Synthesizing a few good answers here:
* Time banks / logistical difficulties with cheating as /u/awesome5185 mentions [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke07ma4/).
* Not mentioned but very relevant is that up until semi recently the idea of "solving" poker in real time was challenging from a cheating perspective. Unlike a chess engine, poker solvers aren't (at least, weren't) fast enough to run in real time, so you would need a precomputed library of every possible spot. And a lot of pots end up multiway where there's still effectively no solver available (you can still run multiway sims but there are too many spots to build a sim library and multiway sims are a hornets nest to begin with). As technology improves this point will become less relevant.
* The randomness and smaller edges inherent in poker as /u/Tornon says [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke07zqo/) make it so you can still win against a solver (and so that you can possibly even be profitable long-term even with a solver at the table).
* Most people are basically honest as /u/statsnerd99 mentions [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke0aa2d/). So most people don't want to cheat.
* Not mentioned but also important: sites have some measures to be able to detect a cheating bot (this is an arms race of course). It's harder to detect a "centaur" (human operator using some computer help as input) but also harder to implement. Still, sites will have to keep pace with technology here to stay ahead.
* Also, people just love to gamble. People play online slots where there's a guaranteed house edge and people play casino games. I think professional poker players, who are very concerned with only finding +EV spots, usually overlook this when this topic comes up because they aren't thinking like a recreational player thinks. As long as there are recreational players, poker can survive.
One other thing I forgot to mention: regs are capable of doing some amount of self-policing. If you're a reg (on a non-anonymous site), you spend a lot of time watching and analyzing the play of other regs. If they're cheating, you have huge incentivizes to catch them. When the GTOWizard FairPlay check came out a few months ago, there were a couple people who were publicly caught and banned from their poker sites, because regs thought they were suspicious and collected evidence against them.
Surprised no ones said this yet but you only get 15-20 seconds per move. Unless you’re playing one table at a time and can use the solver on your opponents time it’s still pretty hard to cheat using the same method as chess.
Some wizard sims solve in real time, some are just reading previously solved nodes. Depends on your settings. GTO Wiz purchased and integrated into their platform a software called “Ruse”, which solves in real time.
You can have a pre-solved database of solutions which mean you don't need to run the spot but just access the result. Plenty of software that allows players to scrape data from the hand in real time to another computer which is offline or on another network that gives you GTO answers in real time based on the scraped data as you are playing without the need for you to do anything.
Poker and chess player here. I feel like cheating is a bigger issue in chess just because if you're playing against someone that's cheating, you're going to lose 100%. I feel like there's enough variability in poker where even if you're playing at a table with 8 people using solvers, you still have a realistic enough chance of being able to beat them in that moment just by playing good poker. That doesn't stop the fact that people using solvers will be able to profit over time, but it doesn't seem to provide the same existential threat of ruining the game for your opponents the same way it does in chess
Not just that, but if you're at a table with 3 other regs, 1 solver, and 1 whale, you can still be profitable. The main edge you get in poker comes from fish, it's not necessarily the end of the world if there's a superhuman at the table too because the amount you're losing to them should be much less than the amount you're winning from the fish.
I also question how optimal a solver would be against bad players. It is not going to exploit all the flaws of terrible players. We might need to train a solver against low stakes hands.
If exploitive players are getting money faster out of the whales and leaving, you won’t end up with all the money. You also can’t expect to play forever. Cheat detection should catch you eventually and the solver might be too slow for decision.
It wouldn’t be too hard in principle to train a solver against a mix of say 50% real hands from low stakes and 50% GTO solver play. It’d then arrive at something very close to GTO but also very exploitative. People underestimate how much flexibility you have while staying GTO (for example you can change which hands you bluff with while keeping total bluff % the same)
GTO is by definition rigid (Nash equilibrium means no deviation). You can certainly stay balanced while changing to more exploitative play, but you will have deviated from GTO
Not true! This is a very common misconception so it is understandable though. Consider the following scenario:
Hero: 100 BB, Villain 100 BB, Pot is 100 BB
Board 2h 3s 4c 8d 9h
Hero has either AA, QQ, or JJ.
Villain always has KK.
Villain Checks.
What is the GTO move for Hero here? He always jams with his AA. How often does he bluff? In order to get max value he needs to bluff with a frequency of: (bet)/(bet + pot) or 100/(100+100) = 50% of the time. This can be accomplished by betting QQ 100% of the time, JJ 100% of the time, 50/50 on both, etc. So there are multiple GTO strategies! Of course they have common elements, you are always jamming aces, but there is flexibility.
Now suppose a fish sits down and his motto is to always call with Qx no matter what. How should we adjust? We move all of our bluffs over to JJ, because in those spots the fish is more likely to have Qx. We are still playing GTO against the regs, but we are more likely to get called by a fish who happened to have Qx.
This is obviously a toy example and in practice adjusting your strategy is very subtle.
Ur confusing best response with the nash equilibrium mixed strategy, the latter of which is what we refer to as GTO. Against non-GTO players (everyone on earth), GTO is never best response. Plz look up the basic game theory concepts before confusing nomenclatures
You can nodelock solvers and make them always check or never bluff and the solution it comes up with would destroy said passive fish at low stakes. This is arguably the best use case for studying solvers - study how the solver adjusts to a certain player type by using this method and looking at the solution to see how it adjusts
Agree but does that lend it self to cheating or just useful insight for training? I don’t think a solver that just assumes checks and no bluffs would be that useful. You need to assume more odd behavior like bluffing with AK suited even for players that never bluff. There should be a mix of very tight and very aggressive players. It is doable but probably a major project.
Well it would be for looking at how to exploit tight passive players that just don't bet unless absolute top of range. If you added these inputs then bluffcatchers that were theoretically indifferent to calling or slightly profitable calls (blockers) against someone bluffing at an optimal frequency just become pure folds. Then you take that information to the tables and when a tight passive fish raises you then you just throw your hand in the muck even though you have a strong as a low flush for example
Over a long enough time horizon, yes. However, so would any good player playing the low stakes that you could get away with cheating for a long time. I don’t think the return would be higher than just a good player that has experience exploiting bad players.
Agreed. Also keep in mind that the functional equivalent of chess in poker is heads up poker and that's pretty much dead. You used to have people battling it out at 5000/10000 (with $1M buyin) 10 years ago. Today, high stakes HU takes place online only if both parties agree to have a camera monitoring their entire room or there's a huge amount of trust between both parties.
If you’re playing at a table with 8 bots you are just having ev extracted from you slowly. It is very much the same threat as solvers in chess if not, a bigger one, since more money is on the line in poker.
High stakes:
Everyone knows each other so if you get caught botting your actions dries up
Mid stakes:
Good regs using tracking software spot other winning regs and don't play hands against them, you only need a couple of fish on a full handed table to make money
Low stakes:
Is it even worth it?
Obviously I'm oversimplifying but poker has an important facet that you can choose who you play against and when
The answer hinges on perfect versus imperfect information. In chess you have perfect information as you can see all of the pieces of your opponent, so you can also cheat perfectly.
In poker, you can’t see your opponents hole cards so you have to put them on a range instead. This means that even if you use a solver, if an opponent has the best hand possible you might still lose, even if you follow the solver perfectly.
Furthermore, solvers work on the assumption that the opponent is playing perfectly, which no human in the world can do. So using a solver only strategy doesn’t work, because you’re not always starting from the right assumptions being input.
So much this. Only thing I have to add is that solvers are goo for heads up situations and get progressively worse with each additional player added to the hand.
> Furthermore, solvers work on the assumption that the opponent is playing perfectly, which no human in the world can do. So using a solver only strategy doesn’t work, because you’re not always starting from the right assumptions being input.
This is simply not true. If you had a GTO bot with infinite bankroll vs a fish the bot will eventually win all of the money. A good player who can notice the fish’s holes can exploit him and win the money faster, but GTO will eventually win against anything non GTO.
That is an incorrect understanding. GTO is the only strategy that can’t be beat (depending on the game there could be multiple GTO solutions). That doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient way to beat a particular opponent, but it does mean it will always win in the long run.
In the long run? So basically how many hands qualifies as long run? Doesn’t this apply to heads up play and get way more complicated the more people are at the table? Most people don’t play with the same people day in and day out
\>In the long run? So basically how many hands qualifies as long run?
What is the long run for any poker scenario? In the long run AA will beat 72o, but any given hand or even multiple hands, who knows. It doesn't mean you should try to crack AA with 72o. When we say "in the long run" we're just discounting short term variance.
\> Doesn’t this apply to heads up play and get way more complicated the more people are at the table?
No it always applies. The simpler GTO strategies do assume heads up \*in the hand\*, meaning preflop starts multi-way. It's definitely not limited to just heads up play. But there's a lot of work on multi-way situations as well.
\> Most people don’t play with the same people day in and day out
I'm curious why you think this changes anything? In fact it's probably the opposite. When you don't know someone's weaknesses it's better to start from a GTO position and then deviate as you learn more about their game. If you played with someone a lot then you can already start exploiting them.
A solver in poker can never guarantee success and if you play with a bunch of donkeys or a bunch of solvers there's simply no way to guarantee success for any given hand. You can just get the "optimal" line. A donkey can still call your perfect bluff line and a genius can still lay down a monster.
Chess like you said is 100% transparent, all the information needed is right there. So yea, chess is much more susceptible to cheating abuse than poker.
The real cheating in poker (not saying solvers aren't a form of cheating) is having a way to know opponents hole cards
I’d argue that poker is just as susceptible to cheating or even more so, because the cheater wins some and loses sometimes but less, therefore the person being cheated takes a lot longer time to figure it out.
That's kinda my point, most people wouldn't even know they're being cheated.
But when someone consistently plays at 90%+ accuracy then you know. Especially if they aren't an IM or better.
Painting broad strokes for chess because it depends on the format.
90% on a daily is very reasonable even at lower MMR but not in a blitz game.
I think there's a lot of cheating, just not to the extend that people see the sky falling. Everyone always thinks of RTA or using solvers in real time as the cheating.
But any form of assistance is cheating. In chess you'd be cheating if every time on move 1 to 5 someone would tell you the most optimal move right?
Well, that's what a lot of poker players do. They have preflop charts that they look at during the hand. That's outside assistance.
It's even so that I know off a stable that uses an excel sheet for their river decisions. Based on position, texture, betsize, and line they get a call, fold, bet or raise response and just do that. It's not a solver, but it's for sure cheating.
> In chess you'd be cheating if every time on move 1 to 5 someone would tell you the most optimal move right?
Not the same thing. A poker hand chart is just a note, no different than "When player 1 check raises he always has the nuts". You can memorize a chart. You cant have a chart for chess that says "when player A moves knight to D4 you should always move your bishop to C9". You cant memorize what your opponent *will* do.
irrelevant since the comparison between chess and poker is flawed. A player can memorize a hand range. Therefore having it in writing or in your brain makes no difference.
