The vast majority of people that play poker absolutely suck and think they are being cheated because they lose money very quickly. Most bad poker players would literally be better off playing blackjack.
Played thousands of hours in casinos. Saw some asshole show down cards to someone still in the hand, stuff like that, but never anything I thought was collusion.
Plenty of other angles, though.
Do you think I can't exploit that after buying the history of millions of hands it played on some shady website.
Having a poker solver isn't enough. Let's say you play tournament poker, just having a basic understanding of concepts like ICM give you a massive edge. Let's say you take it a step further and understand concepts like "future game" and actually study them using tools, you're edge has expanded further.
There are a bunch of charts out there that tell you what hands to go all in with if you have 15bbs or fewer. None of those charts take into account ICM. Also how do you adjust the charts if your opponents are calling with too many hands? How do you adjust them if they call with too few hands?
Let's say we are just talking about cash game poker, it's not enough to have a solver, you need to understand how to actually study with the solver. People try to use them like a cheat sheet that tells you what to do, not understanding that a slight change to the inputs of the solver can drastically change the output. The purpose of a solver is to understand how different ranges interact at different stack depths on different boards.
ie: Playing 100bbs deep, on a KK3 flop with a flush draw, what hands should i check or bet as the preflop raiser? What happens if that 3 is a 7? What if it's a J? What if it's 33K instead of KK3? What if I'm 200bbs deep instead of 100? What if the opponent calls too much? What if they call too little?
There are multiple tools on the market that solve preflop all-in game for multiway pots with ICM and more advanced chip utility models. Those are very easy to solve you don't even need a chart (on the fly solving is fast enough on a laptop). You can also solve them with adjustments for certain players.
I've rarely met players whom I think could even act properly on the knowledge.
I've also never been in a room that wouldn't take it very, very seriously.
Today, we've got 6 Las Vegas locals, and 1 rich Chinese tourist.
The LV locals are making small-talk, "hey bro you go to the gym today? Nah my back is super-sore from my last work out. bla bla bla"
All 6 locals have butt-plugs plugged in. Two clenches means, 'I got this'. The tourist doesn't stand a chance.
I think people fundamentally don't get that poker is not like chess. The vast majority of money I win is from identifying when players are too attached to their hand and never folding or when they just give up on their hand and fold to any bet.
Please explain to me how you think these bots work? Do you think they are literally hooked into solvers and solving these hands in real time? If you actually understood poker you'd understand that the winrate from GTO is not good enough to make real money playing poker without a massive sample size, the game is all about exploiting players when they deviate from GTO. Explain to me how you program your poker bot to know intuitively that a player has too many bluff combinations when a flush arrives on the turn after they check back on the flop therefor you should call wider than standard? There are a billion little unique situations where people don't bluff enough, bluff too much, call too much or call too little and that is where the winrate from poker comes from.
This is the difference between having a 3 bb / 100 winrate and a 10-15 bb / 100 winrate. Maybe there are a bunch of shitty poker bots winning at 1 bb / 100 but if they are winning it's because some players suck really really bad, not because they are playing perfect poker.
I feel like there was (or will be, if it somehow hasn’t yet occurred) a very short gap between one site being unwinnable and all sites being so.
Second of all, poker is fairly capital intensive and whenever your bot account gets banned the site will confiscate your funds, so there's risk involved as well. And every time you get banned you need to create a new account with new KYC etc.
Third of all, bots play differently from humans and many of them are detected and caught by the players in addition to the site security. Further adding to the challenge is that the community of professional online players in the US is pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else (we're all on Discord together, basically). So new names appearing at high stakes out of nowhere get scrutinized more.
Fourth, even if you're playing against a bot or cheater, you can still make money, since winrate is entirely driven by fish. You might lose a little against the cheater but as long as you're winning far more from the fish you'll still make money. This separates poker from other competitive games.
I don't mean to imply the bot and cheating issues don't exist, they're real and serious and existential, and every online pro these days spends a lot of time worrying about it, worrying if a certain opponent is cheating, etc. But I think the bigger issues facing online poker are actually regulatory (in the US, an unregulated market has sprung up since the pandemic that is now struggling with a lot of legal changes; Europe has a lot of anti gambling laws these days and more every year) as well as general game quality (fewer recreational players wanting to gamble large amounts of money online and more pros than ever trying to split that smaller pie).
