if that answer is different online vs in person.
- reillychase 1y agoNo idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a profitable poker player but on the strategy side, and this is very oversimplified, but you should be folding a lot of the time other than when you get AA-22, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, QJ, JTs, T9s, 87s you call or 3 bet pre-flop because you have good odds. When you're up against tight players you can make a small bluff on the flop and scare them away most of the time, if they raise you fold though. Position is very important in the game, when you're on the button you have odds in your favor because everyone else has to check or bet before you so you play more loose and aggressive in that position and more tight and passive in early position. There is no one single strategy to memorize and apply, that's why it's great. 5 minutes to learn the game, a lifetime to master.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago> No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a profitable poker player but on the strategy side Sorry, why are you answering a question if your first response is “no idea”? Am I missing something? If you have little information, my feeling is that your response is at best just BS? I know that sounds very rude, I’m sorry for that.
- reillychase 1y agoYou’re probably right, I am just sharing what I have been studying and from my experience playing but I’m a losing player so it should be taken with that context.
- retsibsi 1y ago
- algo_trader 1y ago> I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown Are today's online tables simply impossible to win? (bots, collusion) Or are players simply too evenly matched and the house rake/fees kills you anyway?
- jkercher 1y agoI don't think so. I don't play nearly as often as I used to, but I still do alright. Though, I usually play tournaments where "game theory optimal" can only get you so far. There is a lot more nuance in a tournament where your style should change as it progresses.
- bluecheese452 1y agoPretty much. Not impossible but the effort reward ratio simply isn’t there.
- dataengineer56 1y agoIt's become a lot more difficult to win online since online poker was banned in the USA. The USA sat at a huge net loss online and every other country profited.
- sans_souse 1y agoagree, and this is what I've heard in general of the post shutdown landscape
- sans_souse 1y agoWhen I left (or, got shut out, so to speak) in 2011 the games were getting a lot tougher, less big fish and more reg on reg with marginal if any edge, where you're essentially just paying the rake (-%rakeback).
- rhubarbtree 1y agoPlayed a random game the other day and I love it! What’s the best way to learn and get involved? I just want to play socially, happy to lose a little money each time as the cost of fun.
- reillychase 1y agoI like reading BlackRain79 and watching his YouTube videos. Nothing beats experience though. Start playing without money for a long time first to learn the rules of the game. I actually downloaded a Game Boy emulator for iOS and the ROM for GBA World Poker Tour (2005). After playing that for a long time I finally got the basics like muscle memory of knowing what hand beats what and what possible combinations could be out there based on the board cards, stuff like that. Then from there if you live in a legalized state like I do you could start playing the lowest stakes online like .01/.02 NL.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoThanks. BlackRain79 looks good. I’ve not found a decent app for playing online with a good UX yet.
- gdilla 1y agoYup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is having a viable business, not the software development of X.
- reillychase 1y agoI still think that might be oversimplifying what software creation is which is being able to explain to a computer what it is you want. I think of Cursor as Python was to C. It's a higher level language but you still have to be able to think like a hacker, which will always be a rare skill.
- lotyrin 1y agoAnd the best hackers at any level abstraction will always be the ones that actually understand what's going on in every lower layer in order to diagnose when the abstraction is failing them. Anyone that thinks you can be up at the level of vibes without understanding how an LLM thinks, without knowing how to review and factor your vibed Python or whatever high-ish level language, can make it performant without knowing if or when to write something in lower levels like C or need to be using a library where all the hard work is in something like C, make it secure without understanding how that gets turned into instructions for an incredibly obedient but ignorant machine (like the LLM is but in the exact opposite ways, buffer overruns and free before use and stuff)... It's a holistic practice. The guys that produce code and don't know which parts are happening in the browser or in the client, think they can trust the values of cookies not to be tampered with and junk are able to be productive, probably more so with LLMs these days but they simply can't make quality software and never will be able to. Corporations love them because nobody's accountable to resiliency (securty, quality, reliability) until something actually breaks and those guys can get thrown under busses easily when and if that happens because they're cheap cogs. Hackers love them because we'll always have work to do to improve (or compete with, or exploit) what folks like that make.
- throwzasdf 1y ago> Then I started building my own Python script automations to export my hand history from PokerStars, import it into PokerTracker 4, check my balance, stuff like that. If it works like it did with ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) back in the day, then doesn't the app now have all of your decision bias? Restated, isn't the app a reflection of how you play poker, not how an AI would play if it were truly artificially intelligent?
- reillychase 1y agoI didn’t build a poker playing bot only a poker hand history analyzer
- throwzasdf 1y ago[dead]
- crimsoneer 1y agoI did something similar with Risk, in case of interest https://andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-play/ https://andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-play/
- sherlock_h 1y agoWell done! Interesting post. How long did it take you to build this?
- averageRoyalty 1y agoGreat write up. Love the Terry Prat chett reference!
- mattmaroon 1y agoI have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
- iEchoic 1y agoYou can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots. The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoI used to work for an online poker outfit. The boss wanted weak bots populating the tables so that we looked popular. Of course, he had a “crack team” of bot writers for playing on “other sites” to make money, too.
- sejje 1y agoThe poker world would love to hear your story. It would be the biggest news in some time.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoMight be another somewhat interesting perspective - not sure how filling in the details from my summary above could be big news. But sure, I’d write it up if it seems interesting enough to someone.
