FEAR

What would you be IF you weren't afraid?
“In a balance of mutual terror, whoever acts first has the advantage!”
Showing posts with label professionals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label professionals. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Bum Hunting

Updated 2/11/2017
mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker

Looking for Road Kill: Dead Money
Bum Hunting is looking for weak players in cash games, preferable heads-up games. I prefer to keep track of Mental Midgets. I think it's more profitable. Some extreme bum hunters just start a table and wait for the fish to come. Some will open several heads-up tables in the hopes that a fish will jump in. If you can keep good records, it may be better to join a full table where there are several fish. I like to do this with Mental Midgets at a loose table. There are sometimes several Mental Midgets who will go all-in pre-flop with marginal hands. They usually don't last long, because they do this from any position. After they have reloaded a couple of times they settle down a little and you have a good table with several fish waiting to be hooked, or trapped.

There are some players who would like to see some changes at poker sites. One suggestion came from a twoplustwo poker forum.

"Here are 2 simple/reasonable changes (poker sites) can make, either of these will solve the issue, but I'm in favor of both.
1. Allow players to change their screen name. This will make bum hunting much harder to do. No more can someone just look you up on table ratings and deny your action.
2. Only allow a small number of tables with 1 player sitting at them. Also, if a player sits down and you deny their action, you should be booted from the table instantly. If you don't want their action, you lose your table."


Regarding the first suggestion, many players like their screen name too much to change it, so it's not likely to be workable. The second one makes better since both from the bum hunter side and the fish side. If a bum hunter opens a table, any who sit can play, and if a fish opens one, the first bum hunter that finds it, gets first crack. What would really make it better would be to have a minimum of 10 to 20 big blinds set aside so a player can't just play one hand and leave.

I NEVER BLUFF


“Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence

Updated 2/11/2017
mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker
Artificial intelligence bot vs. the poker pros
By Noah Bierman
May 21, 2015, 3:00 a.m.

Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh
The Game. Texes Hold'em No Limit - Heads Up
14 days and 80,000 hands of no-limit Texas hold ‘em

Claudico, an AI from the same lab at Carnegie Mellon University that gave birth to Deep Blue, the computer that beat chess master Gary Kasparov.
The Pros: Jason Les, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li, and Doug Polk.

Its name, Claudico, means "I Limp" in Latin, a reference to the fact that it does not mind calling a bet in a fashion that many professional poker players believe to be weak and foolish.

The contest was part exhibition, part science experiment, and part test of humanity's limits. Lead scientist Tuomas Sandholm recruited four players recommended by top professionals to compete in a type of Texas hold 'em poker known as "heads-up, no-limit," a one-on-one game involving an especially complex array of betting strategies and choices.

The bot risked all its available chips on one hand while holding a 10 and a 5 of different suits — very bad cards — and bet big on another hand when the chances that its opponent could make a full house or a flush were great.

"It has a very sophisticated model," said Sandholm, the lead developer. "It just doesn't know that it's bluffing because it doesn't know the word 'bluff.'"
Unlike professionals, Claudico did not track its opponents' strategies. And its own game seemed random. For Brown and the other programmers, poker is the measuring stick, but not the goal.

They are really aiming to advance the field of artificial intelligence to fight cyberwars, perform negotiations and plan medical treatments, among other tasks that require complex decision-making with limited information.

Hold 'em poker, in this regard, offers a different challenge than chess or "Jeopardy!" because two cards are dealt facedown to each player; an opponent always has a large chunk of information missing. Five cards are then dealt face up for both players to use in forming their best potential poker hand.

The players beat the computer, but not by much.

Humans Out-Play an AI at Texas Hold ‘Em—For Now
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/humans-play-ai-texas-hold-em-now/
Claudico can only get close to Nash Equilibrium; it doesn’t react to the specific tendencies of individual opponents. The machine instead approximates ideal rational play, no matter the circumstances.

So the professionals adopted a constantly changing, exploitative strategy designed to locate and attack specific quirks in Claudico’s play. For example, it couldn’t process card removal—the way in which the cards in one’s own hand affect the likelihood of another player having specific card combinations. Les says that Claudico didn't factor that in, so the humans could tell when the AI was making big bets to disguise a weak hand, trying to force its opponent to fold.

That tell meant Les and his colleagues could pick off gigantic bluffs on the river by calculating that their hole cards made it unlikely Claudico had a hand as big as its bet would suggest. “It was writing a check it can’t quite cash,” says Les.

Claudico couldn't adjust to unusual bet sizing. That’s a big problem; it meant that the AI didn't always responding correctly. The humans capitalized on that. “Bjorn started using the most unusual bet sizes,” Les says. “He was falling in between the known sizes a lot, and was causing Claudico to have difficulties.”

When the final hand of the competition was completed, the players had wagered around $170 million (theoretically), and the team of humans professionals was ahead $732,713.

