[MikeTV]

> DeepStack becomes the first computer program to beat professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em

Whether any others have been made before now is anyone's guess. Botting is a known problem in online poker. If there's a golden goose out there, I'm sure it's being kept under wraps.

[zitterbewegung]

You can collude multiple bots or perform other tasks which could make the botting problem in Texas Holdem not equivalent to the same achievement that they present in the paper.

[femto113]

I believe the primary botting "problem" is not rule breaking activity like collusion but the farming of lower-skill players at lower limits than a professional would be willing to play at. A bot will happily rake in a 1x big-blind/hour advantage that a comparably skilled human would consider a complete waste of time. It's my understanding that the real state of the art here is not in the play algorithms (existing bots are more than good enough to beat weaker players) but in avoiding detection by both human and automated monitors.

[bcassedy]

Correct. When I last played for income in 2012, the site I played on had 1-2 bots at virtually every table from the $10 buyin cash games all the way up to the $200 buyin games. Around the time I stopped playing it came out that there was a botting ring that had been winning at $1000 buyin games for some time.

Most of their income does come from the weaker players at the table, but many of these bots were good enough to breakeven or do slightly better against the pros at the table too.

[valarauca1]

Most these bots are likely using standard well established techniques.

Strategic play, card counting, etc. A handful of heuristics make you an above average player and will get you thrown out of a casino. They'd be trivial to program.

I guess all that is novel here is a bot learned these techniques on its own.

[LewisJEllis]

With all due respect, do you have any idea what you're talking about? This is poker, not blackjack. Card counting is useless and there's no strategy that will get you thrown out of a casino because it's not the casino's money you're playing for.

I'm not sure what sort of "standard well-established techniques" that "would be trivial to program" you're talking about. Optimal play in no-limit hold'em is a tremendously complicated mixed strategy with a massive decision tree. To make things even more interesting, in almost any given situation there will be multiple "correct" plays that, to avoid being exploitable, should each be made some percentage of the time at random.

This AI is novel because it achieved a result that (as far as anybody knows) has never been achieved before, not because it figured out how to do something on its own.

[pokearl]

I think it's pretty clear he either legitimately thinks this is about blackjack or is completely clueless.

[pdog]

The big games are typically heads up to avoid the collusion problem.

[gallerdude]

I always think the same thing about neural nets on the stock market.