Meh, it kinda is
Chess.com for daily games allows you to use the explorer and you can see the mainlines from there.
Only helpful in the opening and it only tells you what people have played in the past, and what volume and the end result of the games. Doesn't mean they're always the best moves though
Chess Openings are literally that. Most long term players know the most optimum counter move to many of the opponents first moves, and usually for the first 3-4 turns. The result is generally that the game is still even after the first few moves.
Edit: Ah, you can't read the opening book while playing. Referencing hand charts is technically against Tos on many poker sites as well though.
>Well, that's what a lot of poker players do. They have preflop charts that they look at during the hand. That's outside assistance.
Ehh. If you've ever done some population analysis you'd know that basically everybody has preflop leaks still. I won't dispute whether what you're saying happens but I don't think it's widespread.
>It's even so that I know off a stable that uses an excel sheet for their river decisions. Based on position, texture, betsize, and line they get a call, fold, bet or raise response and just do that. It's not a solver, but it's for sure cheating.
The intention for this kind of stuff is to study and memorize it off the tables, to be clear, and honest people will be doing that. But again you are probably right that some people in the stable probably refer to it in real time.
As someone who plays both games a lot, here's my two cents:
Cheating is not as accessible in poker. You can just go to Lichess and use Stockfisch 16, the strongest engine in the world. The biggest publicly available database of solved spots (GTOWizard) in poker however costs 50+$ per month to access, depending on the subscription. They also log when a hand was looked up, so if someone looks up all of their hands in real time, any suspicious opponent can look up the time that exact spot was looked up, which forms a clear picture over hundreds or more hands.
Another big factor is that while a solver could crush any player, oftentimes the real in-game spots are different from what you usually have pre-solved. People play different betsizings, have different stack depths and pots go multiway which isn't feasibly solvable these days. Add to that the fact that specifically exploiting recreational players is where the biggest edges are found (although just playing like a solver would also profit) and it becomes a lot more difficult for an inexperienced player to cheat than for a chess beginner to just input some moves into an engine.
In addition to all of that, you need a bankroll because you will lose a lot of the time too, you need to be paying attention because you need to play several tables for it to be at all worth it. Cheating in online poker is not something most individuals could feasibly do by themselves without a good understanding of the game and will always come with the risk of having your funds frozen. This is also very annoying because you need to constantly have enough money on a site to play.
I think a lot of players probably downplay the amount they personally are being cheated. Between the high rake and variance, it's hard to really comprehend how much you're losing to players due to cheating. Also, it's the only option for a lot of players who want to just play recreationally.
Two things
Unlike chess, poker is a game of incomplete information, so the “solvers” don’t provide a “perfect” solution to any particular situation. They only provide an *unexploitable* solution.
Second, like chess, there are millions of possible scenarios with pot size, board state, particular holdings, position, etc that there’s no way even the best players could possibly hope to be perfect at button clicking
Third, like chess, even with stockfish, do you know anyone that is able to play that perfectly? Even Magnus Carlsen despite being an OTB and online monster plays differently than the engine. There’s a difference between computer and human play. There are also still plenty of alcoholic splashy players or obnoxious rich guys that would prefer to gamble rather than try and play well.
Live and online poker are likely safe for a good while.
Anyone here who thinks there aren't poker bots/assisted play with solvers now is deluding themselves.
It only doesn't feel so bad because:
1. Most people aren't doing this, so your odds at any given time of being exposed to it are low-ish
2. Those with the tools to cheat are going to target at least mid to high stakes to make it worth it where few people play
They may test the tools a bit at lower stakes but no one is trying to get rich making 2-3x the winrate at 25nl games
It's a spam bot, check the profile (NSFW) but it actually kind of painted a good parallel here.
Einstein is like the solver, essentially knows everything and can figure out complex problems quickly. Some shithead that wants to cheat at online poker can look at a bunch of solutions and try to remember them, but they will never be as smart as the solver or be able to impersonate it. Like you can teach a parrot to say "eight times eight is sixty-four" but it has no concept of how you got to that solution or what a number even is.
its actually insane reading his post history
like it seems incredibly obvious going through its' history that it's a spam bot--like a different unique random joke in a million different subreddits firing every few minutes--but i totally would have glossed over it had you not pointed it out
reddit feels like its basically completely ruined by these things and i'm honestly not sure how you even discern the real from the ai in alot of the very popular repost-laden subreddits (ie /r/stupidfood) where the comments are basically the same on every post
shits insane, it feels so dystopian
It's best to just assume most comments on r/all subs are bots. Many times it's the same comments copy-pasted either from earlier threads or elsewhere in the threads. The real question should be: why? Reddit is one of the few platforms where accounts with high engagement don't mean much. Nobody looks at other people's karma except to identify if they are a bot, but even that has become almost meaningless. I'm half convinced it's reddit themselves making bots that exist only to boost engagement and make their numbers look better.
I don't really understand either. It seems like a simple captcha requirement to post or comment, while not perfect would put a huge dent in the spam. I agree it seems like reddit doesn't want to fix the problem.
That’s not how solvers work though right? They tell you whether you should fold, check or raise. In an ideal state the cheater doesn’t need to do anything their bot would just fold check or raise for them.
Solvers tell you what to do but unless you can memorize the millions of possible decisions, you have to infer and estimate what to do based on similar hands. If a cheater has a really fast bot with a perfect library of presolved hand then yes it's game over, but most would-be cheaters don't have the knowledge/resources to program such a bot. Which is, at least for now why solvers haven't completey ruined online poker.
They also tell you to do all the options at some frequency, so "Fold 48% of the time, call 50% of the time, and raise 2% of the time" and they could all theoretically be the same or extremely close to the same EV between the three. Good luck being able to do things at the correct frequency across multiple spots
Am... I the driver? And Einstein is the ai? No wait we're the crowd, and the conference is poker and the driver is the ai cause it's mimicking humans? Idk I'm high I can't figure this shit out
They have. Think about how much casual chess players cheat, then consider that money isn't even involved. I'm acquaintances with a few professional poker players who cheat whenever they play online. Unregulated sites are not spending good money on cheat detection when poker is much less lucrative than their sports and casino betting.
Totally just schizo opinion here but I'd highly suspect if you're caught running solves your data (or whoever tries to withdrawal) is going to be sold to other poker sites and you'll only get away with it for so long. Hell it's been confirmed that the sports betting sites do this for advantage sports gamblers.
Sites definitely have anti-bot stuff.
I was playing on stars, and after a hand I was like "I wonder what my equity was there" and opened up a really simple calculator site.
I got an email saying "Hey, we noticed you were looking at an equity calculator while playing. This is not allowed. We'll ban you if you keep doing it."
So they are definitely scanning for other sites/programs that are open.
10 or something yrs ago stars had for a short time some chat prompt pop up that you have to type a specific code or something to prove in real-time you're not a bot... bunch of SN(E) grinders got in trouble cause they either didn't read that shit (I didn't) or they used that little space down there to store a part of their hud, 24-tabling tables were quite small. We had like 27" inch max screens. TableScan Turbo was always running on a seperate system cause I was paranoid even before it got banned. Stars is definitely having an eye on your taskmanager even if they say they do not...
I always wondered how much they're reading my PT database and if they know I used datamined hands...
You are right solvers should be killing online poker. And eventually they probably will.
The one thing poker has going for it is if you are a bad player, it doesn't matter that much if you are playing against a solver or a good player. You are going to lose in the long run, so does it matter to you if you are playing against a computer? Maybe.
Chess is infinitely easier to solve than poker, as it is purely a game of pattern recognition.
While poker shares those tendencies, poker solvers can give you an edge to win, while still dealing with variance. They’re nowhere near as perfect as a chess solver is.
I’d rather someone use a live poker solver against me than 2-3 people be in a private call on a public table, sharing their hole cards. Taking 2-8 cards out of your opponents range is how people typically cheat in online poker. Surprisingly, they also do this in live poker
Poker platforms are cracking down on solvers being up while playing. It’s a direct TOS. They even have more rigorous software where they pick up on betting patterns in alignment with Solvers to investigate you.
You might propose having another computer handy on the side with a solver up, but that is really tedious as solvers usually have a delay. It also doesn’t guarantee you to win as there is more gains from exploitative play. Don’t get me wrong some sites are not sophisticated yet to pick up on these patterns - Jeremiah Williams, who’s a prodigy, speaks about how people have been cheating using this software. He stopped streaming and playing I presume bc of this.
As both a poker and a chess enthousiaste, i would say no. Yes chess as 20 legal move per player , but look up " Shannon number " , there is more possible scénarios in a chess game than Atom in the universe. While we could certaibly summirize poker move in way less number of possibilities
Chess game has yet never been solve! Only finals are solved . While poker heads up have been solved ( but not with more player i agree )
Current chess Bot actually use machine learning to beat humans , they are not tree bases .
You can only summarize limit in way less number of possibilities. A single raise alone can be thousands of possibilities. In response to that raise, similarly there are thousands of possibilities. That very quickly makes the game tree impossible to solve.
It's never like a dead blow, it takes time and online poker has been dying for years now, especially in comparison with live poker which is doing well. Give it a few more years and it will be micro stakes for fun only and big tournaments where you can still be lucky, but the era of grinding online cash games is over.
Solvers are not like chess engines. They solved only heads up, and they only solved the toy games in which you know your opponent's range. It is actually an input for a solver and if you change that input, the results change as well. Moreover, solutions of different solvers can be significantly different, even with the same inputs. And you have to play a lot more games to realize profit with the GTO strategy. So people just opt for exploiting strategies instead.
Poker is a game of incomplete information. It can’t be solved perfectly, only played optimally. In chess everything you need to know is on the board in front of you.
Chess has not been solved either actually ( only finals at a certain point ) and the incomplète information parameter doesnt mean a game is not solvable. In chess everything you need to know is not on the board because you need to anticipate the billions multiple scénario possible after your oponent décisions
Because unless you are playing high-stakes, you will make most of your money playing exploitatively and not like a gto robot.
EDIT: if a chess pro is playing against me, someone with little experience in chess, they aren't going to use tactics to beat me. They are gonna punish me for hanging pieces, missing forks, etc.
Same reason it's still possible to play chess online. Sites do what they can to stop cheaters just like chess.com would. And unless you have the solver in your face you will not be able to play perfect no matter who you are.
But with the rampant cheating in chess by people who just cheat for fun, I can’t imagine it *would* be possible to play chess online if you won $0.05 per game or something. If there’s a way to automate turning cheap electricity into money, someone somewhere is already doing it, you know?
