[HN Gopher] The birth of AI poker? Letters from the 1984 WSOP
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The birth of AI poker? Letters from the 1984 WSOP
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-05-05 16:30 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.poker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.poker.org)
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| It still pains me that in Colorado one has to play on a sketchy
| unregulated poker site against what is likely a large number of
| bots while people can gamble on the lottery, play daily fantasy,
| and sports bet.
|
| I miss pre-black friday.
| rel2thr wrote:
| feels like solvers killed online poker and it can't come back.
| Theres just no technical solution to prevent using solvers to
| real-time assist
|
| That being said , its kind of the golden era of live poker
| right now. Games are growing everywhere.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I really doubt live poker is as big as it was twenty-five
| years ago, when Phil Helmuth was a household name and
| Hollywood were casting Matt Damon in movies about the sport.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Live poker is significantly more popular now than ever.
| Every major tournament has seen record participants, Vegas
| has bigger poker rooms than ever before, and I'd say
| anecdotally local poker clubs are packed compared to
| anytime I can recall.
| serf wrote:
| that's a shame, the coverage is 100x worse than it was.
|
| the ESPN2 streams _suck_ , they seem like they don't know
| what table they're watching and the commentary is usually
| below-basic pop-culture and memery, and the WSOP
| commentators are equally childish and unprofessional.
|
| poster was right though, it seems far from what it was as
| far as general non-poker interest goes.. maybe the
| increased size of the poker hall/tournament attendance is
| evidence of another effect; gambling tends to go up in
| poor economies.
|
| my .02c: i've seen a lot of my favorite casinos close
| their poker rooms or convert them in the past five years.
| my neighborhood games are all mostly dried up, and all of
| my cohort I network with about poker stuff is essentially
| still just enjoying 10-20 year old Poker After Dark eps.
| The coverage sucks and only the huge games or private
| tables are worth watching, and that's a whole other cash
| grab. The personalities are largely non-existent, and the
| ones that try angle don't do that great a job.
|
| It all sounds like sour-grapes nostalgia, and maybe it is
| to a degree, but it's a common opinion that poker is in a
| rut lately.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| ESPN2? I thought the live coverage is only on PokerGO for
| the last few years, with the packaged shows broadcast
| later on CBS Sports channel?
| recursive wrote:
| We must have been frequenting very different households.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| Isn't it trivial for online poker providers to cheat, i.e.
| manipulate the cards you receive, and have a fake bot player
| at the table that can be made to win, etc. ?
| sejje wrote:
| Short term, yes.
|
| Long term, people store their hand histories and this shows
| up plainly in analysis.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That only catches a subset of ways online poker rooms can
| cheat.
|
| The server knows what cards everyone is holding. Even if
| the cards were randomly assigned and weren't changed
| after the fact, users have no logs of the order of cards
| remaining in the deck. Its pretty trivial to have
| software that selects community cards that usually lead
| to a larger pot.
| chowells wrote:
| That's not exactly true. It's a non-trivial but not
| exactly difficult task to design a fair shuffling
| cryptographic protocol that every participant can
| validate after the fact.
|
| On the other hand, that still doesn't prevent cheating in
| the form of the server providing information to some
| participants via a different channel. There's nothing
| cryptography can say about out-of-band communications.
|
| So maybe fair shuffling is cute but ultimately pointless.
| pton_xd wrote:
| Wouldn't that show up in a statistical analysis of the
| community cards? How is your algorithm modifying the
| community cards advantageously but preserving randomness
| such that over a large sample size every card shows up at
| the same frequency? Although it wouldn't be exactly the
| same, presumably some cards that are less often bet
| preflop, like a 2, would show up at a slightly higher
| frequency in the community cards, but still.
|
| The much simpler way to cheat is to just give some
| players more information. Or, run bots that take up
| guaranteed payout seats in tournaments and such, which
| I've heard rumors of happening on certain sites. Or both.
| Loughla wrote:
| Any online or electronic gambling. Any at all. You have to
| expect it to be crooked.
|
| This applies to sanctioned sites, sketchy sites, or physical
| machines.
|
| The incentive is just too damn high for it not to be a cheated
| system made up of black boxes.
| lowdest wrote:
| Some of the cryptocurrency casinos pioneered having
| cryptographically signed random sequences that are revealed
| after the game is over. That way you can confirm that the
| game was fair. It's not a very popular feature, however, as
| it's not a major selling point for most people.
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