i somehow stumbled upon this old portion of the internet and felt compelled to comment upon it as there are so many simply incorrect statements in it. i really don't have a ton of credentials other than understanding the some low-level game theory of chess, the depth of math of poker, their differences, and a background in information systems, economics, and statistics. oh hai.
solomonrex - your statement may be true for limit, maybe, but not for no limit hold'em (NLHE), which even thought rules are very similar is a completely different animal. any decent (i'd say about a year's worth of study / experience) poker player could pick apart today's bot fairly easily for 100+ big blind stacks (this is referring to cash game). also, let's be clear that NLHE tournaments and NLHE cash games are two very different animals. to determine who is best in NLHE cash games, long term expectation must be assessed (overall equity in when making / calling bets). this takes LOT of hands (i've seen massively winning players go on break even stretches of 25k+ hands or so, but usually 25k will give us a good enough confidence interval to assess if someone is actually winning (we call this deviations in expectation Variance). but when you say: "I don't think human players win poker consistently, so I don't see how a computer will. How many "stars" dropped out in the first day of WSOP this year?" you demonstrate a clear lack of understanding on our topic. "stars" are stars because they have great long term expectation. because poker is a game of skill WITH ELEMENTS OF LUCK, anyone can get bad beat and bounced from a tournament even though they made the best move with respect to your opponent's specific hand (e.g. i shove AA preflop and get called my KK, he hits a king and i lose). also, because deception is an important strategy in poker, one must plan certain hands similarly to mask their true holding. one way we do this is to bet when we have nothing relative to the board to make our opponent fold (you know this as bluffing). we'll do this with several hands and situations so we have a Range of hands which are in our actual hand (in the eyes of our opponent). but when we have KK and we bet into a K8922 board after we acted weak and our opponent shoves over us for 3 times the pot (this is how much money we have left), we call, and he shows us 22, this doesnt mean we're bad players. we ran into the top of his range (with the 2nd best hand!), which is another form of getting unlucky in poker. these two aspects lead to variance. there are more. so anyway, your "stars" losing in the first round means NOTHING. nobody will EVER have enough of an edge in a standard tournament environment to win it 100% of the time.
back on topic though: comparing chess to poker is basically pointless. chess: complete information. there's no fog of war on the board. you know all of your opponents pieces, where they are, what they do, and vice versa. this is why players need to think ahead and along the permutations of such actions and opponents actions -- the strategy level has just gotten to that point where the best of the best need to be able to do that.
poker, however is a game of incomplete information. you don't know what your opponent is holding. you don't know what cards are going to come out. you bet when you think you're ahead. you check and fold when you think you're not. for the most part. there's always balancing of acting weak when you're strong and strong when you're weak, but be careful, because if you do this too much you'll lose long term. it's easier to compare poker to the stock market than it is with chess. making good decisions long term will yield good results. if there are certain market indicators which are all pointing in one direction, you invest, and then it's force majeure in your face, that doesn't mean you're not good at investing or are stupid. you got bad beat, essentially. such things will normalize after time. we also call this the Law of Large Numbers.
duerra - you are so off the mark it's not even funny. have you even ever played poker? it's exponentially more complicated than chess given the differences in game dynamics.
cry havoc - "Until a massive revolution occurs, a computer will simply never be able to process the depth of human emotion and reactions that are necessary to play top level poker". you're overestimating the importance of physical reads / tells. now, i know the media loves to play that up like that's the core of the game, but poker is a game of MATH. yes, if you put the same person against himself and one has a pro's understanding of tells and the other does not (read: same fundamentals / skills for other areas of the game), the guy with the reads will win. however, all he is doing is incorporating another dimension of information into a mathematical model which he's using to decide his most optimal action relative to his opponent.
osu-no.1 - you get +1 Internets for knowing what you're taking about. succinct (not like me) and correct.
poker's complex because there is no Perfect way to play. it's an exploitative game. which means sometimes that weird actions must be taken to exploit / manipulate an opponent. this means, in a sense, learning. computers can remember everything, but to be able to use such information predicatively is more difficult. i have no doubt that eventually computers will best humans in NLHE eventually. it'll get to a point where their fundamentals are so close to a pro's that the only edge a pro would have are reads (useless on a computer!). and once a computer WOULD be able to get reads on a human (i'd guess we're pretty far off for this, but who knows), then the human is toast.
for more on this topic, read No Limit Hold'em by David Sklansky and the Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen.