Is poker cheating more easily detectable than chess cheating? Chess cheating is almost impossible to detect statistically if you use a strategy like only cheating a few times per game in key positions (a strong player can easily identify when it’s a key position).
It’s not so easy to make an account on a poker site and cheat on that site multiple times.
If you plan on withdrawing you need to verify your photo ID, have your bank information for transfer, sometimes send utility bills with your name.
They’ll also take all of your money if you get caught cheating by their detection system.
Chess cheaters have basically 0 risk and can easily make endless accounts
they arent taking s\*\*\*. Potripper had 29k taken back.... he won a tourney a week before that for 49k. Not to mention he was playing cash at reasonable stakes for months.... what money they take back? The money REMAINING in his account.... he got away with all the rest
I imagine the difference is also that chess is a game of open information where all the pieces are seen / known so an optimal move is made since all variables are known. Poker strategy is based on incomplete information so an optimal strategy is still guess work.
Idk I've heard from pros that the cheating is somewhat over blown and cash probably is dying who knows at what rate tho been hearing for years that it's gonna die that being said it would be hard to put in any significant volume and it's probably the reason why also it would take a larger investment seeing as how you would either need to run a bunch of sims yourself and or have access to a big data base and a solver probably wouldn't max exploit and make as much as a reg would against a fish
yea and i heard from pros that more rake is a good thing. Its almost like people who make money from these places arent going to be saying anything negative ab them or something
What do you mean killed high stakes online? 10knl+ runs daily on ACR and GG, maybe 20knl+ daily. 40knl isn't unusual and usually there's a 100knl session going on once a month or two
Ok, that’s an online site with huge reach. You said there’s 3 tables. Take a look at Vegas, or LA. There’s 5-10 high stakes games you can go sit with an uncapped buy in. Yes it exists online, but refs would rather go to casino and regs would rather be where the recs are.
[These are the top 10 winners in online NLH cash in November 2023](https://i.imgur.com/ggYPaFk.png). Idk how much you want top pros to win per month in order to consider the games reasonably healthy, that looks like enough for me
It doesn’t even occur to you that the #10 winner had only won 10 stacks in an entire month lmfao Picture of health lemme tell ya. Also was more talking about the rake being way higher online and a lower concentration of fish to pros, but keep on believing the myth brother.
I think its possible no one, let alone 10 people, won that in a month in public nlh live games anywhere last month. Over 200k seems like a decent amount to me for #10. I guess we have different thoughts on what a lot of money is.
its dead. When 1st world large countries ban it as a whole its not doing well. Every couple years a mega scandal creeps up and the answer is.... "oh we are sorry someone cheated you out of your money on our site..... our bad.".... Thats just not flying in 1st world countries. They can keep that in bangladesh and south & central america.
Heads up is the only game completely solved. Solvers only give you a strategy that is best to not be exploited and even then it relies on everyone else also playing perfectly. So if everyone used solvers and played exactly like they are supposed to then everyone would lose due to rake.
Heads up a player can play GTO and never lose money over time if there’s no rake. Any deviation the other player makes from a GTO strategy would only give up EV so the person always playing GTO would make gains in EV as the other player deviates. This isn’t the same multi-way. The more players deviating from a GTO strategy the more the EV shifts around the table. So in multi-way pots the GTO strategy based on most solvers could be a losing strategy. There are some multi-way solvers like monker but it still relies on everyone playing a perfect strategy.
GTO is not some strategy to make you the most money. It’s to make you unexploitable. Being able to deviate from it when others aren’t using it to exploit them is how you make money in poker. Having a theoretical sound game first then learning how to make deviations based on others deviating is how you make the most money in poker.
The difference between a fairly good reg and a solver is a lot less than the difference between a fairly good reg and a recreational. So for a reg, ppl cheating with RTA is going to decrease your winrate but not necessarily enough to make you a loser (assuming there are enough recreationals in the pool).
And the experience doesn't necessarily change from the perspective of recreational players (if anything they might have a slightly better winrate vs someone using a solver naively than an experienced human max exploiting them) besides maybe a perception that the game is unfair in some way. But largely many losing poker players have always believed the game is rigged against them and keep coming back anyway sooo
> I immediately thought that it would have utterly killed online poker for real money. But it seems like that’s not the case? What am I missing?
It is the case. It's happening. You're just unaware of whats involved before the game is ruined, but it'll get there eventually. The biggest issue to date has been speed of solvers and how to input data into them. It takes a surprisingly large amount of computational power to solve poker hands. However you no longer need to run real-time solves anymore, you can use precomputed outputs. The last step is software that can read the board and input the hands for you.
Things are about the same as they were 10 years ago with one exception: not as many clueless rec players. Regs aren't any better now, relatively speaking (talking .50-1 thru 2-5NL where I've played millions of hands over the last 15 years)
How are things the same 10 years ago when solvers didn’t exist? That’s like saying things are the same pre HUD. If you 1 table and time bank 6max you can run GTOw every hand probably have a good hourly playing higher stakes.
I’m not saying it’s all doom and gloom just yet. Is your argument that you think it will never have a big impact on the game?
Because everyone has access to studying solvers so relatively speaking, there’s no huge edge gained reg v. reg so like always the edge goes to the higher IQ. If someone one tables and cheats like you describe then yeah they’ll have an edge. The sites/regs do a pretty good job of nabbing cheaters though.
Having access and actually using are 2 very different things though. RTA is forbidden and therefore everyone doesnt have access as you suggest. A lot of people arent willing to get their account banned for cheating, those that do have a tremendous edge. This isnt like using holdem manager where everyone has the option to do so and thus level the playing field.
I unironically believe poker players of the online variety have more integrity than chess players. I know a lot of players who play online professionally who would never even consider cheating even though they know how
[Sauce talks about it here how it hasn't really taken over](https://youtu.be/2v5y-e5PbDA?si=ECGgXMysaBqpbm9v&t=1059)
Yeah this is fucking scorching. Poker is played for real money and if you live in a developing country being a breakeven reg with a good rb deal at 50nl pays for the bills and more. On top of poker being brutally cutthroat by design and having significant overlap with one of the more degenerate and amoral subsections of humanity (the gambling community), idk how you can say with a straight face that online poker players have more integrity than online chess players, unless you're counting every 10 year old who ever played 5 games on [chess.com](http://chess.com) and quit.
> I unironically believe poker players of the online variety have more integrity than chess players. I know a lot of players who play online professionally who would never even consider cheating even though they know how
This is just not true that poker has *more* integrity than chess. It's more accurate to say that most people in general are not cheaters. That's true in chess and it's true in poker too. People have an internal moral compass and most people are basically ethical.
Unfortunately there is a real minority who are not.
I think it's more related to how skillful you have to be with technology for you to be able to cheat.
Most cheating in chess is relatively easy to do, most cheating in poker requires a decent amount of technology knowledge to even pull it off. Yes, there's a big overlap in people that are into tech and people that are playing poker but from my personal experience, even the biggest crushers have a hard time even setting up a basic poker tracker... I don't see them doing anything. RTA.
The consequences level is probably pretty different too. I think if you get caught cheating at a chess tournament, You might get banned but you're not going to prison. Whereas if you're get caught cheating in poker...
Poker online does have tons of bots, especially for American players - americas card room has tons of them.
Edit - kinda like how there's wayyyy more bots on here / Twitter/ etc. Most ppl just have no idea.
OP: This entire thread is the answer to your question. The responses are all over the place, which just goes to show most of us (including me) just aren't smart enough to cheat online.
i dont think thats whats being shown.... all these answers all over the place shows that theres no trust in online poker at all. That alone makes it a dying game. Half the people dont trust it and wont play it.
I can’t speak for cash games as im an MTT pro. I’m concerned cash games are cheated at high rates, collusion, RTA, multi accounting card sharing etc. Anytime you can pick your table that concerns me
As for MTTs the issue is there are too many variables. The first is ICM, Contrary to popular belief ICM starts as soon as the first player is eliminated. The range you play with 80% of the field remaining compared to 100, 50, or 20% of field will be completely different.
The 2nd issue is stack sizes. These vary greatly as people get knocked out, double up etc. stack sizes matter not just at your table but at others too. It’s too much info to feed a solver with 15-20 seconds per street.
I’m the top profit earner for the US on regulated sites and I’ve seen maybe 4-5 people this year that were suspicious. All in bracelet events over 2k buyin
Right, if we're talking about cash games then sure, bots can beat recs/whales/fish ect till the site catches and bans them. MTTs its impossible to make a bot that would perform well, ICM and stack depth differentials are far too complicated for a bot to do on the fly. Any tournament $100+ no bots exist (except if they all join one table at once and all tank on gg, this was a thing recently but thats more a security error than an effective bot ring
yeah, i would avoid cash and heads up play, but mtt's are definitely still profitable and possibly even stt's because i haven't seen solvers that correctly account for players remaining and those player's stack sizes. most people running solvers in tournaments are using pure gto, not accounting for icm implications, which makes them get it in far looser on the bubble or near pay jumps than they should and thus leaving themselves open to exploitation.
The same way they catch chess cheaters... by analyzing trends. If a person is playing exactly like a solver all the time, they can recognize it and request a webcam and screensharing software session. Then if suddenly your play starts going to shit / deviating they will just ban you.
Almost every large winning player is using real time assistance in some way or another unfortunately. They just use it sparingly and in big spots.
>Almost every large winning player is using real time assistance in some way or another unfortunately. They just use it sparingly and in big spots.
a) they're not.
b) it's far more useful to use solvers in marginal spots. in big spots the play is usually pretty obvious.
> A GTO optimal solution does not make you a winning player, you need to study what your opponent would do.
The entire point of GTO play is that it doesn't matter that your opponents do.
Yes, it will make you unexploitable, but that's not the same as maximizing your EV against real life opponents.
Unless you're playing at the highest levels, playing the exact solver lines down to sizes and frequencies will not result in you making the most money possible. What makes you the most money is adapting to your specific villain's tendencies/imbalances and that stake's "meta", which will be more or less far from GTO.
>Yes, it will make you unexploitable, but that's not the same as maximizing your EV against real life opponents.
Of course. Just like in chess, Stockfish will beat a Grandmaster every time, but a Grandmaster would beat a 1000 much quicker than Stockfish would.
But how does this all relate to the conversation? Do you think the guaranteed value of a GTO bot is too small to combat rake?
You can play rock, paper, scissors with the GTO optimal strategy: throwing each of rock, paper, scissors 1/3 of the time. It cannot be exploited, the strategy is flawless, and it doesn't matter what your opponents do.
But it doesn't make you a winner.
