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OK now that Chess and Jeopardy have been conquered. I wonder if no-limit texas hold'em poker is something that massive computing power can consistently conquer

OK now that Chess and Jeopardy have been conquered. I wonder if no-limit texas hold'em poker is something that massive computing power can consistently conquer as well. Imagine if you had 10,000's of instances of EC2 churning at playing one hand of poker against the world's best opponents... Is it possible?

alanctgardner2 14y ago
The thing about poker (versus chess), is the notion of complete versus incomplete information. In chess, you know the location of every piece. This means you can compute possible positions (theoretically) until every possible game ends. Even better, you can play the algorithm against itself, since it can see everything either player knows. This makes chess computationally expensive - there are many positions, and you can do fairly meaningful analysis on every possible move. The best chess algorithms know how to aggressively cull paths which won't work well early on. In Texas Hold'em, you only know ( initially ) your pocket cards, then as the rest come up you gain a bit more information. But compare this to the number of cards you can't see as a player. Those overlays they show on TV are effectively the best you can do; there's just no more data to work with. It's not like chess where throwing more computing power at it helps anything.
- dminor 14y ago
  That's silly. You have an opponent whose previous actions you can analyze with an eye to the possible cards to come and the moves you can make. Add more players and the calculations are more complex. There's plenty of data for a computer to crunch on.
- jib 14y ago
  If you played just one hand that would be true. Poker strategy is based on large sample sizes - you're not trying to figure out the optimal strategy for a single hand, you're trying to figure out an overall strategy for groups of hands against groups of boards. Winning strategy for limit poker is essentially making sure you're game theory optimal, so that there isn't a strategy someone can apply against you that will in the long run be profitable. You can't apply a simple greedy algorithm hand per hand, you need to be aware of the ranges of hands you could have and what strategies your opponent could be applying against those hands. That is the not losing part, the winning more part is figuring out where your opponents arent playing GTO and figuring out if you can afford making your strategy exploitable to in turn exploit your opponents (because if you try to be always GTO you may not beat rake etc). Looking at poker hand by hand is like looking at chess move by move.
  - andyakb 14y ago
    Players can try to be GTO, but limit is not solved, so they are simply guessing. This post (and many others across the web) seem to assume that we know GTO or that we can reason it, but twe cant as this isnt a solved game yet
btilly 14y ago
In a group setting, computers can beat humans. They just keep track of more stuff. And if you get 2 computers communicating, sitting at the same table, well, HUGE advantage.
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  It is very hard to make a bot that doesn't do stupid things. > 90% will fail and > 95% will fail to beat rake. Plus the top online poker players are basically half machine. They use stuff like Hold'em manager and various sites to analyze a large amount of statistics against their opponents. Ranging from performance, games they tend to play and win, as well as storing a local database of all their hand histories, positions etc. they encounter. They also use the software to go over their own play to look for weaknesses with the computer giving suggestions. The bots would be going against something that is not fully human and similar to advanced chess results, they would stand little chance.
  - andyakb 14y ago
    This is a strange argument, you say that top players are not fully human, maybe 80% human and 20% machine, for example, implying that this makes them better than being fully human, and yet suggest something that is 100% machine could not beat it. How is this so?
    - sp332 14y ago
      Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess The human picks the strategy, and the computer makes sure the tactics are perfect.
      - andyakb 14y ago
        that would be miles ahead of what the current top players do. the statistical aid that players get simply recounts what has happened in the past "your opponent has raised X% of the time, called Y%, etc." the human doesnt prune the tree of poor decisions and then have the computer simply tell it what to do, the player needs to make all strategy decisions. Further, that type of hybrid "cyborg" situation is decidedly not optimal, it is simply the best way to make use of limited computing ability. Instead of a computer brute forcing every possible situation, the human tells it what ones are bad and to avoid. With infinite computing power, no human intervention would ever be needed, nor would it help. Obviously we dont have that kind of power, but for chess I believe it is already at the point where humans cannot improve upon a bots strategy by advising it. For poker, the issue is that these games have not been studied anywhere near to the level that chess has, so it is very likely that even a top pro would not be able to pick the "best" starting points for the program to then solve [or what ones to ignore, except for the very obvious which wouldnt be helpful]. For nearly all 2-player fixed-limit games, a pure computer strategy would win. When you add more players, the hybrid solution is needed, however, it is still not the theoretical best.
dminor 14y ago
There's a group at the University of Alberta that does research in poker strategy. They have a program that plays heads-up poker (2 players) as well as the best in the world. Adding more players into the mix significantly complicates things though, so it will be a little while yet. There are people that run bots on online poker sites, to varying degrees of success.
- wilfra 14y ago
  Those bots have gotten significantly better the last few years. I would say the best bots today are beating nearly all of the recreational players and even the lower rungs of professional players - but the very best players can still beat them, should they be paying attention to their tendencies. The bots have a big advantage over them though in that they are robots: they don't get tired or hungry and their judgment never gets clouded on runs of bad luck. PokerStars and FullTilt have worked hard to rid their sites of bots but many other networks have turned a blind eye to them, some even explicitly allowing them - since the bots pay rake like any other player. Every so often the players will revolt and the sites will crack down but the bots always find their way back again.
  - Dn_Ab 14y ago
    Which sites explicitly allow bots?
  - jcampbell1 14y ago
    I agree with everything you have said, but it is worth pointing out that the best online players are assisted by bots. The top players use software that can immediately show your last 10 bets and the outcomes as soon as you raise. My point is that if you play low stakes, you get crushed by patient bots. If you play high stakes, you get crushed by cyborgs.
    - andyakb 14y ago
      Im not positive that the current HUDs do that , and even if they did, i dont think its a huge advantage. Players use statistical tools which could be seen as unfair , except they are so common now that a significant percent of players from the lowest stakes to the highest use these tools. Just having this data is not enough to make soemebody a winning player as it does not suggest a specific move, the player still needs to figure that out. High stakes players are just much, much better than lower stakes players, with or without the HUD.