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i somehow stumbled upon this old portion of the internet and felt compelled to comment upon it as there are so many simply incorrect statements in it. i really don't have a ton of credentials other than understanding the some low-level game theory of chess, the depth of math of poker, their differences, and a background in information systems, economics, and statistics. oh hai.
solomonrex - your statement may be true for limit, maybe, but not for no limit hold'em (NLHE), which even thought rules are very similar is a completely different animal. any decent (i'd say about a year's worth of study / experience) poker player could pick apart today's bot fairly easily for 100+ big blind stacks (this is referring to cash game). also, let's be clear that NLHE tournaments and NLHE cash games are two very different animals. to determine who is best in NLHE cash games, long term expectation must be assessed (overall equity in when making / calling bets). this takes LOT of hands (i've seen massively winning players go on break even stretches of 25k+ hands or so, but usually 25k will give us a good enough confidence interval to assess if someone is actually winning (we call this deviations in expectation Variance). but when you say: "I don't think human players win poker consistently, so I don't see how a computer will. How many "stars" dropped out in the first day of WSOP this year?" you demonstrate a clear lack of understanding on our topic. "stars" are stars because they have great long term expectation. because poker is a game of skill WITH ELEMENTS OF LUCK, anyone can get bad beat and bounced from a tournament even though they made the best move with respect to your opponent's specific hand (e.g. i shove AA preflop and get called my KK, he hits a king and i lose). also, because deception is an important strategy in poker, one must plan certain hands similarly to mask their true holding. one way we do this is to bet when we have nothing relative to the board to make our opponent fold (you know this as bluffing). we'll do this with several hands and situations so we have a Range of hands which are in our actual hand (in the eyes of our opponent). but when we have KK and we bet into a K8922 board after we acted weak and our opponent shoves over us for 3 times the pot (this is how much money we have left), we call, and he shows us 22, this doesnt mean we're bad players. we ran into the top of his range (with the 2nd best hand!), which is another form of getting unlucky in poker. these two aspects lead to variance. there are more. so anyway, your "stars" losing in the first round means NOTHING. nobody will EVER have enough of an edge in a standard tournament environment to win it 100% of the time.
back on topic though: comparing chess to poker is basically pointless. chess: complete information. there's no fog of war on the board. you know all of your opponents pieces, where they are, what they do, and vice versa. this is why players need to think ahead and along the permutations of such actions and opponents actions -- the strategy level has just gotten to that point where the best of the best need to be able to do that.
poker, however is a game of incomplete information. you don't know what your opponent is holding. you don't know what cards are going to come out. you bet when you think you're ahead. you check and fold when you think you're not. for the most part. there's always balancing of acting weak when you're strong and strong when you're weak, but be careful, because if you do this too much you'll lose long term. it's easier to compare poker to the stock market than it is with chess. making good decisions long term will yield good results. if there are certain market indicators which are all pointing in one direction, you invest, and then it's force majeure in your face, that doesn't mean you're not good at investing or are stupid. you got bad beat, essentially. such things will normalize after time. we also call this the Law of Large Numbers.
duerra - you are so off the mark it's not even funny. have you even ever played poker? it's exponentially more complicated than chess given the differences in game dynamics.
cry havoc - "Until a massive revolution occurs, a computer will simply never be able to process the depth of human emotion and reactions that are necessary to play top level poker". you're overestimating the importance of physical reads / tells. now, i know the media loves to play that up like that's the core of the game, but poker is a game of MATH. yes, if you put the same person against himself and one has a pro's understanding of tells and the other does not (read: same fundamentals / skills for other areas of the game), the guy with the reads will win. however, all he is doing is incorporating another dimension of information into a mathematical model which he's using to decide his most optimal action relative to his opponent.
osu-no.1 - you get +1 Internets for knowing what you're taking about. succinct (not like me) and correct.
poker's complex because there is no Perfect way to play. it's an exploitative game. which means sometimes that weird actions must be taken to exploit / manipulate an opponent. this means, in a sense, learning. computers can remember everything, but to be able to use such information predicatively is more difficult. i have no doubt that eventually computers will best humans in NLHE eventually. it'll get to a point where their fundamentals are so close to a pro's that the only edge a pro would have are reads (useless on a computer!). and once a computer WOULD be able to get reads on a human (i'd guess we're pretty far off for this, but who knows), then the human is toast.
for more on this topic, read No Limit Hold'em by David Sklansky and the Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen.