Posted by projectyang 20 hours ago
I built this website which allows you to:
Spectate: Watch different models play against each other.
Play: Create your own table and play hands against the agents directly.
I had similar idea for people to code poker playing bots and enter tournaments versus each other, this was pre-llm, however.
It would be fun if you hosted a 'tournament' every month and had each of the latest releases from the major models participate and see who comes out on top.
Or perhaps do open it up to others to enter and participate versus each other - where they can choose the model they want to build with and also enter custom prompt instructions to mold the play as they wish.
If you walk this path, would love to chat more.
In fact, all of them love folding before the flop. Most of the hands I'm seeing go like - $10 (small blind), $20 (big blind), fold, $70 bet, everyone folds. The site says "won $100", but in most of these cases that one LLM is picking up the blinds alone - $30. Chump change.
This is illuminating, but not a resource for learning poker.
These LLMs are playing better than most human players I encounter (low limits).
They're kinda bad, but not as criminally bad as the humans.
How much of a session is based on "reading players" vs "playing the odds"?
What I am getting at, is how different is poker than say roulette or blackjack? My initial thoughts are that poker such as TX hold 'em is not a game offered in a casino, so it must be mostly indeterminate. I imagine that the casino versions of poker are not TXHT.
By contrast, roulette is simply a game where the casino wins eventually with a fixed profit (thanks to 0 and a possible 00). That is all well documented.
I have only ever visited a casino once, 25 years ago, Plymouth, Devon as it turns out and I was advised to only take £50 in readies and bail out when it was gone. I came out £90 up, which was nice and my "advisor" came out £95 up (eventually, after being £200 down at one point). Sadly my "advisor" ended up bankrupt a year later.
So, how do you play a LLM? I would imagine that conversation is not allowed ...
I think the key is you need to watch for a person's play style.
There's a two axis system: tight/agressive and passive/active.
An active player sees more flops, and an aggressive player will call and raise more than a tight player.
So a tight, aggressive player sees few flows but bets strongly when they have a good hand -- this is considered "good" strategy.
Others might play a "tight-passive" strategy -- they'll play few hands but fold easily. They won't lose large amounts of money but they'll slowly bleed chips.
A loose, aggeessive player is the type you want at the table -- they're making a lot of bets, and often bluffing, and you can sit and wait to catch them.
Now, this is "reading" someone, but it's not the Rounders style "oh he just ate an oreo so he's bluffing" level reading of a player that movies
For context, I'm an OK player. I can make a few hundred playing 1/3 per session -- I'm not in Vegas so I can't move to the next tier without sinking a lot of money on a flight and hotel.
If your goal is a bit of beer money, it can be a fun hobby, but I wouldn't go into it expecting it to become a full time career.
Most common game spread is 9-handed $200 max $1/$2 NLHE. It's exactly like the game on the link, except more players and lower stakes.
In the game, you try to win the money of the other 8 players, not of the casino. The casino takes a rake each hand, and a player with a large enough edge can overcome it. The edge might be you're excellent, or it might be they're terrible (or drunk). But the house gets paid to deal each hand.
In the long term, poker outcomes are determined by skill. In the short term, they're luck. In the medium term, both. Most people never reach the long term, it's a lot of hands.
There's also table games, similar to blackjack, that they call "three card poker" etc. These can't be beat, they favor the house. Standard table game, with a poker flavor. I've never played one of these.
At low levels, playing is ABC simple and mostly about following basic strategy for starting hands and pot adds for chasing. Don’t get fancy and keep your temperament steady and you’ll win.
To a slight degree, you can do better with reading players and identifying them in broad ways (wild, conservative, confused, etc.) but don’t let that allow you to get fancy. Stick to the basic fundamental strategy for hands, position, and pot odds to crush lower level games.
Others may differ and I am biased because 99% of my play has been online, but I'd say it's almost entirely playing the odds. Or at least, the popular romantic conception of looking for tells or whatever, is, I would expect, a really minimal edge compared to simply playing better.
You do learn the other players' tendencies and adapt accordingly, and table selection is very important, so in that sense it is very much about reading players.
A large part of my play was heads up where it's very much about understanding the other player's play as deeply as possible, and so if I wanted to be technically accurate about reading players vs playing the odds, I'd say both are very important. But if I'm answering someone who has the popular conception of what those phrases mean, I think saying "it's about playing the odds" would give them the more accurate picture.
You really want to be good at playing the odds, and you don't want to stray too far from fundamentally good play. If someone is learning how to play and I'm advising them, I'm teaching them all about playing the odds, and trying to get them to read players less. Only once they have a solid fundamental understanding of the odds would I teach them how to adjust.
They're kind of a ridiculous format - you typically start with about 20 BB but the blinds go up pretty quickly so you don't see a lot of post-flop play.
Somewhat entertaining.
Why not? Because you think it's a game where the casino can lose?
If so it's not an issue, as casinos that provide poker take "fees" from the stakes. Like how stock exchanges work: there are people making or losing money from stock market, but exchanges are always making profit.
Post-flop on the other hand is all over the place...
but seriously at lower stakes there is just no respect for the art its just a shock and awe strategy: throw shit up, break the game and use that demoralization to bully others.
Given online is now bot-riddled, I half-finished something similar a while back, where the game was adopting and 'coaching' (a <500 character prompt was allowed every time the dealer chip passed, outside of play) an LLM player, as a kind of gambling-on-how-good-at-prompting-you-are game. Feature request! The rake could pay for the tokens, at least.