“While humans may still be ahead for now,” says Bowling, “it’s really just the beginning of the end.”

Poker has become one of the best ways to quantify the true power computers have in a way that is tangibly testable against a human opponent.

Unlike chess, poker is a game of incomplete information—no player has all the available data. An algorithm capable of determining optimal strategy for incomplete information scenarios could have applications for cybersecurity, medicine, and military strategy.

“Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was,” said Sandholm. “It’s a game of exceeding complexity that requires a machine to make decisions based on incomplete and often misleading information, thanks to bluffing, slow play, and other decoys. And to win, the machine has to outsmart its human opponents.”


This was Heads UP poker!
How would it do at a full table or short handed 6 max or even with just two other players?

(Update)
OK, they did it again in February 2017. In the previous matchup, the pros won. The new computer named "Libratus", designed by Carnegie Mellon University, the same designers that built "Claudico". This time the computer beat (badly) 4 other professional poker players out of 1.8 million dollars (not real money though). Again, heads-up Texas Hold'em.

Let me know when it wins the main event at the WSOP against thousands of poker players.

I NEVER BLUFF




A Beautiful Theory

Updated 2/11/2017
mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker

A Beautiful Theory (Game Theory and Poker)
Forbes 12.14.06 b Tim Harford
http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/business-game-theory-tech-cx_th_games06_1212harford.html

A revolution in the social sciences began in the 1920s, when the man Time magazine called "the best brain in the world" decided he would work out how to win at poker. John von Neumann's quicksilver genius accelerated the development of the atomic bomb by a year, and he was one of the fathers of the computer.

Armed with Von Neumann's mathematics, even a computer could learn when to bluff.
Real poker is hugely more complicated--and so, too, is real life. Von Neumann may have played down this objection because he and Morgenstern developed a theory of "zero sum" games, such as poker, where one player's loss is the other player's gain. If you play the optimum strategy in that sort of situation, and the other player makes mistakes, you will win. But real-life games are not usually zero-sum. It is also a reminder that in most situations, the point is not to beat some opponent but to do well for yourself. That will involve understanding the man on the other side of the game. If you think he is rational, and he isn't, your strategy will go badly wrong.

Some brilliant mathematicians and economists have worked hard to patch up these holes in the Von Neumann project, including Nobel prize winners, the most famous of them all is John Nash. Von Neumann, consumed with envy, dismissed the young Nash's result as "trivial"--meaning, mathematically simple. Sure, it was simple enough, but only (when) Nash had pointed it out. As a practical advance in game theory, it was far from trivial.

The year 2000 saw a landmark in the use of game theory. It was pure Von Neumann: a lanky computer scientist by the name of Chris "Jesus" Ferguson won the World Series of Poker using the game theoretic calculations he had developed, run on powerful, modern computers, and committed to memory.

Game theory has a lot to contribute to the analysis of life, love and economics. But the game will only go according to plan if you're sure the other fellow knows the rules. In the immortal words of Dalton from Road House, "Be nice, until it’s time NOT to be nice".

Poker champ Chris 'Jesus' Ferguson discussed life lessons and game theory with panel at UCLA
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/7189848

(Update)
Sadly, Chris was a primary component of the Black Friday debacle.

I NEVER BLUFF

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Poker outside the box.

Updated 2/11/2017
mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker

Poker pros are action freaks. The don't just play poker, they are so easily bored during the game that they have to play games within games. Side bets,  Proposition bets, insurance, running it twice, etc.

Double-flop Hold'em
An alternative to the traditional formats is, as the name suggests, to have two flops (and turns and rivers), now they call it "running it twice". In this game the pot is split between the winner according to each board, although it’s probable that someone somewhere has tried to play double flop hi-lo! The game can also be played with variations of hole card numbers and discards, which make things a lot more interesting. Two flops introduces key decisions like the choice between making an all-out attempt to win on one board (and perhaps scoop an opponent attempting to do the same) or trying to have some shot at both, or choosing between a combination of made hands and draws when you come to discard.

How does Insurance work?
Let's work with other numbers first just so I can be sure I'm doing all the math correctly. Let's say you're a 75% favorite. You win 75% of the time and lose 25% of the time, so you are a 75:25 favorite, or 3:1.

Let's make the insurance fully fair right now, so the rate will be 3:1 as well. We'll play for $10.

If you win the pot, which you will do often, you pay the $10. If you lose the pot, which you will do less often, you get paid 3 times that amount, or $30.

The way you can remember is that you pay the insurance the opposite of the pot -- win the pot, lose the insurance, but lose the pot and you win the insurance. If you're a favorite, you will win more than you lose, so you should pay the smaller amount when you win the pot. When you lose the pot in the rare situations, you then get a consolation prize that's bigger than what you would have paid. In other words, more frequent event involves less money and the less frequent event involves more money.