- sejje 1y agoBy and large it is not proven that bots exist in any large scale. The operator running his bots would be a betrayal and probably end the business of the poker site involved.
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
- GenerWork 1y agoIf you're looking for a tool that may be a bit better than Cursor for UX, you could potentially look into Lovable. If you know what you want and the proper design terminology, you can potentially make some slick looking UIs.
- reillychase 1y agoThanks! Can I use Lovable to design and then bring that back and have Cursor implement it?
- vunderba 1y agoYou can have Lovable do the design and then sync it to a GitHub repo. Then you can pull it down locally and further refine with Cursor. Just be aware that under the hood Lovable is strictly react (or at least it was the last time I checked it) so that might be a important variable to consider since I saw that you were using Laravel.
- GenerWork 1y agoPotentially. Like the other poster said, you can go through Github, but if worst comes to worst you could take screenshots of what Lovable makes and have Cursor modify the UI based on the screenshots. If you're using Sonnet 4.5 as a model it should be able to handle it pretty easily.
- NumberCruncher 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414905
- Jhsto 1y agoHave you cross-referenced with the other hand trackers whether the numbers add up? Alternately, could someone explain why wouldn't a LLM hallucinate with numbers in an application like this?
- reillychase 1y agoYeah I used PokerTracker 4 to cross reference and kept working with Cursor until it got very close like within 1% of accuracy but there are still some edge cases I might not have found yet. In the beginning it was hallucinating a bit by “estimating” what the percentages “should be” etc but I kept working it until it was doing things right.
- discordance 1y agoI like this approach: “ What it all means for the future It's not really my thing to give too much thought about macro-trends that are out of my control or worry about what negative consequences they might have on my life. The short answer, I really don't know what this means for the future of the career of programming, the business of software, or anything else. Instead of worrying about that I'm going to try to focus on the here and now, the upside potential, and the unique set of advantages that I have available to me to build something valuable, have fun, and maybe profit. I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, try to learn some new skills and create things.”
- throw-10-8 1y agoyou havent needed ai to build this for decades. these random posts are so tiring: “i used ai to make something college freshmen were building in their dorm rooms 20 years ago”
- viccis 1y agoYep. AI is and will always be good at making stuff where the main coding knowledge requirement is having read the tutorials.
- alansammarone 1y agoafter reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding. at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details. then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing. yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.
- throw-10-8 1y agotook me a week to build a poker bot in 2006 that earned me $1000 a week during college, and that was self imposed because I didn't want to raise any flags. It was based on a world of warcraft bot that I modified, and I learned a lot during the process. What you call wasted mechanical work I call the foundations of a career that changed my life. Take away the AI and this guy has nothing but an idea. An old idea that has already been done to death, and none of the skills required to actually implement it and maintain it. You might not like writing code, but that is the job no matter how many natural language layers you put on top of it.
- afaik69 1y agosorry op is a fish. or more a whale. look at this hand from him (op is "reillychase") calls a 3bet from small blind with A7o - very bad openjams with bottom pair on a flush flop into 2 players...wtf is this?! but op uses AI....lol PokerStars Hand #257890817589: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02 USD) - 2025/10/08 22:04:41 ET Table 'Acrux' 6-max Seat #4 is the button Seat 1: MillyPoo42 ($2.61 in chips) Seat 2: Pershgn ($10.14 in chips) Seat 3: Sikcat95 ($3 in chips) Seat 4: gcee3 ($5.79 in chips) Seat 5: prljaminone ($0.82 in chips) Seat 6: reillychase ($2 in chips) prljaminone: posts small blind $0.01 reillychase is disconnected reillychase is connected reillychase: posts big blind $0.02 ** HOLE CARDS ** Dealt to reillychase [As 7c] MillyPoo42 is disconnected MillyPoo42 is connected MillyPoo42: raises $0.04 to $0.06 Pershgn: raises $0.04 to $0.10 Sikcat95: folds gcee3: folds prljaminone: folds reillychase: calls $0.08 MillyPoo42: calls $0.04 ** FLOP ** [8d 7d Qd] reillychase: bets $1.90 and is all-in MillyPoo42: calls $1.90 Pershgn: calls $1.90 ** TURN ** [8d 7d Qd] [8h] MillyPoo42: checks Pershgn: checks ** RIVER ** [8d 7d Qd 8h] [6d] MillyPoo42: bets $0.61 and is all-in Pershgn: calls $0.61 ** SHOW DOWN ** MillyPoo42: shows [5h Ad] (a flush, Ace high) Pershgn: shows [Kh Kc] (two pair, Kings and Eights) MillyPoo42 collected $1.15 from side pot reillychase: shows [As 7c] (two pair, Eights and Sevens) MillyPoo42 collected $5.68 from main pot ** SUMMARY ** Total pot $7.23 Main pot $5.68. Side pot $1.15. | Rake $0.40 Board [8d 7d Qd 8h 6d] Seat 1: MillyPoo42 showed [5h Ad] and won ($6.83) with a flush, Ace high Seat 2: Pershgn showed [Kh Kc] and lost with two pair, Kings and Eights Seat 3: Sikcat95 folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 4: gcee3 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 5: prljaminone (small blind) folded before Flop Seat 6: reillychase (big blind) showed [As 7c] and lost with two pair, Eights and Sevens
- reillychase 1y agoI was on tilt last night had a bad night I don’t usually play that bad. I agree this was a super dumb hand. I don’t use AI to help me play. No one would need AI to know this was a dumb hand though.