I got a call over the weekend from Verizon telling me they analyzed my bill and they could save me money by changing my plan to a lower one but that I would have to extend my contract. Sounds like they are cold calling customers to try to get them to extend their contracts before this change.
Also they can't measure whether a computer is successful playing poker in one game or tournament. The measure of a good player is how they play over time. A top player can get a run of bad cards or bad luck and lose a tournament but say over a year they will win much more than a novice when you take luck out of the equation. I hope if they test a computer system they take that into account and test it over many tournaments but I can see it now a computer getting "lucky" against a pro in one tournament and the designers bragging about it.
Cry Havoc I agree. I am an avid poker player. Psychology and the human element are a huge part of the game. I've played live against people that play primarily online. Those players once they get onto a live table have a much harder time adapting. I think a computer might be able to beat some novice players by playing a tight game but it wouldn't be able to touch the pros.
It doesn't sound like you are a poker player. I'm not a chess expert by any stretch. What I meant is that poker is a different kind of game than chess. In chess you can calculate many moves ahead and you can make logical deductions about what a player's next move is probably going to be. In poker logic doesn't often apply. Players use deception in order to hide what they are doing. As a simple example a computer might assume a raise from a player preflop might be a big hand like AA or KK but sometimes a player won't raise to keep his hand hidden or he might raise with a weak hand. I think it would be difficult for a computer to interpret things like this. In the end I think a human would be able to adapt to changes in the game much better than a computer could.
I doubt that they will ever be able to get a computer to win at poker consistently. There are so many variables in poker that a computer won't be able to take into account. Physical tells, player evaluation, betting trends, and many other elements would be difficult if not impossible for a computer to evaluate or predict reliably. Plus you aren't playing against one person, you normally have between 8 to 9 opponents. Your strategy has to change constantly during the game, I don't think a computer has what it takes to be a winning player.
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