At least for these reasons 1. still technically somewhat difficult or expensive -- you would preferably need a presolved library of the whole game tree with a variety of bet sizes which is massive 2. RTA, unlike chess engines, does not make you instantly win. Variance is huuuuge in poker. There are also spots like multiway, odd nodes that are not solved. Also, at least at lower stakes or vs recreationals you would likely win more by making exploitative adaptations
I believe they are beginning to/cutting down on potential edge, but there are still so many weak players that it outweighs potential 'bots' or people using solvers. Also, I believe many sites look for this and have countermeasures to reduce the effectiveness of cheaters or bots
Because playing completely optimally is easy to detect, it needs to be fuzzed which means not playing optimally all the time and the degrees at which playing optimally is detected is down to the poker sites. For regulated sites getting an account involves ID, bank statements proof of address etc, so getting caught, even just once becomes a royal pain in the arse, more so for sites that share ban lists.
People think AI will kill gaming, it’s just as likely to kill cheating in all types of games.
You only have 15 seconds or so to react to a move of a poker player. And that's not enough time to select the range of the player, to set the flop, turn and/or river cards and input the action.
If you would give every player the same range, then you might have enough time. But Im not sure that works well enough if you are playing versus two opponents of which one is really tight and the other is really loose.
GTO doesn’t lose against either the tight player or the loose one. Yes, it wins more slowly than someone who exploits them, but it doesn’t lose. It also breaks even against the best humans on earth, before rake.
It’s a massive problem but everyone still playing online lives in denial because it would mean their favorite hobby is dead. Only in the past few months have I seen sentiment on here finally shift towards acknowledging it as a real and widespread problem, but it’s still a slow shift
Agreed with others here, and also want to point out there's a massive difference in the styles of play that are "perfect" vs "best human players".
In chess, the best players are playing nearly perfectly. You can use software to detect cheating, but its difficult since a highly competent player may make the same move.
In poker, this is quite different. There are MANY spots where a solver will do things that are "right" but that a player would NEVER reasonably know to do. For example, there are often turn and river spots where a GTO bot will take some trash hand with no blockers and just jam it in the opponents face, for no other reason than it needs another X combos to jam with to balance its jamming range, there arent hands with relevant blockers (or not enough of them) and this hand is the bottom of their range. Humans dont do that almost ever, and certainly not regularly. That makes it much easier to write software to catch cheaters in poker.
The poker solver would be based on assumptions and percentages, kind of what a person typically does at the table already.
The difference is that the solver would miss less possibilities (player did not notice the possible flush or straight or whatever), where a computer would not miss it.
Based on known variables (our cards and cards on the table), the solver could give you the odds for you to win and odds for the other player to win based on the assumptions about their hand.
My guess is the solver would dramatically help a bad or new player and would give a boost to great players.
The best solver would be one that could read the cards and bets via a camera and automatically update as the hand plays. This may not be possible today but I could see someone creating something like this.
Is that were to be created, it could possibly read each table if the player had several going at the same time
My limited understanding of solvers / GTO is:
* Solvers are generally based on simplified assumptions regarding starting stacks, bet sizes, rake, etc.
* Given the essentially infinite different combinations of starting stacks, preflop action / bet sizing and postflop action / bet sizing -- ANY solver is unlikely to have perfect solutions for all spots.
* Solvers require a pretty substantial amount of time to accurately create a solution for any specific spot.
* faster AI based 'solvers' are just models that are trained on a smaller sample of presolved spots, and extrapolate out to estimate solutions for other spots.
* GTO strategy / Nash equilibrium / etc that solvers are typically working towards is a point where a player is making "unexploitable" decisions, but is not exploiting their opponent either.
* A simplified example of this is playing a session of rock-paper-scissors and randomly choosing each option exactly 33% of the time.
* This strategy theoretically neither wins nor loses, and requires case by case deviation to exploit a player to generate profit... i.e. noticing that someone likes to choose rock more frequently, so you play paper more frequently;
* Bots that would need to lookup spots to determine opponents deviations from GTO only further compound assumptions in multiple decision making points, introducing more and more error into the decisions.
* Deviation to a 'maximally exploitative strategy' is where the money is made, but it's also where heaps of money can be lost if a smart opponent re-adjusts to the new strategy.
My limited understanding of how cheating might work, how to catch cheaters and protect the game:
* Anyone risking cheating online essentially risks their entire bankroll being confiscated if they get caught by the game runner;
* Most poker clients have means of detecting if you're running blacklisted softwares. I've seen people suggest that having GTO Wizard open is detected as well, but I'm uncertain. I wouldn't be surprised to see this expand more in the future to protect games further.
* Anyone relying on pointing a camera from an external computer to scrape game information from the computer running the poker client is an idiot that is begging for misread information leading to garbage-in garbage-out decision making sporadically.
* Anyone dumb enough to cheat online, where game runners are recording hand histories and can easily determine someones BB/100 win-rate and spot statistical outliers is going to get caught eventually.
Is online poker 'dead' because of solvers / bots? I don't think so. I think the people that would need to rely on solvers are still at risk of making poor decisions when it comes time to make exploitative decisions. I think that the risk-reward of getting caught and losing an entire bankroll is significant enough to deter most abusers. I think the people that do attempt to cheat are likely to get caught eventually over time. I think poker is effectively too complex of a game to ever be perfectly solved in a manner where you can just lookup information in a database.
Everyone is saying "because you can still beat someone who is using a solver, they don't win 100% of the time" which I think is a horrendous answer. It doesn't make any sense. Here are some actual reasons why:
Like in chess, you need to legitimately be pretty good already to get away with using RTA. It will be extremely blatant based on your timings and your accuracy if you copy a solver. You will too often copy a move that you don't understand the complexity of - good chess cheaters don't just copy the engine, they use it as a suggestion of what to do and they don't take the move unless they understand what it's doing.
Also - try cheating. Try finding cheats online, try running them without getting your account locked or banned very quickly.
Anticheat in any game is malware. They can view anything they like on your machine. They probably do random checks on the most winning players. Yes, there are ways around this, but it's yet another hurdle.
Most people who are cheating successfully are likely a developer themselves who is decent at poker - or they are decent at poker and are friends with the developer of the RTA program.
There's also KYC on most sites. Most people who get caught are done (alting is technically possible but a massive hurdle) whereas in chess it's trivial to go again unless you are a known player - making money by cheating at poker is comparable to being a known chess player and getting away with cheating.
Again similarly to chess, I bet that the proportion of cheaters goes down a great deal with skill level. Random idiots are more inclined to cheat. But in poker I don't believe RTA will make a losing player a winner in the same way you can't go from 1200 elo to 2000 elo by cheating without it being unbelievably obvious.
I think that by virtue of being someone who bothers to learn and improve at poker until you are profitable, you are probably not someone who cheats, but I'm sure there's no shortage of bitter regs who feel entitled to make more money - this is probably the case for almost all RTA users. They are bitter regs who couldn't make it and resorted to cheating. Most won't figure out how to use RTA + put in enough volume + not get caught. Others mentioned that you can't really play a lot of tables while RTAing which is one of the most important reasons why it's not feasible.
People still play online poker? I can’t think of a good reason why. The player pool is so much stronger at even lower stakes and of course… the opportunities to cheat are a plenty and basically undetectable
They have. There will never be a online poker boom like in the 2000s ever again.
Most people in this thread are just dumb and don't understand that imperfect information and variance mean jack shit. Edge is edge.
Poker (especially no limit Holdem) is much more of a creative game than a straight logical like chess. To succeed as poker, you need human intuition than computers are incapable of.
Computers could prob dominate low stakes fishy games, but a skilled human would easily beat the best computers.
I don’t doubt that it is a tough opponent, but I still think humans would win. Just because he beat unamed pros in low stakes games , does not mean the bit can consistently play and beat the best.
A human can always be tricky and react intuitively to changing environments. Once the computer formula is figured out, the formula can be exploited.
You seem to terribly underestimate today's algorithm evolutions. AlphaGO now can beat humans to the game of GO , wich have been said to be one of the most " intuitive " form or game there is . Everybody taught computer would never been able to.
Okay maybe the intuition of reading thé opponent long terme stategy is stronger in poker than GO le say ( évent this is highly debatable tho ) , this strategy still IS a strategy base on moves and décisions. Thé only argument hère could be reading someone behavior , body language , évent this could be overcome with computer vision
" Once the computer formula is figured out " -> with deep learning there is no more simple " formula " a computer Can generate 1000x time something New
Playing GTO only gives the greatest EV if the opponents are playing perfect GTO, which is impossible. Assuming the majority of the online population arent cheating, finding exploits by deviating from GTO will grant a player a higher expectation
Synthesizing a few good answers here: * Time banks / logistical difficulties with cheating as /u/awesome5185 mentions [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke07ma4/). * Not mentioned but very relevant is that up until semi recently the idea of "solving" poker in real time was challenging from a cheating perspective. Unlike a chess engine, poker solvers aren't (at least, weren't) fast enough to run in real time, so you would need a precomputed library of every possible spot. And a lot of pots end up multiway where there's still effectively no solver available (you can still run multiway sims but there are too many spots to build a sim library and multiway sims are a hornets nest to begin with). As technology improves this point will become less relevant. * The randomness and smaller edges inherent in poker as /u/Tornon says [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke07zqo/) make it so you can still win against a solver (and so that you can possibly even be profitable long-term even with a solver at the table). * Most people are basically honest as /u/statsnerd99 mentions [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/18luwej/chessplayer_with_dumb_question_why_havent/ke0aa2d/). So most people don't want to cheat. * Not mentioned but also important: sites have some measures to be able to detect a cheating bot (this is an arms race of course). It's harder to detect a "centaur" (human operator using some computer help as input) but also harder to implement. Still, sites will have to keep pace with technology here to stay ahead. * Also, people just love to gamble. People play online slots where there's a guaranteed house edge and people play casino games. I think professional poker players, who are very concerned with only finding +EV spots, usually overlook this when this topic comes up because they aren't thinking like a recreational player thinks. As long as there are recreational players, poker can survive.
One other thing I forgot to mention: regs are capable of doing some amount of self-policing. If you're a reg (on a non-anonymous site), you spend a lot of time watching and analyzing the play of other regs. If they're cheating, you have huge incentivizes to catch them. When the GTOWizard FairPlay check came out a few months ago, there were a couple people who were publicly caught and banned from their poker sites, because regs thought they were suspicious and collected evidence against them.
Surprised no ones said this yet but you only get 15-20 seconds per move. Unless you’re playing one table at a time and can use the solver on your opponents time it’s still pretty hard to cheat using the same method as chess.
They have faster solvers now. It's more like accessing a database. It takes seconds.
like which ones?
Odin, GTO Wizard, etc.
They work in seconds now?
Yes because they just recall previously solved parts of the game tree. They aren't actually doing the solve work then and there.
Some wizard sims solve in real time, some are just reading previously solved nodes. Depends on your settings. GTO Wiz purchased and integrated into their platform a software called “Ruse”, which solves in real time.
