There are more than a few poker players who’ve chosen to take part in a game of strip poker.  Normally the prime reason behind strip poker is guys just using the game to try and get girls naked.  Oftentimes in the end though, the girls do end up losing but refusing to take their clothes off and the game comes to an end.  Rarely though does a game of strip poker end in a person’s death.

Unfortunately for group of British college students, their game did and they will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.  20 year-old Mark Day was playing a game of poker with some friends from his university.  The venue was the Majorca Beach Hotel in a resort called Magalluf and Day had just lost the poker game they were playing.

After losing, he had to strip off almost all of his clothes and run along the hotel corridor in just his socks and underwear.  Fueled by alcohol, he undertook the task and began running.  His friend ran with him as they were trying to make it to the elevator.  Sadly, he couldn’t stop in time as a pane of glass approached and fell through a fifth floor window which led to his death 40 feet below on the hotel lobby roof.

His sobbing friends called for help and paramedics arrived on the scene right away but there was nothing they could do for Mark as he was pronounced dead at the scene.  His buddies were then left to try and make some sense of the incident to the police there.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much sense to be made of the whole thing and all they could do was recount what had happened.        

One thing that always puzzles me about poker is how it seems that certain people in the game can dominate live cash games and/or online ring games but they can’t find their way off the first couple of tables in a big tournament.  The reverse can be true as well where great tournament players will get taken for all they’re worth in a good cash game.

The reason this puzzles me is because the Texas Hold’em rules don’t change just because there is a tournament or a cash game.  It’s still two hole cards to each player and a board of five cards.  But perhaps the only thing that truly changes is the way that successful players play in each situation.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the majority of of successful cash game players follow the tight/aggressive model that hauls in a decent amount of money.  Obviously some people are better at using the tight/aggressive style than others and thus they bring in more cash while they’re playing.

On the flip side, it often seems that aggressive players who are willing to go all-in at any given point (provided they have at least something in their hand) are the ones who double their stacks in tourneys and find themselves competing for spots at the final tables of a lot of tourneys they enter. 

These same players who compete in cash games will, in many cases, find their loose and reckless style to be detrimental to a bankroll.  At some tables, their loose play may scare super tight players away from pots but they’ll most likely be called with their all-in A-5 bets by someone at sometime.

Oftentimes in a tournament though, this all-in A-5 bet will turn out to be a winner because the tight players don’t want to risk their entire (or a large portion) of their stack by calling this bet.  And it is these tight players (who may excel at cash games) that are rarely ever found at the top of a tournament leaderboard.  They merely try to hang on and, in the process, never try to build their stack till it’s too late.

In my opinion, cash game players looking to play more tournaments and tourney players looking to get in on more cash games can learn something from one another.  It’s best to switch one’s style up when changing games.

As some people may already know, the second Man vs. Machine Poker Challenge is set to begin at the Rio in a week.  Online pros will be taking on Polaris 2 this time around.  I’ve covered this challenge with a couple of previous posts already in one where I talked about it and another where I responded to some comments by a Polaris programmer named Mike Johanson. 

Well I had some questions about the actual machine known as Polaris that Phil Laak and Ali Eslami played last year and Mike was kind enough to answer all of the questions that I had about it.  He had some very interesting things to say on the subjects of Polairs and how it is able to compete against human players such as the online pros it will be taking on July 3rd.

Below are my questions and his answers;

Jeremy: I know you’re pretty busy getting things together with the Polaris competition only about a week away but I was wondering if you would have time to answer a few quick questions about it.

Mike: No problem!  We’re in pretty good shape this year.  Last year, we were still figuring out which bots to put in the seat up until the day of the competition.  This time, we’ve had a pretty good idea for the last month.