Even some people who are victims of scams admit that at the time they sent some/all of money they knew it was a scam but did it anyway.
Writing a winning poker bot is not trivial, you are unknowingly spreading false information.
How so? It's not like the entire game state is visible to all players, and a big part of poker is playing the other players.
The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
The operator running his bots would be a betrayal and probably end the business of the poker site involved.
Maybe it’s worth a couple hundred words.
Sure you could use an AI agent to write that code, but it wouldn't actually being that AI agent in the hot loop constantly coordinating your UI interactions with the poker engine...
Comments like these make me feel a bit safer from AI in my engineering job. People think it's a perfect no brainer fit for so many inane situations.
This decline was underway a full decade before bots really came on the scene.
Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.
Anyone who thinks machine learning can’t conquer poker is fooling themselves. I used to have bots collect every hand played on major poker sites in the early aughts so I’m sure there’s infinite training data.
And if it can be done we know there’s sufficient financial incentive. So I (former long time professional poker player) feel reasonably confident online poker must be unwinnable by now.
It doesn’t matter how many hands you “train” something on. Poker is a game of incomplete information and many assumptions must be made about an opponent’s range, bluff frequency, etc. One small tweak in assumptions and the entire GTO output changes with solvers. It’s very difficult to get these assumptions right. As I said it’s an unsolved game. Even the GTO solvers only work in 1 on 1 pots (assuming the assumptions you’re working with are close).
Respectfully, although you claim to be a former online professional (I have played for 20 years, at times professionally) - you don’t seem to understand what you are talking about.
Surely you're not implying that writing a good short story is a solved problem for computers?
GTO trees are far too complex to fully memorize, so nobody can play perfect GTO. But you can do a lot of solver work to get reasonably close.
The tell was a very common one. Anytime he liked what he saw, either hole cards or on the flop, he would quickly glance at his chip stack (thinking about a bet). Probably didn't even realize he was doing it. When it got to head to head, if he glanced at his chips...I'd fold early. If he didn't, I'd bet into him until he eventually folded.
- limp-shoving under the gun
- always trying to go on runs
- over playing suited connectors (JTs specifically)
But, you still get the advantage of being able to recognize it. There's lots of good wisdom in there that isn't as prescriptive either. Read as many books as you can. Poker is information warfare.
There are nuggets of wisdom in every poker book I've read even if I disagree with some parts or some are just flat out wrong. Super System, in particular, provided insights into the mind of one of the greatest player of all time. I particularly liked the psychological view on things. If nothing else, it provides context for the ones that came before you. Its been 15+ years since I read it, but beyond the fundamentals, I recall picking up (hopefully not misattributing anything here)...
- a quick, in-your-head method of calculating odds based on outs
- psychology of playing runs and others perceptions of you at the table
- the pitfalls of playing AA
- a realistic look at "tells"
- the general psychology of aggression
- how/where tight players make money and how/where aggressive players make money
Super System is the seminal book of poker. It is the book that your opponents are most likely to have read. As I alluded in my original comment, you wouldn't want to be the only person at the table who doesn't recognize someone playing the super system to the letter. IIRC, the goal was to make the player just appear lucky. It was meant to be confusing. It's like reading K&R as a C programmer. Sure, some of the information might not hold up today, but it provides a lot of context.
But I do really appreciate hearing your perspective on it.
Sorry, why are you answering a question if your first response is “no idea”? Am I missing something? If you have little information, my feeling is that your response is at best just BS? I know that sounds very rude, I’m sorry for that.
Are today's online tables simply impossible to win? (bots, collusion)
Or are players simply too evenly matched and the house rake/fees kills you anyway?
So basically "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away, know when to run." :)
“ What it all means for the future
It's not really my thing to give too much thought about macro-trends that are out of my control or worry about what negative consequences they might have on my life.
The short answer, I really don't know what this means for the future of the career of programming, the business of software, or anything else. Instead of worrying about that I'm going to try to focus on the here and now, the upside potential, and the unique set of advantages that I have available to me to build something valuable, have fun, and maybe profit.
I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, try to learn some new skills and create things.”
Just be aware that under the hood Lovable is strictly react (or at least it was the last time I checked it) so that might be a important variable to consider since I saw that you were using Laravel.