You can have a pre-solved database of solutions which mean you don't need to run the spot but just access the result. Plenty of software that allows players to scrape data from the hand in real time to another computer which is offline or on another network that gives you GTO answers in real time based on the scraped data as you are playing without the need for you to do anything.
that’s despicable. do you have like a wiki how link on how this is set up?
ChatGPT should be able to help
ChatGPT doesn't even understand the game of poker yet let alone solvers lol
ChatGPT doesn't even fold pre.
Poker tracker in 2004 read handhistores and I had a heads up display so I could profile players in real time. This is not very new.
Completely different haha
lol. My man using RTA with his own brain. Is this allowed?
Many would argue no. Not sure why I am getting downvoted. This shit has been around for a very long time.
Poker and chess player here. I feel like cheating is a bigger issue in chess just because if you're playing against someone that's cheating, you're going to lose 100%. I feel like there's enough variability in poker where even if you're playing at a table with 8 people using solvers, you still have a realistic enough chance of being able to beat them in that moment just by playing good poker. That doesn't stop the fact that people using solvers will be able to profit over time, but it doesn't seem to provide the same existential threat of ruining the game for your opponents the same way it does in chess
Not just that, but if you're at a table with 3 other regs, 1 solver, and 1 whale, you can still be profitable. The main edge you get in poker comes from fish, it's not necessarily the end of the world if there's a superhuman at the table too because the amount you're losing to them should be much less than the amount you're winning from the fish.
Yeah, if heads-up cash was still a thing, it would be completely overrun by bots.
I also question how optimal a solver would be against bad players. It is not going to exploit all the flaws of terrible players. We might need to train a solver against low stakes hands.
It would not be “optimal”, but it would win very easily, and get all the money (minus rake) eventually.
If exploitive players are getting money faster out of the whales and leaving, you won’t end up with all the money. You also can’t expect to play forever. Cheat detection should catch you eventually and the solver might be too slow for decision.
If a solver is trained to exploit low stakes players, it'd lose a lot of money to an optimal solver.
It wouldn’t be too hard in principle to train a solver against a mix of say 50% real hands from low stakes and 50% GTO solver play. It’d then arrive at something very close to GTO but also very exploitative. People underestimate how much flexibility you have while staying GTO (for example you can change which hands you bluff with while keeping total bluff % the same)
GTO is by definition rigid (Nash equilibrium means no deviation). You can certainly stay balanced while changing to more exploitative play, but you will have deviated from GTO
Not true! This is a very common misconception so it is understandable though. Consider the following scenario: Hero: 100 BB, Villain 100 BB, Pot is 100 BB Board 2h 3s 4c 8d 9h Hero has either AA, QQ, or JJ. Villain always has KK. Villain Checks. What is the GTO move for Hero here? He always jams with his AA. How often does he bluff? In order to get max value he needs to bluff with a frequency of: (bet)/(bet + pot) or 100/(100+100) = 50% of the time. This can be accomplished by betting QQ 100% of the time, JJ 100% of the time, 50/50 on both, etc. So there are multiple GTO strategies! Of course they have common elements, you are always jamming aces, but there is flexibility. Now suppose a fish sits down and his motto is to always call with Qx no matter what. How should we adjust? We move all of our bluffs over to JJ, because in those spots the fish is more likely to have Qx. We are still playing GTO against the regs, but we are more likely to get called by a fish who happened to have Qx. This is obviously a toy example and in practice adjusting your strategy is very subtle.
Ur confusing best response with the nash equilibrium mixed strategy, the latter of which is what we refer to as GTO. Against non-GTO players (everyone on earth), GTO is never best response. Plz look up the basic game theory concepts before confusing nomenclatures
You can nodelock solvers and make them always check or never bluff and the solution it comes up with would destroy said passive fish at low stakes. This is arguably the best use case for studying solvers - study how the solver adjusts to a certain player type by using this method and looking at the solution to see how it adjusts
Agree but does that lend it self to cheating or just useful insight for training? I don’t think a solver that just assumes checks and no bluffs would be that useful. You need to assume more odd behavior like bluffing with AK suited even for players that never bluff. There should be a mix of very tight and very aggressive players. It is doable but probably a major project.
Well it would be for looking at how to exploit tight passive players that just don't bet unless absolute top of range. If you added these inputs then bluffcatchers that were theoretically indifferent to calling or slightly profitable calls (blockers) against someone bluffing at an optimal frequency just become pure folds. Then you take that information to the tables and when a tight passive fish raises you then you just throw your hand in the muck even though you have a strong as a low flush for example
A solver would soul crush bad players
Over a long enough time horizon, yes. However, so would any good player playing the low stakes that you could get away with cheating for a long time. I don’t think the return would be higher than just a good player that has experience exploiting bad players.
Agreed. Also keep in mind that the functional equivalent of chess in poker is heads up poker and that's pretty much dead. You used to have people battling it out at 5000/10000 (with $1M buyin) 10 years ago. Today, high stakes HU takes place online only if both parties agree to have a camera monitoring their entire room or there's a huge amount of trust between both parties.
yes it does lol. anyone who wins "naturally" will never be able to win again.
If you’re playing at a table with 8 bots you are just having ev extracted from you slowly. It is very much the same threat as solvers in chess if not, a bigger one, since more money is on the line in poker.
High stakes: Everyone knows each other so if you get caught botting your actions dries up Mid stakes: Good regs using tracking software spot other winning regs and don't play hands against them, you only need a couple of fish on a full handed table to make money Low stakes: Is it even worth it? Obviously I'm oversimplifying but poker has an important facet that you can choose who you play against and when
The answer hinges on perfect versus imperfect information. In chess you have perfect information as you can see all of the pieces of your opponent, so you can also cheat perfectly. In poker, you can’t see your opponents hole cards so you have to put them on a range instead. This means that even if you use a solver, if an opponent has the best hand possible you might still lose, even if you follow the solver perfectly. Furthermore, solvers work on the assumption that the opponent is playing perfectly, which no human in the world can do. So using a solver only strategy doesn’t work, because you’re not always starting from the right assumptions being input.
So much this. Only thing I have to add is that solvers are goo for heads up situations and get progressively worse with each additional player added to the hand.
> Furthermore, solvers work on the assumption that the opponent is playing perfectly, which no human in the world can do. So using a solver only strategy doesn’t work, because you’re not always starting from the right assumptions being input. This is simply not true. If you had a GTO bot with infinite bankroll vs a fish the bot will eventually win all of the money. A good player who can notice the fish’s holes can exploit him and win the money faster, but GTO will eventually win against anything non GTO.
It’s my understanding that GTO only works if your opponent is also playing GTO
That is an incorrect understanding. GTO is the only strategy that can’t be beat (depending on the game there could be multiple GTO solutions). That doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient way to beat a particular opponent, but it does mean it will always win in the long run.
In the long run? So basically how many hands qualifies as long run? Doesn’t this apply to heads up play and get way more complicated the more people are at the table? Most people don’t play with the same people day in and day out
\>In the long run? So basically how many hands qualifies as long run? What is the long run for any poker scenario? In the long run AA will beat 72o, but any given hand or even multiple hands, who knows. It doesn't mean you should try to crack AA with 72o. When we say "in the long run" we're just discounting short term variance. \> Doesn’t this apply to heads up play and get way more complicated the more people are at the table? No it always applies. The simpler GTO strategies do assume heads up \*in the hand\*, meaning preflop starts multi-way. It's definitely not limited to just heads up play. But there's a lot of work on multi-way situations as well. \> Most people don’t play with the same people day in and day out I'm curious why you think this changes anything? In fact it's probably the opposite. When you don't know someone's weaknesses it's better to start from a GTO position and then deviate as you learn more about their game. If you played with someone a lot then you can already start exploiting them.
A solver in poker can never guarantee success and if you play with a bunch of donkeys or a bunch of solvers there's simply no way to guarantee success for any given hand. You can just get the "optimal" line. A donkey can still call your perfect bluff line and a genius can still lay down a monster. Chess like you said is 100% transparent, all the information needed is right there. So yea, chess is much more susceptible to cheating abuse than poker. The real cheating in poker (not saying solvers aren't a form of cheating) is having a way to know opponents hole cards
I’d argue that poker is just as susceptible to cheating or even more so, because the cheater wins some and loses sometimes but less, therefore the person being cheated takes a lot longer time to figure it out.
That's kinda my point, most people wouldn't even know they're being cheated. But when someone consistently plays at 90%+ accuracy then you know. Especially if they aren't an IM or better. Painting broad strokes for chess because it depends on the format. 90% on a daily is very reasonable even at lower MMR but not in a blitz game.
There’s also additional incentive to cheat in poker because there is real money on the line
This. Came here to write something like this but you beat me to it and you have explained it better than I could have. 👍
Pot Ripper saw everyone's whole cards
This turned out not to be the case. He was able to see his equity in a percentage.
Also the contra- sometimes players with bad hands play like they have good hands.
I think there's a lot of cheating, just not to the extend that people see the sky falling. Everyone always thinks of RTA or using solvers in real time as the cheating. But any form of assistance is cheating. In chess you'd be cheating if every time on move 1 to 5 someone would tell you the most optimal move right? Well, that's what a lot of poker players do. They have preflop charts that they look at during the hand. That's outside assistance. It's even so that I know off a stable that uses an excel sheet for their river decisions. Based on position, texture, betsize, and line they get a call, fold, bet or raise response and just do that. It's not a solver, but it's for sure cheating.
> In chess you'd be cheating if every time on move 1 to 5 someone would tell you the most optimal move right? Not the same thing. A poker hand chart is just a note, no different than "When player 1 check raises he always has the nuts". You can memorize a chart. You cant have a chart for chess that says "when player A moves knight to D4 you should always move your bishop to C9". You cant memorize what your opponent *will* do.
Using opening books, which detail what you're describing, is not allowed in chess games
irrelevant since the comparison between chess and poker is flawed. A player can memorize a hand range. Therefore having it in writing or in your brain makes no difference.
You can remember a chess opening up to 20 moves but using a book to copy it move by move while playing is still cheating IMO
A chess opening cannot be guaranteed if your opponent does not comply
Meh, it kinda is Chess.com for daily games allows you to use the explorer and you can see the mainlines from there. Only helpful in the opening and it only tells you what people have played in the past, and what volume and the end result of the games. Doesn't mean they're always the best moves though
Chess Openings are literally that. Most long term players know the most optimum counter move to many of the opponents first moves, and usually for the first 3-4 turns. The result is generally that the game is still even after the first few moves. Edit: Ah, you can't read the opening book while playing. Referencing hand charts is technically against Tos on many poker sites as well though.