alanctgardner2 14y ago

The thing about poker (versus chess), is the notion of complete versus incomplete information. In chess, you know the location of every piece. This means you can compute possible positions (theoretically) until every possible game ends. Even better, you can play the algorithm against itself, since it can see everything either player knows. This makes chess computationally expensive - there are many positions, and you can do fairly meaningful analysis on every possible move. The best chess algorithms know how to aggressively cull paths which won't work well early on. In Texas Hold'em, you only know ( initially ) your pocket cards, then as the rest come up you gain a bit more information. But compare this to the number of cards you can't see as a player. Those overlays they show on TV are effectively the best you can do; there's just no more data to work with. It's not like chess where throwing more computing power at it helps anything.

dminor 14y ago
That's silly. You have an opponent whose previous actions you can analyze with an eye to the possible cards to come and the moves you can make. Add more players and the calculations are more complex. There's plenty of data for a computer to crunch on.
jib 14y ago
If you played just one hand that would be true. Poker strategy is based on large sample sizes - you're not trying to figure out the optimal strategy for a single hand, you're trying to figure out an overall strategy for groups of hands against groups of boards. Winning strategy for limit poker is essentially making sure you're game theory optimal, so that there isn't a strategy someone can apply against you that will in the long run be profitable. You can't apply a simple greedy algorithm hand per hand, you need to be aware of the ranges of hands you could have and what strategies your opponent could be applying against those hands. That is the not losing part, the winning more part is figuring out where your opponents arent playing GTO and figuring out if you can afford making your strategy exploitable to in turn exploit your opponents (because if you try to be always GTO you may not beat rake etc). Looking at poker hand by hand is like looking at chess move by move.
- andyakb 14y ago
  Players can try to be GTO, but limit is not solved, so they are simply guessing. This post (and many others across the web) seem to assume that we know GTO or that we can reason it, but twe cant as this isnt a solved game yet

btilly 14y ago

In a group setting, computers can beat humans. They just keep track of more stuff. And if you get 2 computers communicating, sitting at the same table, well, HUGE advantage.

Dn_Ab 14y ago
It is very hard to make a bot that doesn't do stupid things. > 90% will fail and > 95% will fail to beat rake. Plus the top online poker players are basically half machine. They use stuff like Hold'em manager and various sites to analyze a large amount of statistics against their opponents. Ranging from performance, games they tend to play and win, as well as storing a local database of all their hand histories, positions etc. they encounter. They also use the software to go over their own play to look for weaknesses with the computer giving suggestions. The bots would be going against something that is not fully human and similar to advanced chess results, they would stand little chance.
- andyakb 14y ago
  This is a strange argument, you say that top players are not fully human, maybe 80% human and 20% machine, for example, implying that this makes them better than being fully human, and yet suggest something that is 100% machine could not beat it. How is this so?
  - sp332 14y ago
    Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess The human picks the strategy, and the computer makes sure the tactics are perfect.
    - andyakb 14y ago
      that would be miles ahead of what the current top players do. the statistical aid that players get simply recounts what has happened in the past "your opponent has raised X% of the time, called Y%, etc." the human doesnt prune the tree of poor decisions and then have the computer simply tell it what to do, the player needs to make all strategy decisions. Further, that type of hybrid "cyborg" situation is decidedly not optimal, it is simply the best way to make use of limited computing ability. Instead of a computer brute forcing every possible situation, the human tells it what ones are bad and to avoid. With infinite computing power, no human intervention would ever be needed, nor would it help. Obviously we dont have that kind of power, but for chess I believe it is already at the point where humans cannot improve upon a bots strategy by advising it. For poker, the issue is that these games have not been studied anywhere near to the level that chess has, so it is very likely that even a top pro would not be able to pick the "best" starting points for the program to then solve [or what ones to ignore, except for the very obvious which wouldnt be helpful]. For nearly all 2-player fixed-limit games, a pure computer strategy would win. When you add more players, the hybrid solution is needed, however, it is still not the theoretical best.

dminor 14y ago

There's a group at the University of Alberta that does research in poker strategy. They have a program that plays heads-up poker (2 players) as well as the best in the world. Adding more players into the mix significantly complicates things though, so it will be a little while yet. There are people that run bots on online poker sites, to varying degrees of success.

wilfra 14y ago
Those bots have gotten significantly better the last few years. I would say the best bots today are beating nearly all of the recreational players and even the lower rungs of professional players - but the very best players can still beat them, should they be paying attention to their tendencies. The bots have a big advantage over them though in that they are robots: they don't get tired or hungry and their judgment never gets clouded on runs of bad luck. PokerStars and FullTilt have worked hard to rid their sites of bots but many other networks have turned a blind eye to them, some even explicitly allowing them - since the bots pay rake like any other player. Every so often the players will revolt and the sites will crack down but the bots always find their way back again.
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  Which sites explicitly allow bots?
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  I agree with everything you have said, but it is worth pointing out that the best online players are assisted by bots. The top players use software that can immediately show your last 10 bets and the outcomes as soon as you raise. My point is that if you play low stakes, you get crushed by patient bots. If you play high stakes, you get crushed by cyborgs.
  - andyakb 14y ago
    Im not positive that the current HUDs do that , and even if they did, i dont think its a huge advantage. Players use statistical tools which could be seen as unfair , except they are so common now that a significant percent of players from the lowest stakes to the highest use these tools. Just having this data is not enough to make soemebody a winning player as it does not suggest a specific move, the player still needs to figure that out. High stakes players are just much, much better than lower stakes players, with or without the HUD.