[HN Gopher] I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web ap...
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I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor
AI
Author : reillychase
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-10-08 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.rchase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.rchase.com)
| sans_souse wrote:
| Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year
| leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking
| poker strategy.
| reillychase wrote:
| Nice! It's legal here in Michigan and a few other states, where
| are you from?
| skulk wrote:
| what do you think about OP's 40% VPIP? It seems to me that in
| low-stakes online play you'd want to play tighter than that,
| but I know very little about poker strategy beyond what I've
| absorbed from seeing people talk about it.
| rokkamokka wrote:
| I mean, according to the graph he's losing money, so not that
| great I guess? :)
| reillychase wrote:
| Yes this was going to be my reply lol
| jjxw wrote:
| To be fair, 1k hands is a pretty meaningless sample - I
| think most pros would say you need at least 50k if not 100k
| hands for the results to be any reliable signal as to
| whether or not a player is actually winning or losing in
| the long run.
| splonk wrote:
| It's a fairly meaningless stat without knowing the number of
| the players at the table. At a quick glance he seems to be
| playing 6-max, but sometimes 3-handed. In any case 40% is
| within the reasonable range for 6-max.
| reillychase wrote:
| This is true, when I played live poker with full ring I got
| destroyed, you can be much more loose with 6 or less
| fallinditch wrote:
| Probably a dumb question but when I watch poker on TV I see
| that the aggressive players tend to win, so why do the losers
| let themselves get intimidated?
| reillychase wrote:
| Oversimplifying for sure but if you're loose and aggressive
| against a tight aggressive player, you're going to make them
| fold most of the time and win a small amount by applying
| pressure on bluffs but every once in a while if you get too
| aggressive and they call you because they have a monster hand
| then you get wrecked
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| Aggression generally wins the day but pay attention to the
| size of the bets and their position. Generally, you want to
| make a lot of small bets to show action (they can fold for a
| minimal investment) and leverage table position to make other
| players make hard decisions.
| niwtsol wrote:
| I read doyle's Super System back in the day and used that as
| the basis for my poker strategy from high school to mid-
| twenties. In talking to some friends who play competitively,
| they say SS is just super out dated and you would get eaten
| alive at any cash game. I'm curious what, in your opinion, is
| the "standard" playing strategy that is most effective in
| today's poker rooms? I'm curious if that answer is different
| online vs in person.
| reillychase wrote:
| No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a
| profitable poker player but on the strategy side, and this is
| very oversimplified, but you should be folding a lot of the
| time other than when you get AA-22, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ,
| QJ, JTs, T9s, 87s you call or 3 bet pre-flop because you have
| good odds. When you're up against tight players you can make
| a small bluff on the flop and scare them away most of the
| time, if they raise you fold though. Position is very
| important in the game, when you're on the button you have
| odds in your favor because everyone else has to check or bet
| before you so you play more loose and aggressive in that
| position and more tight and passive in early position. There
| is no one single strategy to memorize and apply, that's why
| it's great. 5 minutes to learn the game, a lifetime to
| master.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| > No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a
| profitable poker player but on the strategy side
|
| Sorry, why are you answering a question if your first
| response is "no idea"? Am I missing something? If you have
| little information, my feeling is that your response is at
| best just BS? I know that sounds very rude, I'm sorry for
| that.
| reillychase wrote:
| You're probably right, I am just sharing what I have been
| studying and from my experience playing but I'm a losing
| player so it should be taken with that context.
| iEchoic wrote:
| The "standard" strategy is to play GTO (game theory optimal).
| There are solvers out there (like GTO Wizard) that show you
| the "optimal" play for every situation, which is used as a
| baseline, and then players deviate to exploit specific player
| tendencies.
|
| GTO trees are far too complex to fully memorize, so nobody
| can play perfect GTO. But you can do a lot of solver work to
| get reasonably close.
| algo_trader wrote:
| > I played online professionally for the year leading up to the
| big online shutdown
|
| Are today's online tables simply impossible to win? (bots,
| collusion)
|
| Or are players simply too evenly matched and the house
| rake/fees kills you anyway?
| gdilla wrote:
| Yup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some
| things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and
| pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services
| will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run
| on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is
| having a viable business, not the software development of X.
| reillychase wrote:
| I still think that might be oversimplifying what software
| creation is which is being able to explain to a computer what
| it is you want. I think of Cursor as Python was to C. It's a
| higher level language but you still have to be able to think
| like a hacker, which will always be a rare skill.
