Online poker bot
I played 400 hands against Cepheus, a poker-playing computer program developed by scientists at the University of Alberta, and I must admit that I am yet to be fully convinced by the scientists’ claims of its infallibility. People have been trying to create online poker ‘bots’ for many years now, though they are illegal on real money websites and security teams are constantly monitoring for suspicious accounts. The last thing both the sites and regular players want are successful bots scaring the more recreational types who are happy to hand over their cash. So claims by computer scientists in a highly respected scientific journal to have created a near perfect player will make the poker world take notice.
The choice of heads-up limit hold’em for Cepheus makes obvious sense: just two players and fixed betting amounts to keep things as simple as possible for the computer. However, one of the bot’s limitations appears to be that it did not seem to adapt against my change of style, something that could be its undoing. The most important thing in any heads-up battle is finding out your opponent’s flaws (known as leaks) and relentlessly exploiting them until they change their style to compensate. It’s the smartest and quickest way to win and means less reliance on the luck and the cards. If your opponent is too passive then you should raise and bluff more; if they’re too aggressive then become more passive with your made hand and let your opponent bluff into you.
At first, I was roundly stuffed by the computer’s non-stop aggression. Any bluffs I made failed miserably. To counteract this, I became more aggressive preflop and stopped bluffing almost entirely. Cepheus’s game did not adapt to my play and it made what I would consider several questionable plays. The program was reluctant to ever give up any sort of hand in a large pot making it easier to get lots of value from moderately weak hands.
I just squeezed out ahead over the 400 hands but the sample is still too small to come to any real conclusion about Cepheus’s claim to be an unbeatable poker program. Perhaps the best way to show off Cepheus would be to issue a challenge over a fixed amount of hands to a world-class professional player like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey. This could create poker’s own version of Deep Blue v Garry Kasparov and would certainly be interesting for poker junkies like myself. I’d probably still take man over machine, though.