How A.I. Conquered Poker

# · 🔥 245 · 💬 181 · 2 years ago · www.nytimes.com · jdkee · 📷
Good poker players have always known that they need to maintain a balance between bluffing and playing it straight. For some players, especially those who made a living playing that variant of poker online, the Alberta group's triumph represented a serious threat to their livelihood. One former member of the Alberta team, who asked me not to name him, citing confidentiality agreements with the software company that currently employs him, told me that he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help poker players develop software that would identify perfect play and to consult with programmers building bots that would be capable of defeating humans in online games. In a home office decorated mostly with trophies from poker tournaments he has won, Koon turned to his computer and pulled up a hand on PioSOLVER. After specifying the size of the players' chip stacks and the range of hands they would play from their particular seats at the table, he entered a random three-card flop that both players would see. While good poker players have always known that they need to maintain a balance between bluffing and playing it straight, solvers define the precise frequency with which Koon should employ one tactic or the other and identify the best and worst hands to bluff with, depending on the cards in play. Unlike a regular poker game, where players can leave the table and cash in their chips whenever they feel like it, a poker tournament requires players to continue until they either lose everything or win every single chip in play. "In a relatively tough tournament, the worst players in the field are losing maybe as much as 30 or 40 percent of their buy-in," says Ike Haxton, who plays professionally.
How A.I. Conquered Poker



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