Kevin comments on Verifying Rationality via RationalPoker.com - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Louie 25 March 2011 04:32PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 March 2011 10:28:24PM *  -2 points [-]

I'm dubious of the idea that I should be training mentally in an area that a computer program can already trounce all humans in. Playing optimal poker is computationally solvable and not demanding, except for figuring out the biases of the human players.

I assume that a human can't do better than a computer when playing against a player with no biases. At the professional level, play should converge closer and closer to the unbiased ideal, so that poker experience and human insight should become less and less valuable.

Do professional poker players make most of their money playing against rubes, or against other professionals? Is any of the money counted as their earnings prize money contributed by sponsors, or advertising sponsorships?

What are the arguments that a human can outplay a computer at poker? How is poker more useful than practicing multiplying large numbers together?

Comment author: Kevin 28 March 2011 01:16:38AM 2 points [-]

Bots only win at 1v1 limit poker. No bot can play professional no-limit poker, especially at a full table.

Again, the best humans are much, much better at poker than the best bots. The idea that optimal NL poker is computationally solvable and not demanding is just wrong. No one has solved it yet.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 March 2011 10:29:28PM 1 point [-]

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would no-limit be much harder than limit?

Comment author: Cyan 31 March 2011 11:57:38PM 1 point [-]

I'm no expert, but I expect it's because the game tree is sparser in limit than in no-limit.

Comment author: Kevin 01 April 2011 01:03:34AM *  1 point [-]

Yup. There are also many more situations in limit poker that have a clearly optimal play than no-limit poker.

In limit poker, you have the choice of check/call/raise/fold, where in no-limit poker the raising is fully continuous and you almost definitely don't have the complete information to make the actual optimal play across the full possible range of bets.

Phil, if you wanted to read the best literature on this, The University of Alberta Poker group (run by the guy who weakly solved checkers, I think?), made a bot years ago that wins 1v1 limit poker against professional players and they keep writing about it while probably winning millions of dollars secretly on the internet. Or possibly they are too true of academics to actually run bots.

They're working on no-limit poker now though, and I'd be surprised if bots haven't passed humans within 5 years. For now, humans still dominate. http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications.html

Comment author: DaveInNYC 31 March 2011 10:03:15PM 0 points [-]

Bots only win at 1v1 limit poker. No bot can play professional no-limit poker, especially at a full table.

I believe that they can win LIMIT poker at a full table; does not have to be 1-1 in that case.

Comment author: novalis 31 March 2011 08:18:28PM 0 points [-]

Out of curiousity, if computers were better to become poker players than humans (this is highly likely, in the long run), what would you say then?

Comment author: Kevin 31 March 2011 09:08:22PM 0 points [-]

Stop playing poker online unless you have a bot to play for you or a software tool to enhance and regulate your play.