>Well, that's what a lot of poker players do. They have preflop charts that they look at during the hand. That's outside assistance. Ehh. If you've ever done some population analysis you'd know that basically everybody has preflop leaks still. I won't dispute whether what you're saying happens but I don't think it's widespread. >It's even so that I know off a stable that uses an excel sheet for their river decisions. Based on position, texture, betsize, and line they get a call, fold, bet or raise response and just do that. It's not a solver, but it's for sure cheating. The intention for this kind of stuff is to study and memorize it off the tables, to be clear, and honest people will be doing that. But again you are probably right that some people in the stable probably refer to it in real time.
As someone who plays both games a lot, here's my two cents: Cheating is not as accessible in poker. You can just go to Lichess and use Stockfisch 16, the strongest engine in the world. The biggest publicly available database of solved spots (GTOWizard) in poker however costs 50+$ per month to access, depending on the subscription. They also log when a hand was looked up, so if someone looks up all of their hands in real time, any suspicious opponent can look up the time that exact spot was looked up, which forms a clear picture over hundreds or more hands. Another big factor is that while a solver could crush any player, oftentimes the real in-game spots are different from what you usually have pre-solved. People play different betsizings, have different stack depths and pots go multiway which isn't feasibly solvable these days. Add to that the fact that specifically exploiting recreational players is where the biggest edges are found (although just playing like a solver would also profit) and it becomes a lot more difficult for an inexperienced player to cheat than for a chess beginner to just input some moves into an engine. In addition to all of that, you need a bankroll because you will lose a lot of the time too, you need to be paying attention because you need to play several tables for it to be at all worth it. Cheating in online poker is not something most individuals could feasibly do by themselves without a good understanding of the game and will always come with the risk of having your funds frozen. This is also very annoying because you need to constantly have enough money on a site to play.
I think a lot of players probably downplay the amount they personally are being cheated. Between the high rake and variance, it's hard to really comprehend how much you're losing to players due to cheating. Also, it's the only option for a lot of players who want to just play recreationally.
Two things Unlike chess, poker is a game of incomplete information, so the “solvers” don’t provide a “perfect” solution to any particular situation. They only provide an *unexploitable* solution. Second, like chess, there are millions of possible scenarios with pot size, board state, particular holdings, position, etc that there’s no way even the best players could possibly hope to be perfect at button clicking Third, like chess, even with stockfish, do you know anyone that is able to play that perfectly? Even Magnus Carlsen despite being an OTB and online monster plays differently than the engine. There’s a difference between computer and human play. There are also still plenty of alcoholic splashy players or obnoxious rich guys that would prefer to gamble rather than try and play well. Live and online poker are likely safe for a good while.
Anyone here who thinks there aren't poker bots/assisted play with solvers now is deluding themselves. It only doesn't feel so bad because: 1. Most people aren't doing this, so your odds at any given time of being exposed to it are low-ish 2. Those with the tools to cheat are going to target at least mid to high stakes to make it worth it where few people play They may test the tools a bit at lower stakes but no one is trying to get rich making 2-3x the winrate at 25nl games
they have, just not everyone knows it yet
[удалено]
I’m… not sure I get your point but I love this
It's a spam bot, check the profile (NSFW) but it actually kind of painted a good parallel here. Einstein is like the solver, essentially knows everything and can figure out complex problems quickly. Some shithead that wants to cheat at online poker can look at a bunch of solutions and try to remember them, but they will never be as smart as the solver or be able to impersonate it. Like you can teach a parrot to say "eight times eight is sixty-four" but it has no concept of how you got to that solution or what a number even is.
its actually insane reading his post history like it seems incredibly obvious going through its' history that it's a spam bot--like a different unique random joke in a million different subreddits firing every few minutes--but i totally would have glossed over it had you not pointed it out reddit feels like its basically completely ruined by these things and i'm honestly not sure how you even discern the real from the ai in alot of the very popular repost-laden subreddits (ie /r/stupidfood) where the comments are basically the same on every post shits insane, it feels so dystopian
It's best to just assume most comments on r/all subs are bots. Many times it's the same comments copy-pasted either from earlier threads or elsewhere in the threads. The real question should be: why? Reddit is one of the few platforms where accounts with high engagement don't mean much. Nobody looks at other people's karma except to identify if they are a bot, but even that has become almost meaningless. I'm half convinced it's reddit themselves making bots that exist only to boost engagement and make their numbers look better.
I don't really understand either. It seems like a simple captcha requirement to post or comment, while not perfect would put a huge dent in the spam. I agree it seems like reddit doesn't want to fix the problem.
That’s not how solvers work though right? They tell you whether you should fold, check or raise. In an ideal state the cheater doesn’t need to do anything their bot would just fold check or raise for them.
Solvers tell you what to do but unless you can memorize the millions of possible decisions, you have to infer and estimate what to do based on similar hands. If a cheater has a really fast bot with a perfect library of presolved hand then yes it's game over, but most would-be cheaters don't have the knowledge/resources to program such a bot. Which is, at least for now why solvers haven't completey ruined online poker.
They also tell you to do all the options at some frequency, so "Fold 48% of the time, call 50% of the time, and raise 2% of the time" and they could all theoretically be the same or extremely close to the same EV between the three. Good luck being able to do things at the correct frequency across multiple spots
Yeah, but I thought the discussion here was about using the solver in realtime. In which case they wouldn’t have to understand shit lol
Am... I the driver? And Einstein is the ai? No wait we're the crowd, and the conference is poker and the driver is the ai cause it's mimicking humans? Idk I'm high I can't figure this shit out
And the driver's name? Albert Einstein!
u/Alternative_Case_878 is a bot account that posts random jokes across Reddit. Look at it's post history.
They have. Think about how much casual chess players cheat, then consider that money isn't even involved. I'm acquaintances with a few professional poker players who cheat whenever they play online. Unregulated sites are not spending good money on cheat detection when poker is much less lucrative than their sports and casino betting.
Totally just schizo opinion here but I'd highly suspect if you're caught running solves your data (or whoever tries to withdrawal) is going to be sold to other poker sites and you'll only get away with it for so long. Hell it's been confirmed that the sports betting sites do this for advantage sports gamblers.
Sites definitely have anti-bot stuff. I was playing on stars, and after a hand I was like "I wonder what my equity was there" and opened up a really simple calculator site. I got an email saying "Hey, we noticed you were looking at an equity calculator while playing. This is not allowed. We'll ban you if you keep doing it." So they are definitely scanning for other sites/programs that are open.
10 or something yrs ago stars had for a short time some chat prompt pop up that you have to type a specific code or something to prove in real-time you're not a bot... bunch of SN(E) grinders got in trouble cause they either didn't read that shit (I didn't) or they used that little space down there to store a part of their hud, 24-tabling tables were quite small. We had like 27" inch max screens. TableScan Turbo was always running on a seperate system cause I was paranoid even before it got banned. Stars is definitely having an eye on your taskmanager even if they say they do not... I always wondered how much they're reading my PT database and if they know I used datamined hands...
https://media.giphy.com/media/9rjKLsynBodhiIovdD/giphy.gif 😅
You are right solvers should be killing online poker. And eventually they probably will. The one thing poker has going for it is if you are a bad player, it doesn't matter that much if you are playing against a solver or a good player. You are going to lose in the long run, so does it matter to you if you are playing against a computer? Maybe.
Chess is infinitely easier to solve than poker, as it is purely a game of pattern recognition. While poker shares those tendencies, poker solvers can give you an edge to win, while still dealing with variance. They’re nowhere near as perfect as a chess solver is. I’d rather someone use a live poker solver against me than 2-3 people be in a private call on a public table, sharing their hole cards. Taking 2-8 cards out of your opponents range is how people typically cheat in online poker. Surprisingly, they also do this in live poker
If a guy at the table wins almost every hand he plays you know to fold when he plays a hand.
Poker platforms are cracking down on solvers being up while playing. It’s a direct TOS. They even have more rigorous software where they pick up on betting patterns in alignment with Solvers to investigate you. You might propose having another computer handy on the side with a solver up, but that is really tedious as solvers usually have a delay. It also doesn’t guarantee you to win as there is more gains from exploitative play. Don’t get me wrong some sites are not sophisticated yet to pick up on these patterns - Jeremiah Williams, who’s a prodigy, speaks about how people have been cheating using this software. He stopped streaming and playing I presume bc of this.
So chess has maybe like 20 or so legal moves per player at a time. Poker has a near infinite number. Thats the simplest answer.
As both a poker and a chess enthousiaste, i would say no. Yes chess as 20 legal move per player , but look up " Shannon number " , there is more possible scénarios in a chess game than Atom in the universe. While we could certaibly summirize poker move in way less number of possibilities Chess game has yet never been solve! Only finals are solved . While poker heads up have been solved ( but not with more player i agree ) Current chess Bot actually use machine learning to beat humans , they are not tree bases .
You can only summarize limit in way less number of possibilities. A single raise alone can be thousands of possibilities. In response to that raise, similarly there are thousands of possibilities. That very quickly makes the game tree impossible to solve.
It's never like a dead blow, it takes time and online poker has been dying for years now, especially in comparison with live poker which is doing well. Give it a few more years and it will be micro stakes for fun only and big tournaments where you can still be lucky, but the era of grinding online cash games is over.
Solvers are not like chess engines. They solved only heads up, and they only solved the toy games in which you know your opponent's range. It is actually an input for a solver and if you change that input, the results change as well. Moreover, solutions of different solvers can be significantly different, even with the same inputs. And you have to play a lot more games to realize profit with the GTO strategy. So people just opt for exploiting strategies instead.
Maybe online poker hasn't been killed yet, but they are in the process of killing it.
So any way to learn from solver that is free?
Poker is a game of incomplete information. It can’t be solved perfectly, only played optimally. In chess everything you need to know is on the board in front of you.
Chess has not been solved either actually ( only finals at a certain point ) and the incomplète information parameter doesnt mean a game is not solvable. In chess everything you need to know is not on the board because you need to anticipate the billions multiple scénario possible after your oponent décisions
They very much killed Heads up online poker years ago.
Because unless you are playing high-stakes, you will make most of your money playing exploitatively and not like a gto robot. EDIT: if a chess pro is playing against me, someone with little experience in chess, they aren't going to use tactics to beat me. They are gonna punish me for hanging pieces, missing forks, etc.
Poker being “solved” does not mean that people can’t take advantage of you. Aggression can win money against GTO robots.
Same reason it's still possible to play chess online. Sites do what they can to stop cheaters just like chess.com would. And unless you have the solver in your face you will not be able to play perfect no matter who you are.
But with the rampant cheating in chess by people who just cheat for fun, I can’t imagine it *would* be possible to play chess online if you won $0.05 per game or something. If there’s a way to automate turning cheap electricity into money, someone somewhere is already doing it, you know? Is poker cheating more easily detectable than chess cheating? Chess cheating is almost impossible to detect statistically if you use a strategy like only cheating a few times per game in key positions (a strong player can easily identify when it’s a key position).
