[nonsequ]

I had the same thought. Unfortunately, the article doesn't make it crystal clear how much information the neural net uses to bet against you. It would be patently unfair if it actually knew your hand. According to the article, this is not the case.

I suspect it does perfectly count cards that it has seen in its hand or community cards. This seems okay as well-trained human players can do the same. I suspect the machine would get even more play if this were obvious, maybe if it played at a table with a real dealer and could read community cards on the table. The technology to do this certainly exists.

[LargeWu]

Counting cards in a poker game is really trivial, even for novice players, since you shuffle the deck after each hand, and in Texas Hold-em, once a card is exposed it is not taken out of play until the hand is over (unlike, say, stud games). All you have to do to count cards is look at your hand and look at the board.