[philosopheer]

most people (including here on HN) are complete n00bs when it comes to understanding how poker is played and how computers can play it, so just to straighten y'all out at the git-go here:

computers are better at bluffing and randomness than humans are. Bluffing is an important optimizing strategy in playing poker well, and it entails tracking the expected value of a pot (which includes cost expectations, don't forget) and it entails randomness, necessary to obfuscate patterns of betting that could give away evidence of your bluffing strategy. Like chess and go, we may not be "there" yet with computers, but n00bs need to understand the theory.

What computers can't do is read "tells", so if you are a master poker player via tells (whether it's unconscious or conscious thinking on your part) then you will beat other humans better than a computer will; but, by the same token, the computer will not give you tells to read nor be fooled by your fake tells. I think the mistake in thinking newbies (even highly experienced ones) make is mixing together "the psychology" of the game with the mathematics of the game.

So to give an oversimplified concrete example of a poker bluffing strategy (inspired by Nesmith Ankeny's book), if odds of you drawing one of the cards you need to win a showdown are 1 out of 4 but the expected payoff is 20x then you not only need to stay in purely on expected value, but it is also an optimal time to bluff if you don't get your card. It is informationally better to have a bluffing strategy that masquerades as an "I have good cards" strategy and gives random information after the showdown rather than "bluffing" being something you do sheerly when you have shit cards. And to enforce a random strategy on yourself, he recommends using a system of the cards in your hand as the random number generator to tell you whether to bluff or not: as you can see, his strategy designed for human players is more perfectly implemented by a computer.

[feral]

No - If the only thing computers couldn't beat humans at was reading tells, they'd win online poker.

But they don't yet do that: this paper is about beating humans at heads up, which is a much more limited domain than a full table.

If you want to learn about why to bluff I'd recommend reading about using game theory to solve Kuhn poker.

[philosopheer]

online poker has the tremendous flaw that collusion between players is the most optimum strategy, and there is just noooo way to stop it. Collaborating poker-bots who outsource their peppy poker chatter to Bangalore (your feedback is important to them!) will soon be running all the tables if they aren't already. No, they'll never be the champions, because that suboptimal strategy would lead to discovery, but as a giant grist milling farm grinding out profit, seems irresistable.

I did a quick google review of Kuhn poker and I don't see how any of that would not benefit from the understanding I was attempting to convey in my initial post.

[6nf]

Collusion is avoided entirely by playing heads up only.

[jpolitz]

Does this imply that a pro may well do better in a multiplayer game with mixed humans and machines (by using "tells" to build up a bigger stack from the humans' inaccuracies), than in heads up against a machine?

[jdmichal]

Players can and will target others as "easier" and selectively get in fights with them. If nothing else, you'll certainly avoid getting into fights with a player that continuously beats you.

[geofft]

As an actual complete n00b, in online poker, how are tells communicated when you can't see someone's facial expressions or body language? My guess is the dollar value of bets, and the timing side channel?

[jdmichal]

Bet amount certainly plays a big part. This is what philosopheer means when he talks about "the mathematics of the game". Bet amount is part of that mathematical part; it's basically a signal of your confidence against the current size of the pot. This is why, when you do reading, many strategies will talk about bet amounts as multipliers of the current pot.

Timing can be informative, but it's actually weaker online than in person. In person, you know whether the person is physically present, and can generally gauge when they're paying attention also. Online, taking a long time could simply mean that they're not paying attention. (I've watched streams on Twitch of pro players working multiple tables online.)