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I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

https://blog.rchase.com/i-played-1-000-hands-of-online-poker-and-built-a-web-app-with-cursor-ai/
31•reillychase•1h ago

Comments

sans_souse•1h ago
Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.
reillychase•1h ago
Nice! It's legal here in Michigan and a few other states, where are you from?
skulk•59m ago
what do you think about OP's 40% VPIP? It seems to me that in low-stakes online play you'd want to play tighter than that, but I know very little about poker strategy beyond what I've absorbed from seeing people talk about it.
rokkamokka•56m ago
I mean, according to the graph he's losing money, so not that great I guess? :)
reillychase•44m ago
Yes this was going to be my reply lol
splonk•53m ago
It's a fairly meaningless stat without knowing the number of the players at the table. At a quick glance he seems to be playing 6-max, but sometimes 3-handed. In any case 40% is within the reasonable range for 6-max.
reillychase•44m ago
This is true, when I played live poker with full ring I got destroyed, you can be much more loose with 6 or less
fallinditch•55m ago
Probably a dumb question but when I watch poker on TV I see that the aggressive players tend to win, so why do the losers let themselves get intimidated?
reillychase•40m ago
Oversimplifying for sure but if you're loose and aggressive against a tight aggressive player, you're going to make them fold most of the time and win a small amount by applying pressure on bluffs but every once in a while if you get too aggressive and they call you because they have a monster hand then you get wrecked
niwtsol•51m ago
I read doyle's Super System back in the day and used that as the basis for my poker strategy from high school to mid-twenties. In talking to some friends who play competitively, they say SS is just super out dated and you would get eaten alive at any cash game. I'm curious what, in your opinion, is the "standard" playing strategy that is most effective in today's poker rooms? I'm curious if that answer is different online vs in person.
reillychase•34m ago
No idea, obviously you can see I'm a n00b and not a profitable poker player but on the strategy side, and this is very oversimplified, but you should be folding a lot of the time other than when you get AA-22, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, QJ, JTs, T9s, 87s you call or 3 bet pre-flop because you have good odds. When you're up against tight players you can make a small bluff on the flop and scare them away most of the time, if they raise you fold though. Position is very important in the game, when you're on the button you have odds in your favor because everyone else has to check or bet before you so you play more loose and aggressive in that position and more tight and passive in early position. There is no one single strategy to memorize and apply, that's why it's great. 5 minutes to learn the game, a lifetime to master.
iEchoic•22m ago
The "standard" strategy is to play GTO (game theory optimal). There are solvers out there (like GTO Wizard) that show you the "optimal" play for every situation, which is used as a baseline, and then players deviate to exploit specific player tendencies.

GTO trees are far too complex to fully memorize, so nobody can play perfectly GTO. But you can do a lot of solver work to get reasonably close.

algo_trader•15m ago
> I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown

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?

gdilla•1h ago
Yup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is having a viable business, not the software development of X.
reillychase•1h ago
I still think that might be oversimplifying what software creation is which is being able to explain to a computer what it is you want. I think of Cursor as Python was to C. It's a higher level language but you still have to be able to think like a hacker, which will always be a rare skill.
lotyrin•9m ago
And the best hackers at any level abstraction will always be the ones that actually understand what's going on in every lower layer in order to diagnose when the abstraction is failing them. Anyone that thinks you can be up at the level of vibes without understanding how an LLM thinks, without knowing how to review and factor your vibed Python or whatever high-ish level language, can make it performant without knowing if or when to write something in lower levels like C or need to be using a library where all the hard work is in something like C, make it secure without understanding how that gets turned into instructions for an incredibly obedient but ignorant machine (like the LLM is but in the exact opposite ways, buffer overruns and free before use and stuff)... It's a holistic practice. The guys that produce code and don't know which parts are happening in the browser or in the client, think they can trust the values of cookies not to be tampered with and junk are able to be productive, probably more so with LLMs these days but they simply can't make quality software and never will be able to. Corporations love them because nobody's accountable to resiliency (securty, quality, reliability) until something actually breaks and those guys can get thrown under busses easily when and if that happens because they're cheap cogs. Hackers love them because we'll always have work to do to improve (or compete with, or exploit) what folks like that make.
reverendsteveii•44m ago
our industry has existed on the cutting edge doing what's hard since its inception. it's just that there was a time when sending a piece of text across a wire was hard. Now that's easy, so we do more with the tools that make that easy. When what's hard today becomes easy we'll do that quickly with the tools that make it easy and then do more hard stuff. We can say we've achieved AGI when the tools are doing better on their own than a tool plus an engineer would do, and I think that's a long way off.
reillychase•43m ago
Good take
svachalek•20m ago
Exactly. This is how it's always been. LLMs make it easy to spit out boilerplate code, which drives the price of boilerplate down to free. But good engineers will add a lot more value to that which raises the bar for everyone. The things you can create with an LLM become boring and worthless (honestly they mostly already were before coding agents came out) and the hirable skills become everything else that engineers need to do.
asdev•43m ago
sw engineering will be at an even higher premium if you've seen the code AI creates. AI will raise the bar to entry for sure though
crimsoneer•52m ago
I did something similar with Risk, in case of interest

https://andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-play/

sherlock_h•3m ago
Well done! Interesting post. How long did it take you to build this?
mattmaroon•36m ago
I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
reillychase•29m ago
I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.
ogig•15m ago
Given how awful LLM are at chess, I'd say GPT sucks at poker. Making a profitable bot using state of the art poker software, like stockfish for chess? That's already done.
deadbabe•24m ago
Depends how good your bot is.
JohnMakin•24m ago
Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.

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.

nadermx•23m ago
I dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.
iEchoic•20m ago
You can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots.

The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.

albatrossjr•18m ago
Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.
danbrooks•5m ago
I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.
CobrastanJorji•3m ago
Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.

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