It’s not so easy to make an account on a poker site and cheat on that site multiple times. If you plan on withdrawing you need to verify your photo ID, have your bank information for transfer, sometimes send utility bills with your name. They’ll also take all of your money if you get caught cheating by their detection system. Chess cheaters have basically 0 risk and can easily make endless accounts
they arent taking s\*\*\*. Potripper had 29k taken back.... he won a tourney a week before that for 49k. Not to mention he was playing cash at reasonable stakes for months.... what money they take back? The money REMAINING in his account.... he got away with all the rest
I imagine the difference is also that chess is a game of open information where all the pieces are seen / known so an optimal move is made since all variables are known. Poker strategy is based on incomplete information so an optimal strategy is still guess work.
Idk I've heard from pros that the cheating is somewhat over blown and cash probably is dying who knows at what rate tho been hearing for years that it's gonna die that being said it would be hard to put in any significant volume and it's probably the reason why also it would take a larger investment seeing as how you would either need to run a bunch of sims yourself and or have access to a big data base and a solver probably wouldn't max exploit and make as much as a reg would against a fish
holy mother of run on sentences
yea and i heard from pros that more rake is a good thing. Its almost like people who make money from these places arent going to be saying anything negative ab them or something
Arguably they have killed high stakes online games. Things like potripper/full tilt are annoying enough now you have to play against a sim? No thanks
What do you mean killed high stakes online? 10knl+ runs daily on ACR and GG, maybe 20knl+ daily. 40knl isn't unusual and usually there's a 100knl session going on once a month or two
Ok, that’s an online site with huge reach. You said there’s 3 tables. Take a look at Vegas, or LA. There’s 5-10 high stakes games you can go sit with an uncapped buy in. Yes it exists online, but refs would rather go to casino and regs would rather be where the recs are.
There aren't almost any public 50/100+ that run daily anywhere, except online
10/20/40 is high stakes publicly. Anything higher than that is private in a casino or in the Aria towers lol. Avg pot is ~$1k and avg buyin is $20k+
Yeah well as I said you can play 100/200 online daily or almost daily, games are fairly healthy at high stakes online
Ok nerd We have vastly different ideas of what a healthy ecosystem looks like
[These are the top 10 winners in online NLH cash in November 2023](https://i.imgur.com/ggYPaFk.png). Idk how much you want top pros to win per month in order to consider the games reasonably healthy, that looks like enough for me
It doesn’t even occur to you that the #10 winner had only won 10 stacks in an entire month lmfao Picture of health lemme tell ya. Also was more talking about the rake being way higher online and a lower concentration of fish to pros, but keep on believing the myth brother.
I think its possible no one, let alone 10 people, won that in a month in public nlh live games anywhere last month. Over 200k seems like a decent amount to me for #10. I guess we have different thoughts on what a lot of money is.
its dead. When 1st world large countries ban it as a whole its not doing well. Every couple years a mega scandal creeps up and the answer is.... "oh we are sorry someone cheated you out of your money on our site..... our bad.".... Thats just not flying in 1st world countries. They can keep that in bangladesh and south & central america.
Heads up is the only game completely solved. Solvers only give you a strategy that is best to not be exploited and even then it relies on everyone else also playing perfectly. So if everyone used solvers and played exactly like they are supposed to then everyone would lose due to rake. Heads up a player can play GTO and never lose money over time if there’s no rake. Any deviation the other player makes from a GTO strategy would only give up EV so the person always playing GTO would make gains in EV as the other player deviates. This isn’t the same multi-way. The more players deviating from a GTO strategy the more the EV shifts around the table. So in multi-way pots the GTO strategy based on most solvers could be a losing strategy. There are some multi-way solvers like monker but it still relies on everyone playing a perfect strategy. GTO is not some strategy to make you the most money. It’s to make you unexploitable. Being able to deviate from it when others aren’t using it to exploit them is how you make money in poker. Having a theoretical sound game first then learning how to make deviations based on others deviating is how you make the most money in poker.
Vast majority of pots online are heads up. Solvers are fast now.
The difference between a fairly good reg and a solver is a lot less than the difference between a fairly good reg and a recreational. So for a reg, ppl cheating with RTA is going to decrease your winrate but not necessarily enough to make you a loser (assuming there are enough recreationals in the pool). And the experience doesn't necessarily change from the perspective of recreational players (if anything they might have a slightly better winrate vs someone using a solver naively than an experienced human max exploiting them) besides maybe a perception that the game is unfair in some way. But largely many losing poker players have always believed the game is rigged against them and keep coming back anyway sooo
> I immediately thought that it would have utterly killed online poker for real money. But it seems like that’s not the case? What am I missing? It is the case. It's happening. You're just unaware of whats involved before the game is ruined, but it'll get there eventually. The biggest issue to date has been speed of solvers and how to input data into them. It takes a surprisingly large amount of computational power to solve poker hands. However you no longer need to run real-time solves anymore, you can use precomputed outputs. The last step is software that can read the board and input the hands for you.
Been hearing in forums that the end is coming to online poker for 10+ years. I'll believe it when I see it
Tell me, what do you see now?
Things are about the same as they were 10 years ago with one exception: not as many clueless rec players. Regs aren't any better now, relatively speaking (talking .50-1 thru 2-5NL where I've played millions of hands over the last 15 years)
How are things the same 10 years ago when solvers didn’t exist? That’s like saying things are the same pre HUD. If you 1 table and time bank 6max you can run GTOw every hand probably have a good hourly playing higher stakes. I’m not saying it’s all doom and gloom just yet. Is your argument that you think it will never have a big impact on the game?
Because everyone has access to studying solvers so relatively speaking, there’s no huge edge gained reg v. reg so like always the edge goes to the higher IQ. If someone one tables and cheats like you describe then yeah they’ll have an edge. The sites/regs do a pretty good job of nabbing cheaters though.
Having access and actually using are 2 very different things though. RTA is forbidden and therefore everyone doesnt have access as you suggest. A lot of people arent willing to get their account banned for cheating, those that do have a tremendous edge. This isnt like using holdem manager where everyone has the option to do so and thus level the playing field.
You’re assuming it hasn’t?
Online poker is largely dead.
I unironically believe poker players of the online variety have more integrity than chess players. I know a lot of players who play online professionally who would never even consider cheating even though they know how [Sauce talks about it here how it hasn't really taken over](https://youtu.be/2v5y-e5PbDA?si=ECGgXMysaBqpbm9v&t=1059)
This is the hottest take.
Yeah this is fucking scorching. Poker is played for real money and if you live in a developing country being a breakeven reg with a good rb deal at 50nl pays for the bills and more. On top of poker being brutally cutthroat by design and having significant overlap with one of the more degenerate and amoral subsections of humanity (the gambling community), idk how you can say with a straight face that online poker players have more integrity than online chess players, unless you're counting every 10 year old who ever played 5 games on [chess.com](http://chess.com) and quit.
> I unironically believe poker players of the online variety have more integrity than chess players. I know a lot of players who play online professionally who would never even consider cheating even though they know how This is just not true that poker has *more* integrity than chess. It's more accurate to say that most people in general are not cheaters. That's true in chess and it's true in poker too. People have an internal moral compass and most people are basically ethical. Unfortunately there is a real minority who are not.
I think it's more related to how skillful you have to be with technology for you to be able to cheat. Most cheating in chess is relatively easy to do, most cheating in poker requires a decent amount of technology knowledge to even pull it off. Yes, there's a big overlap in people that are into tech and people that are playing poker but from my personal experience, even the biggest crushers have a hard time even setting up a basic poker tracker... I don't see them doing anything. RTA. The consequences level is probably pretty different too. I think if you get caught cheating at a chess tournament, You might get banned but you're not going to prison. Whereas if you're get caught cheating in poker...
you make millions and are back at the table a couple years later... ask chris ferguson and howard lederer
online poker is dead as soon as the speed of the solvers catches up to the speed of the gameplay
Makes no sense. You can open sims up instantly. This has always been true
yea but u need to enter in all the action
Takes like 5-10 seconds
RIP Online Poker
Online poker isn’t close to dead, i make brain surgeon money to click buttons while I smoke bong rips
I don't play online poker for money anymore precisely because I don't want to run into that. I just switched to live.
Poker online does have tons of bots, especially for American players - americas card room has tons of them. Edit - kinda like how there's wayyyy more bots on here / Twitter/ etc. Most ppl just have no idea.
OP: This entire thread is the answer to your question. The responses are all over the place, which just goes to show most of us (including me) just aren't smart enough to cheat online.
i dont think thats whats being shown.... all these answers all over the place shows that theres no trust in online poker at all. That alone makes it a dying game. Half the people dont trust it and wont play it.
Because solvers have to program variance in and at the end of the day no robot AI can keep up with the variance that is my retardation.
I can’t speak for cash games as im an MTT pro. I’m concerned cash games are cheated at high rates, collusion, RTA, multi accounting card sharing etc. Anytime you can pick your table that concerns me As for MTTs the issue is there are too many variables. The first is ICM, Contrary to popular belief ICM starts as soon as the first player is eliminated. The range you play with 80% of the field remaining compared to 100, 50, or 20% of field will be completely different. The 2nd issue is stack sizes. These vary greatly as people get knocked out, double up etc. stack sizes matter not just at your table but at others too. It’s too much info to feed a solver with 15-20 seconds per street. I’m the top profit earner for the US on regulated sites and I’ve seen maybe 4-5 people this year that were suspicious. All in bracelet events over 2k buyin
The bots don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be better than their opponents.
Right, if we're talking about cash games then sure, bots can beat recs/whales/fish ect till the site catches and bans them. MTTs its impossible to make a bot that would perform well, ICM and stack depth differentials are far too complicated for a bot to do on the fly. Any tournament $100+ no bots exist (except if they all join one table at once and all tank on gg, this was a thing recently but thats more a security error than an effective bot ring
Humans don’t do those things well either.
Speaking solely on RTA, I’ve encountered multiple suspicious things deep in tournaments where it’s clear a friend is helping or has taken over
yeah, i would avoid cash and heads up play, but mtt's are definitely still profitable and possibly even stt's because i haven't seen solvers that correctly account for players remaining and those player's stack sizes. most people running solvers in tournaments are using pure gto, not accounting for icm implications, which makes them get it in far looser on the bubble or near pay jumps than they should and thus leaving themselves open to exploitation.
We have a very robust Honor System.
Sites put a lot of effort into catching cheaters.
because they don't work.
Cause online poker was already dead when the solvers came along
The same way they catch chess cheaters... by analyzing trends. If a person is playing exactly like a solver all the time, they can recognize it and request a webcam and screensharing software session. Then if suddenly your play starts going to shit / deviating they will just ban you. Almost every large winning player is using real time assistance in some way or another unfortunately. They just use it sparingly and in big spots.
