How Game Theory Changed Poker

 How Game Theory Changed Poker

Michael Bowling, University of Alberta computer scientist, maintains a clean office unlike his colleagues who are cluttered with technology. Prof. Bowling has a very minimalist office. He only uses it to write complex formulas and graphs on a large whiteboard. Because he is trying make sense of a complex world: poker, he requires the intricate mathematics. He told me that even the smallest version of poker has a billion billion decision point.

After Garry Kasparov’s 1996 chess matches against IBM's Deep Blue, the Computer Poker Research Group at University was founded. Poker's mathematical complexity rivals that in chess (or exceeds it depending upon the variant). Poker adds randomness and hidden data to bring it closer towards the "real world", which AI researchers long to influence. The poker researchers aren't looking to win the game. They view it as a test bed for better ways to do good.

Their work is not just an academic exercise. It has changed how professional poker players approach the game. Pros started poaching Prof. Bowling's talents in search of ways they could improve their odds. "I get asked a lot by poker pros if they need my help. "I would estimate that every one of the top ten pros in the world has paid a poker programr to do some thing," he stated.

Richard Gibson, a former PhD student at Prof. Bowling's told me that the pros had heard about what we were doing. Prof. Gibson's dissertation, "Regret Minimization in Games: The Development of Champion Multiplayer Computer Poker Playing Agents," was published in 2009. Regret can be described as a formalized mathematical concept in making decisions in uncertain situations. It's the difference in making the right decision or not. Many modern poker-playing algorithms emphasize minimising regret. Prof. Gibson said, "It seemed as if it was worth a lot for them." "They were giving me a lot of money."

It is important to make your game more unpredictable and less exploitable. The children's game of rock paper scissors requires that you play each move at random, with a chance of predicting your pattern. This makes it virtually impossible for your opponent, who will then be able to beat you. This is possible in poker using hand ranges or mixed strategies. This can be exploited by other players, such as if they know that I won't raise $100 if I have the small blind, which is the mandatory bet at the start of a hand by the player sitting next to me. Instead, programs recommend that I combine my hands into ranges to raise $100 when I don't have aces. how to get the third place in poker