| lotyrin wrote:
| And the best hackers at any level abstraction will always be
| the ones that actually understand what's going on in every
| lower layer in order to diagnose when the abstraction is
| failing them. Anyone that thinks you can be up at the level
| of vibes without understanding how an LLM thinks, without
| knowing how to review and factor your vibed Python or
| whatever high-ish level language, can make it performant
| without knowing if or when to write something in lower levels
| like C or need to be using a library where all the hard work
| is in something like C, make it secure without understanding
| how that gets turned into instructions for an incredibly
| obedient but ignorant machine (like the LLM is but in the
| exact opposite ways, buffer overruns and free before use and
| stuff)... It's a holistic practice. The guys that produce
| code and don't know which parts are happening in the browser
| or in the client, think they can trust the values of cookies
| not to be tampered with and junk are able to be productive,
| probably more so with LLMs these days but they simply can't
| make quality software and never will be able to. Corporations
| love them because nobody's accountable to resiliency
| (securty, quality, reliability) until something actually
| breaks and those guys can get thrown under busses easily when
| and if that happens because they're cheap cogs. Hackers love
| them because we'll always have work to do to improve (or
| compete with, or exploit) what folks like that make.
| reillychase wrote:
| I love it! This is what I was trying to say but you said it
| much better.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| our industry has existed on the cutting edge doing what's hard
| since its inception. it's just that there was a time when
| sending a piece of text across a wire was hard. Now that's
| easy, so we do more with the tools that make that easy. When
| what's hard today becomes easy we'll do that quickly with the
| tools that make it easy and then do more hard stuff. We can say
| we've achieved AGI when the tools are doing better on their own
| than a tool plus an engineer would do, and I think that's a
| long way off.
| reillychase wrote:
| Good take
| svachalek wrote:
| Exactly. This is how it's always been. LLMs make it easy to
| spit out boilerplate code, which drives the price of
| boilerplate down to free. But good engineers will add a lot
| more value to that which raises the bar for everyone. The
| things you can create with an LLM become boring and worthless
| (honestly they mostly already were before coding agents came
| out) and the hirable skills become everything else that
| engineers need to do.
| asdev wrote:
| sw engineering will be at an even higher premium if you've seen
| the code AI creates. AI will raise the bar to entry for sure
| though
| crimsoneer wrote:
| I did something similar with Risk, in case of interest
|
| https://andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-play/
| sherlock_h wrote:
| Well done! Interesting post. How long did it take you to build
| this?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now,
| right?
| reillychase wrote:
| I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker
| bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with
| it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my
| experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and
| they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the
| game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a
| horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a
| sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing
| with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so
| you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.
| ogig wrote:
| Given how awful LLM are at chess, I'd say GPT sucks at poker.
| Making a profitable bot using state of the art poker
| software, like stockfish for chess? That's already done.
| yunwal wrote:
| The bot would realistically be GPT interacting with the web
| application and calling out to a poker engine for any
| calculations/decisions.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Bots mostly don't play fair. One strategy I've seen is having
| multiple bots play passively to minimize losses, unless at
| least 2 get placed in a single game. In that case the bots
| can share information bully the rest of the table by playing
| aggressively.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Depends how good your bot is.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed
| bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular
| variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way
| pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies
| involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like
| omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.
|
| Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the
| last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be
| successful than it used to be.
| nadermx wrote:
| I dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.
| iEchoic wrote:
| You can still "win" by taking money from the other human
| players and minimizing EV loss against bots.
|
| The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and
| very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I used to work for an online poker outfit. The boss wanted
| weak bots populating the tables so that we looked popular. Of
| course, he had a "crack team" of bot writers for playing on
| "other sites" to make money, too.
| albatrossjr wrote:
| Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and
| banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will
| make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting
| line is taken in a solver.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| And then there's all the bots you aren't spotting.
| danbrooks wrote:
| I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the
| decline of online poker popularity.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand.
| The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and
| share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.
| GenerWork wrote:
| If you're looking for a tool that may be a bit better than Cursor
| for UX, you could potentially look into Lovable. If you know what
| you want and the proper design terminology, you can potentially
| make some slick looking UIs.
| reillychase wrote:
| Thanks! Can I use Lovable to design and then bring that back
| and have Cursor implement it?
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414905
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