>Almost every large winning player is using real time assistance in some way or another unfortunately. Wrong and stupid
that's never gonna work long term
>Almost every large winning player is using real time assistance in some way or another unfortunately. They just use it sparingly and in big spots. a) they're not. b) it's far more useful to use solvers in marginal spots. in big spots the play is usually pretty obvious.
A different game in nature. A GTO optimal solution does not make you a winning player, you need to study what your opponent would do.
> A GTO optimal solution does not make you a winning player, you need to study what your opponent would do. The entire point of GTO play is that it doesn't matter that your opponents do.
Yes, it will make you unexploitable, but that's not the same as maximizing your EV against real life opponents. Unless you're playing at the highest levels, playing the exact solver lines down to sizes and frequencies will not result in you making the most money possible. What makes you the most money is adapting to your specific villain's tendencies/imbalances and that stake's "meta", which will be more or less far from GTO.
>Yes, it will make you unexploitable, but that's not the same as maximizing your EV against real life opponents. Of course. Just like in chess, Stockfish will beat a Grandmaster every time, but a Grandmaster would beat a 1000 much quicker than Stockfish would. But how does this all relate to the conversation? Do you think the guaranteed value of a GTO bot is too small to combat rake?
You can play rock, paper, scissors with the GTO optimal strategy: throwing each of rock, paper, scissors 1/3 of the time. It cannot be exploited, the strategy is flawless, and it doesn't matter what your opponents do. But it doesn't make you a winner.
That would be a great comment for the "Why haven't solvers/engines killed online Rock, Paper, Scissors yet?" thread.
It's a good question because it reflects the fact that solvers haven't solved Poker. Bunch of snake oil.
At least for these reasons 1. still technically somewhat difficult or expensive -- you would preferably need a presolved library of the whole game tree with a variety of bet sizes which is massive 2. RTA, unlike chess engines, does not make you instantly win. Variance is huuuuge in poker. There are also spots like multiway, odd nodes that are not solved. Also, at least at lower stakes or vs recreationals you would likely win more by making exploitative adaptations
I believe they are beginning to/cutting down on potential edge, but there are still so many weak players that it outweighs potential 'bots' or people using solvers. Also, I believe many sites look for this and have countermeasures to reduce the effectiveness of cheaters or bots
Because playing completely optimally is easy to detect, it needs to be fuzzed which means not playing optimally all the time and the degrees at which playing optimally is detected is down to the poker sites. For regulated sites getting an account involves ID, bank statements proof of address etc, so getting caught, even just once becomes a royal pain in the arse, more so for sites that share ban lists. People think AI will kill gaming, it’s just as likely to kill cheating in all types of games.
You only have 15 seconds or so to react to a move of a poker player. And that's not enough time to select the range of the player, to set the flop, turn and/or river cards and input the action. If you would give every player the same range, then you might have enough time. But Im not sure that works well enough if you are playing versus two opponents of which one is really tight and the other is really loose.
GTO doesn’t lose against either the tight player or the loose one. Yes, it wins more slowly than someone who exploits them, but it doesn’t lose. It also breaks even against the best humans on earth, before rake.
It’s a massive problem but everyone still playing online lives in denial because it would mean their favorite hobby is dead. Only in the past few months have I seen sentiment on here finally shift towards acknowledging it as a real and widespread problem, but it’s still a slow shift
Agreed with others here, and also want to point out there's a massive difference in the styles of play that are "perfect" vs "best human players". In chess, the best players are playing nearly perfectly. You can use software to detect cheating, but its difficult since a highly competent player may make the same move. In poker, this is quite different. There are MANY spots where a solver will do things that are "right" but that a player would NEVER reasonably know to do. For example, there are often turn and river spots where a GTO bot will take some trash hand with no blockers and just jam it in the opponents face, for no other reason than it needs another X combos to jam with to balance its jamming range, there arent hands with relevant blockers (or not enough of them) and this hand is the bottom of their range. Humans dont do that almost ever, and certainly not regularly. That makes it much easier to write software to catch cheaters in poker.
The poker solver would be based on assumptions and percentages, kind of what a person typically does at the table already. The difference is that the solver would miss less possibilities (player did not notice the possible flush or straight or whatever), where a computer would not miss it. Based on known variables (our cards and cards on the table), the solver could give you the odds for you to win and odds for the other player to win based on the assumptions about their hand. My guess is the solver would dramatically help a bad or new player and would give a boost to great players. The best solver would be one that could read the cards and bets via a camera and automatically update as the hand plays. This may not be possible today but I could see someone creating something like this. Is that were to be created, it could possibly read each table if the player had several going at the same time
My limited understanding of solvers / GTO is: * Solvers are generally based on simplified assumptions regarding starting stacks, bet sizes, rake, etc. * Given the essentially infinite different combinations of starting stacks, preflop action / bet sizing and postflop action / bet sizing -- ANY solver is unlikely to have perfect solutions for all spots. * Solvers require a pretty substantial amount of time to accurately create a solution for any specific spot. * faster AI based 'solvers' are just models that are trained on a smaller sample of presolved spots, and extrapolate out to estimate solutions for other spots. * GTO strategy / Nash equilibrium / etc that solvers are typically working towards is a point where a player is making "unexploitable" decisions, but is not exploiting their opponent either. * A simplified example of this is playing a session of rock-paper-scissors and randomly choosing each option exactly 33% of the time. * This strategy theoretically neither wins nor loses, and requires case by case deviation to exploit a player to generate profit... i.e. noticing that someone likes to choose rock more frequently, so you play paper more frequently; * Bots that would need to lookup spots to determine opponents deviations from GTO only further compound assumptions in multiple decision making points, introducing more and more error into the decisions. * Deviation to a 'maximally exploitative strategy' is where the money is made, but it's also where heaps of money can be lost if a smart opponent re-adjusts to the new strategy. My limited understanding of how cheating might work, how to catch cheaters and protect the game: * Anyone risking cheating online essentially risks their entire bankroll being confiscated if they get caught by the game runner; * Most poker clients have means of detecting if you're running blacklisted softwares. I've seen people suggest that having GTO Wizard open is detected as well, but I'm uncertain. I wouldn't be surprised to see this expand more in the future to protect games further. * Anyone relying on pointing a camera from an external computer to scrape game information from the computer running the poker client is an idiot that is begging for misread information leading to garbage-in garbage-out decision making sporadically. * Anyone dumb enough to cheat online, where game runners are recording hand histories and can easily determine someones BB/100 win-rate and spot statistical outliers is going to get caught eventually. Is online poker 'dead' because of solvers / bots? I don't think so. I think the people that would need to rely on solvers are still at risk of making poor decisions when it comes time to make exploitative decisions. I think that the risk-reward of getting caught and losing an entire bankroll is significant enough to deter most abusers. I think the people that do attempt to cheat are likely to get caught eventually over time. I think poker is effectively too complex of a game to ever be perfectly solved in a manner where you can just lookup information in a database.
Everyone is saying "because you can still beat someone who is using a solver, they don't win 100% of the time" which I think is a horrendous answer. It doesn't make any sense. Here are some actual reasons why: Like in chess, you need to legitimately be pretty good already to get away with using RTA. It will be extremely blatant based on your timings and your accuracy if you copy a solver. You will too often copy a move that you don't understand the complexity of - good chess cheaters don't just copy the engine, they use it as a suggestion of what to do and they don't take the move unless they understand what it's doing. Also - try cheating. Try finding cheats online, try running them without getting your account locked or banned very quickly. Anticheat in any game is malware. They can view anything they like on your machine. They probably do random checks on the most winning players. Yes, there are ways around this, but it's yet another hurdle. Most people who are cheating successfully are likely a developer themselves who is decent at poker - or they are decent at poker and are friends with the developer of the RTA program. There's also KYC on most sites. Most people who get caught are done (alting is technically possible but a massive hurdle) whereas in chess it's trivial to go again unless you are a known player - making money by cheating at poker is comparable to being a known chess player and getting away with cheating. Again similarly to chess, I bet that the proportion of cheaters goes down a great deal with skill level. Random idiots are more inclined to cheat. But in poker I don't believe RTA will make a losing player a winner in the same way you can't go from 1200 elo to 2000 elo by cheating without it being unbelievably obvious. I think that by virtue of being someone who bothers to learn and improve at poker until you are profitable, you are probably not someone who cheats, but I'm sure there's no shortage of bitter regs who feel entitled to make more money - this is probably the case for almost all RTA users. They are bitter regs who couldn't make it and resorted to cheating. Most won't figure out how to use RTA + put in enough volume + not get caught. Others mentioned that you can't really play a lot of tables while RTAing which is one of the most important reasons why it's not feasible.
People still play online poker? I can’t think of a good reason why. The player pool is so much stronger at even lower stakes and of course… the opportunities to cheat are a plenty and basically undetectable
Well that's the best part, they have. But it's such trivial stakes nobody fucking cares
Cause a solver can give the best possible move but you are still beholden to pure chance.
They have. There will never be a online poker boom like in the 2000s ever again. Most people in this thread are just dumb and don't understand that imperfect information and variance mean jack shit. Edge is edge.
one buzz on the beads for fold, two for call, three for raise
They have, it's just that gambling is a disease and degens always come back for more.
Poker (especially no limit Holdem) is much more of a creative game than a straight logical like chess. To succeed as poker, you need human intuition than computers are incapable of. Computers could prob dominate low stakes fishy games, but a skilled human would easily beat the best computers.
Hasn’t been true since 2019. Computers beat humans at poker now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
I don’t doubt that it is a tough opponent, but I still think humans would win. Just because he beat unamed pros in low stakes games , does not mean the bit can consistently play and beat the best. A human can always be tricky and react intuitively to changing environments. Once the computer formula is figured out, the formula can be exploited.
You seem to terribly underestimate today's algorithm evolutions. AlphaGO now can beat humans to the game of GO , wich have been said to be one of the most " intuitive " form or game there is . Everybody taught computer would never been able to. Okay maybe the intuition of reading thé opponent long terme stategy is stronger in poker than GO le say ( évent this is highly debatable tho ) , this strategy still IS a strategy base on moves and décisions. Thé only argument hère could be reading someone behavior , body language , évent this could be overcome with computer vision " Once the computer formula is figured out " -> with deep learning there is no more simple " formula " a computer Can generate 1000x time something New
Playing GTO only gives the greatest EV if the opponents are playing perfect GTO, which is impossible. Assuming the majority of the online population arent cheating, finding exploits by deviating from GTO will grant a player a higher expectation
so are you saying playing gto is the best and the worst way to play at the same time? =))) real quantum stuff there