

Building a Shortstacking Poker Bot - A Visual History - matt1
http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/10/building-a-shortstacking-poker-bot-a-visual-history/

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awolf
A short-stacking bot should be an achievable goal. Playing short-stacked
really simplifies the decisions: fold, or push all-in. Once you hit an all-in
win, leave the table. Perfect strategy for a bot to use.

The problem is that it is also one of the most detectable patterns for
pokerstars staff to catch onto.

(damn it... reading this post has made me want to play a sit-and-go instead of
returning to my django project...)

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bentoner
It's really not as simple as you say. 20BB (BB = big blinds), the usual
minimum starting stack size, is too large for a fold/shove strategy to be
profitable. You need to do a lot of limp-reraising and squeezing pre-flop, and
you also need to not be terrible post-flop, since, e.g., after a raise of 3 BB
with one caller, the pot is 6BB and you still have 17BB.

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ramanujan
I don't think this guy knew enough probability/stats/game theory to write a
profitable poker bot. Note that he was enumerating a lot of manual decisions
in Excel. That's not going to scale, you want a probabilistic model and a game
state evaluation function (ideally one trained on many past games).

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jacquesm
Author == OP, and if you read to the end you'll see he did get it to work, but
he got shut down pdq.

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keefe
He got a heads up bot working, which is a totally different animal than a full
table ring. U of Alberta has a group discussing poker as an open AI issue :
<http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/> NLHE is not checkers, it's genuinely difficult
to crack. That's one of the things that makes it fun.

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jacquesm
Amazing hack, but not very ethical.

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cvg
Do ethics apply in gambling?

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jacquesm
They do when you're robotically taking money out of the pockets of the other
people at the table.

If it were a 'robots poker contest' that would be a different thing.

That the house takes its 'rake' is one thing, that the guy to your left might
be a digital rig is a bit harder to swallow.

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lacker
What about when you're robotically putting money into the other players'
pockets? After all, his short-stack bot lost $1300 in total.

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jacquesm
Excellent point, but that was accidental. His plan was to do the exact
opposite.

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indiana
pokerai.org