If it works like it did with ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) back in the day, then doesn't the app now have all of your decision bias? Restated, isn't the app a reflection of how you play poker, not how an AI would play if it were truly artificially intelligent?
calls a 3bet from small blind with A7o - very bad openjams with bottom pair on a flush flop into 2 players...wtf is this?!
but op uses AI....lol
PokerStars Hand #257890817589: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02 USD) - 2025/10/08 22:04:41 ET Table 'Acrux' 6-max Seat #4 is the button Seat 1: MillyPoo42 ($2.61 in chips) Seat 2: Pershgn ($10.14 in chips) Seat 3: Sikcat95 ($3 in chips) Seat 4: gcee3 ($5.79 in chips) Seat 5: prljaminone ($0.82 in chips) Seat 6: reillychase ($2 in chips) prljaminone: posts small blind $0.01 reillychase is disconnected reillychase is connected reillychase: posts big blind $0.02 ** HOLE CARDS ** Dealt to reillychase [As 7c] MillyPoo42 is disconnected MillyPoo42 is connected MillyPoo42: raises $0.04 to $0.06 Pershgn: raises $0.04 to $0.10 Sikcat95: folds gcee3: folds prljaminone: folds reillychase: calls $0.08 MillyPoo42: calls $0.04 ** FLOP ** [8d 7d Qd] reillychase: bets $1.90 and is all-in MillyPoo42: calls $1.90 Pershgn: calls $1.90 ** TURN ** [8d 7d Qd] [8h] MillyPoo42: checks Pershgn: checks ** RIVER ** [8d 7d Qd 8h] [6d] MillyPoo42: bets $0.61 and is all-in Pershgn: calls $0.61 ** SHOW DOWN ** MillyPoo42: shows [5h Ad] (a flush, Ace high) Pershgn: shows [Kh Kc] (two pair, Kings and Eights) MillyPoo42 collected $1.15 from side pot reillychase: shows [As 7c] (two pair, Eights and Sevens) MillyPoo42 collected $5.68 from main pot ** SUMMARY ** Total pot $7.23 Main pot $5.68. Side pot $1.15. | Rake $0.40 Board [8d 7d Qd 8h 6d] Seat 1: MillyPoo42 showed [5h Ad] and won ($6.83) with a flush, Ace high Seat 2: Pershgn showed [Kh Kc] and lost with two pair, Kings and Eights Seat 3: Sikcat95 folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 4: gcee3 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 5: prljaminone (small blind) folded before Flop Seat 6: reillychase (big blind) showed [As 7c] and lost with two pair, Eights and Sevens
On top of that, LLM output is so mediocre that even marketing firms are doing most “copy(s)” by hand.
these random posts are so tiring: “i used ai to make something college freshmen were building in their dorm rooms 20 years ago”
at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.
then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.
yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.
It was based on a world of warcraft bot that I modified, and I learned a lot during the process.
What you call wasted mechanical work I call the foundations of a career that changed my life.
Take away the AI and this guy has nothing but an idea. An old idea that has already been done to death, and none of the skills required to actually implement it and maintain it.
You might not like writing code, but that is the job no matter how many natural language layers you put on top of it.
I 100% agree that any good professional still needs (with or without AI) the "design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints". I'm not arguing against that. Those are, in fact, part of what I find most fun about programming, and the reason why I fought through the typing boredom since I was 13. I'm also not a vibe coder.
I'm just saying all of that is somewhat orthogonal to the typing of code itself. With strong typing (as in type theory - I still write the types, sometimes signatures for interfaces, etc) and other tooling, you really can get a lot done by delegating the bulk of the implementation to these tools.
If someone makes a 3D printer for houses there is probably someone who will say laying bricks "is the real job"
It's just someone writing about his vibe coding experience. Not interesting for me, but then again I stopped reading half way and am not telling people to stop.
It's more like a pachinko machine that rewards the user with house like objects that may or may not work.
If the user builds their house with it and it collapses and kills their family fine, but you can't use a system like that to build anything where you might have external liability because fundamentally you don't understand the problem domain and an ai model cannot hold a civil engineering license and be held liable for structural collapse.
To quote the author:
"The insane part is I didn't write a single line of this code. All of this was created through conversations with the Cursor AI agent. I don't even know how we got here with AI."
This is about as interesting as your average TODO MVC tutorial.