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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

I think there's room for a "battlebots meets online poker" product. Imagine buying your bot a real money budget and setting it loose in a tournament to combat other bots.

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This has happened before, but only once that I know of. It was hosted by the creator of the (apparently now defunct) WinHoldEm "poker botting" software, Ray E. Bornert II. It never ran again, only a small handful of the more experienced bot authors attended, and turnout was poor, with the highest max buy in at $100 (http://robopoker.blogspot.com/2007/12/pokerbot-world-champio...). It was called the 2007 Poker Bot World Championship (PBWC).

The online poker community is extremely hostile towards poker bot software in general; you would be very hard-pressed to find an existing poker website that would be willing to encourage and host such tournaments.

Online poker has already been evolving in this direction. Any serious player who plays online will use player assistance tools (such as PIOsolver). Top level poker AI such as Pluribus has already proven that it can hold its own and beat the best online players such as linuslove. It is well known that online poker sites are full of poker bots now. There are programs to help users try to tell if they are playing against a bot by seeing how fast it reacts on each hand, for example if it always takes a fixed amount of time on each hand or if there is a pattern.

Yeah, that was the evolution of my thought process. Online poker is already full of bots, which will get more and more sophisticated over time and defeat bot detection hurdles -- so why not embrace it and have bot-only zones? You could have entire tournaments play out in less than a minute if all participants were software.

because humans are the worst players in most cases now. Especially at the lower limit tables. Obviously, you want to play the worst players to make the most money.

I would expect bots to add random delays? They could even determine real player delay distributions and emulate that.

yes, that is the obvious step that bot makers have taken. When bots were barely at the online poker scene, nobody cared to even check. Of course, there are still other ways to check for bots such as a user playing for an unreasonable amount of time or an extraordinary amount of tables, or simply not answering to chat.

The natural next step is adding ELIZA-like chat responses to your bots

"Tell me about want to kick my ass."

GPT-3 would be interesting, especially once multiple bots start chatting to each other.

I'm actually working on this as a side project. I've been dragging my feet as I wasn't sure anyone would want to "code to play" and had no real marketing plan.

It's a fun project though, especially trying to design in a way that proves I'm not manipulating the deck behind the scenes.

Email in profile if anyone is up for being an alpha player.

I've been thinking about a similar project. Do you intend to have it be only bots? I think it would be interesting to also allow human players to play against the bots (perhaps incentivized by getting preferential rakeback deals compared to the Bot players?). Many players fret about bots on other sites; it would be cool to enable those of us who want the challenge play them knowingly and with a slight financial handicap :)

I sketched out plans for the idea a while back (and have been too busy to do anything about it.) I'd have bot only games, and mixed games. I'd also have tools built into the game to let you pull up full stats on any player (there's add on software right now for major platforms that gives asynchronous advantage to players who use it, so to mitigate that it'd need to be adopted.) I think if the stats were good enough it'd be relatively easy to spot bots, which might make human-only tables possible also. The system would be punitive against bots which didn't declare themselves as such, but it would fully supportive of bots being part of the game on the online sphere.

Both could work. I’m particularly interested in the all bot variety because the pace can be very accelerated. For example, an idea I’m kicking around is having timeout be under 1 second.

I see it like HFT. You may have multiple bots running multiple playing strategies and an entire tournament could occur in minutes/hours. A large weekly tournament might even be like a sporting event for hackers.

The human vs bot scenario you’re interested in would be possible on the same platform with a longer timeout period.

I think the real money aspect would obviously get you some traction, but that's difficult to deal with (since you might run into online gambling laws, although you could very credibly argue that this isn't really any different from algorithmic trading). Maybe you could get in on the hype train and launch it as a crypto product?

There's a "Pokerbots" class/competition at MIT (during January aka Independent Activities Period), along with a robotics competition and a real time strategy video game bot competition. I did both the robotics and poker ones, which were a ton of fun!

But hasn't the problem been solved? Two bots would play perfectly and walk away with roughly 50% of the pot.

This article is about how humans have been memorizing the variations - akin to chess openings - in order to play as perfectly as possible.

No, because you have the randomness of the deck, and you have bluffing. Bots could be tuned to be aggressive or defensive, or switch strategies depending on conditions in the game.

Isn't that just algorithmic trading?

Classic games tend to be more fun than New York horoscopes. For me at least, there's something fundamentally profound about solving a logical puzzle better than anyone in history, that just isn't there in guessing which way some lines are going to go.

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