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by Lkjhmnbv 2729 days ago
Heads up Texas holdem is "solved".

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-fold-huma...

2 comments

The vast majority of "action" available online is "6-max" (6 player) or "full-ring" (9 player). On a PokerStars, WSOP.com, or Party Poker, you're going to find that there are maybe 1/10th or 1/20th the number of headsup tables as higher capacity tables.

The development of "GTO" (game theory optimal) play in Texas Hold 'Em is certainly a first step in the direction of computers playing poker. However, there's still quite a long way to go.

Poker Snowie, one of the cutting edge "GTO" programs, is based off of NNs (https://www.pokersnowie.com/about/technology-training.html). At the same time, there are some glaring weaknesses in the software, namely that it can only offer suggestions at specific pot size bets (0.25, 0.5, 1, 2). The authors themselves concede some other weaknesses (https://www.pokersnowie.com/about/weaknesses.html).

Worth mentioning that Amaya, the owner of PokerStars, has posted job openings for "AI researchers" (http://www.starsgroup.com/careers/job/Poker-AI-Research-Engi... & https://www.pokernews.com/news/2017/10/pokerstars-to-hire-ar...). Some people think that the position may be to help PokerStars detect/combat bot use, but others think that there may be a (arguably bleak) future where players have the option to compete against Amaya-created bots online.

Here's the paper about Libratus (mentioned in the article).

In January 2017 Libratus beat a team of four top-10 heads- up no-limit specialist professionals in a 120,000-hand Brains vs. AI challenge match over 20 days.

(PDF) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~noamb/papers/17-IJCAI-Libratus.pdf