For 70%, it's 70:30, which is the same as 7:3, or (7/3):1, which is 2.33:1. It's just division. If you are giving insurance and are not in the pot, remember things are reversed from above. If the guy wins the pot, you get some of it. If he loses, you have to pay him. So, when you make money, it's the '1' in the ratio. When you pay out, it's the '2.33' in the ratio. To make it in your favor, just reduce your pay out, like give 2:1 odds.

Hold'em hi-lo
As you might imagine, in the search for different variations, hold’em games have often been played hi-lo as well. Crazy pineapple and Tahoe in particular allow for greater degrees of flexibility in going both ways. In the latter game A-A-2 is obviously the dream combination, although A-2-3 also allows for flexibility against being counterfeited for low. Since it is much harder to scoop by winning in both directions in variations of hold’em hi-lo which have a qualifier of 8 or better (i.e. the low hand must be five differently-valued cards of 8 or below), it is important to watch how the board develops. The board can make the difference between a chance to win everything or realizing you’re only playing for half and then playing accordingly.

Propositions for playing marginal hands like 72 and winning the pot outright or with a bluff. Propositions are bets outside the chips in the pot, something like an ante, but the money goes to the winner after the hand is done.

I NEVER BLUFF


FLOP RANKINGS

Updated 2/11/2017
mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker

Currently reading Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hanson.

If you have every watched poker on TV, you know they don't show every hand played. This makes it hard for new players to learn what hand to play and when to play them and how to play them. One of the chief reasons I think there are more aggressive players in the games than a few years ago. Gus Hanson takes you through most, not all, of the hands he was dealt when he won the Aussie Poker Millions tournament in 2007.

I'm about a third of the way through and it looks like Gus is really only playing in hands he thinks he can get heads up in, unless he has a top hand. Most of the hands he plays are played aggressively, from any position. The players appear to be less aggressive than you see on TV, which could be misleading, but may be due to not really knowing about the hands he is not in.

Still, it shows how aggression will win pots that would be lost if you didn't try to reduce the field and try to get heads up. Which leads to some thinking about reading the board again and what you are likely up against.

I like to rate the board, especially when I'm not in the hand, and see if I can figure out who has what. I rate flops from A+ to C, because even what some might consider a D type of nothing flop can lead to a monster on the end, but most players aren't going to go to the Turn or River without a hand that has the potential to win, unless you like to gamble or you're a Mental Midget.

FLOP RATINGS
A+
(usually hits someone - can lead to Big Pots)
Royal Flush, (Ace + K-Q-J) +/- gapped
Straight Flush (any+/- gapped
Trips (any)
High Pair (AA-TT) + 1 Broadway card (A-T)

A
(usually hits someone - can lead to Big Pots)
3 Broadway Cards (AKQJT) +/- 2 are Suited or Gapped
2 Broadway Cards + Suited card less than a Ten
High Pair (AA-KK) - NO other Broadway Card
Ace Suited + 1 Broadway card, not suited

B+
(likely to hit more than one player - can lead to Big Pots - but may be 50/50 race)
High Pair (QQ-JJ-TT) - NO other Broadway Card
Middle Pairs (99-88-77-66) + Ace
Suited cards
Ace Suited with a card lower than a Ten
Ace non-Suited + 1 Broadway card
2 Broadway cards + 1 card less than a Ten

B
(hits limpers the most)
Middle Pair (99-88-77-66)  K-Q-J - NO Ace
Ace + Low Pair (22-55)
Pair lower than a Ten + K-Q-J
Ace - non-Suited + Middle Connectors (9876)
J or T + 98 +/- 2 are Suited
3 middle connectors - (9876) +/- gap

B-
1 Broadway + 2 cards lower than a Ten
Low Pair (22-55) with NO Ace

C+
Low Straight (2345) +/- suited or gapped

C
anything else

The Turn and the River can change anything, but the right play on the Flop may cut out the draws that can win on the last two streets.



I NEVER BLUFF



Saturday, May 16, 2015

Harrington vs Snyder

mrluckypoker Mr Lucky Poker

Great controversy.
I've read both authors, used both strategies, and would highly recommend reading all of Dan Harrington's books as well as all of Arnold Snyder's books.
Snyder may put down Harrington too much for my comfort, but Harrington has lifetime tournament winnings of $6,319,179 and Snyder has ???????? Can't find him on any list.

That said, Snyder's greatest value has to do with card room tournaments that are too fast for skill to be of any value and Harrington doesn't even go there. I think anyone who has read any of Harrington's and/or Snyder's books, can get great value out of both, and they should be re-read as you advance in your playing skill and continue learning more about poker.

Doyle Brunson's Super System 1 & 2, is still the place to start. Dan Harrington's Zone Poker is more of a conservative approach while Arnold Snyder's Rochambeau style with the Speed and Aggression Factors are more aggressive. I think both should be used at the same time, kind of like switching gears. I've even used the Kill Phil approach in some games. I like to blend all of these into the Art of War Poker, as a playing style.

 Brunson Super System 



I Never Bluff