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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

There are bots that are capable of beating professional players today. Is poker not the right game for them either?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_(poker_bot)

Hands in limit poker nearly always have a mathematically correct way to play; if a program executes the correct play every time and isn't figured out as a bot the program stands a pretty good chance of being profitable.

Most human players don't have the advantage of being able to memorize the correct action for every scenario, a well written bot has an absolute advantage with regards to the math involved.

Additionally, a poker bot remembers every hand it's ever played, as well as every hand it's ever seen played - there has been poker software available for many years that will analyze other player's play for weaknesses which can be trivially exploited. I would assume diligent poker bot creators know about this type of thing and are taking advantage of that as well.

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Ok, calm down.

I should've clarified no limit. This article is presumably talking about no limit - since that is by far the predominant game.

With all due respect, you have a poor understanding of poker if you really think there is a way to "memorize the correct action for every scenario". Poker is about interaction, spotaneity, 'feel', instinct. Mastering those things is where to get a real edge, not math - particularly in no limit. Hence my comment.

I'm sure I have a lot of room to improve my game; I've only got around 125k hands logged and haven't played seriously in 4 or 5 years.

That being said, I'm fairly certain the article was not talking about no-limit. The vast majority of poker bots play limit, where there is a clear advantage from playing the mathematically correct way.

The idea that you can play winning poker with "spontaneity" and "feel" is exactly how these bots make money. I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain it to you. If you really care, spend more than 30 seconds reading up about the mechanics of limit poker.

I would suggest starting here, since it has a reasonably compact rundown of the math behind the game:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Poker-Professional-Player-Teach...

There is at least as clear an advantage from playing 'mathematically correct' in no limit. It would be a much more difficult bot to write because adding the bet size variable would greatly increase the complexity of the math, but it could also probably outperform human players by a much greater margin for the same reason.

An objection that could be raised is that psychological factors carry more weight in no limit, especially short term psychology (recognizing when a player is on tilt), but I see no reason why a sophisticated program couldn't integrate these factors better than a human. Psychology in online poker is really just pattern analysis.

Wrong, there is a GTO strategy that a bot could employ which is the correct action for every scenario. Actually, it wouldn't be the same action every time for the same scenario, instead randomly bluffing with the correct frequency. You could try to guess all you want but it wouldn't matter. No amount of feel or instinct would allow you to beat it.

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