Part of why we’re well-prepared right now is because this is our second poker competition this summer.  There’s also the AAAI Computer Poker Competition, which is an open, research-oriented poker tournament for bots.  The results are announced at the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) 
conference each year (mid-July this year), but the bots play for a solid month, starting June 15th.  This year, the bots are playing two Heads-Up Limit events, one Heads-Up No-Limit event, and a 6-player Limit event.  The nice thing about the computer matches is that the bots play millions of hands, so you know down to the millibet (0.001 small bets/hand) how well they do against each other.

The bots we submitted to AAAI are close cousins to the bots we’ll use in the Man-Machine competition, so we’ve been ready to play since the 15th.

Jeremy: I’ve heard Polaris has been upgraded and improved upon from last year when it played Phil Laak and Ali Eslami.  What were the upgrades that your team made to the machine?

Mike: We’ve made a lot of progress in two areas - board texture and adapting.

Last year’s Polaris bot didn’t have a good grasp of the board texture.  It always had a good idea of how likely it was to win a hand, but it had a murky idea of how much potential to improve its hand had (like flush or straight draws) or how easy it was to bluff (or be bluffed) with certain boards.  We’ve made some great progress on that this year.

In matches 1, 2 and 4 of last year’s competition, Polaris didn’t adapt to its opponent at all.  It used exactly the same strategy on hand 1 as on hand 500.  Our bot plays close to a Nash equilibrium strategy, which means it’s tough to beat, but it isn’t able to exploit opponent weaknesses.  If you want to try to win instead of trying to not lose, you need to be able to change what you’re doing to exploit your opponent.

In match 3 last year, we tried an experimental learning bot, but it had some issues.  This year, we have a great system for adapting safely to increase the amount we win from an opponent.  This system is actually the subject of a paper we’re presenting at a conference on July 8th, right after the competition.  A lot of the work we’ve done on poker has led to discoveries that apply outside of poker and outside of games.  We’re doing a lot of good science through this work.

Jeremy: What exactly is Polaris?  Is it an actual machine or computer?

Mike: Polaris is the name we use for the collection of programs we have that play poker.  For example, the bot that’ll play at the Man-Machine match just plays heads-up limit, but when we branch into No-Limit or work on Ring again, we’ll call those bots Polaris, too.

Most of the work in making Polaris is done well before the match on one of the University of Alberta’s clusters.  The program teaches itself how to play poker by playing billions of hands against itself - there’s very little  human knowledge that goes into designing its strategy.  To do that, we use 8 CPUs with 8 gigs of RAM each, and we run it for two to three weeks.  That winds up making a 30 gigabyte program that describes the strategy that bot will use to play poker.

At the match, since the bot has already self-taught itself how to play, it doesn’t need a very powerful compute to actually play.  We can run it on a single off-the-shelf laptop.

So, if anything was the machine behind Polaris, it would be the cluster we use to train the bot, and not the Mac laptop on stage sitting across from the pro.

Jeremy: This is now the second year that Polaris has played some professional poker players.  Do you think that this will become a long standing competition between pro poker players and Polaris?

Mike: We certainly hope so - we learn a lot from the matches, we think the pros do too, and it’s a lot of fun all around.  Eventually, when we’ve gotten as far as we can with Heads-Up Limit, we’d like to branch out to other games.  No-Limit and Ring present their own challenges, and we can learn a lot about the science of AI from asking questions like “What’s different about this game?  What can we reuse, and what’s totally new?”

If we have a convincing win this year, we might try to play No-Limit next year and will probably lose badly.  We can build on that and do better the following year, and so on.

Jeremy: Will you personally be making the trip to the Rio to watch the competition?

Mike: Yep, we’re taking the whole research group this year.  There’s 8 of us graduate students that do the programming, four professors, and hopefully a couple of our past members that still contribute will join us, too.  It’s a big team effort.

Jeremy: Do you have any predictions on the outcome of the competition?

Mike: I think our chances of winning are pretty good.  It was a tight match last year, and while our bot is a lot stronger, we’re also playing against Heads-Up Limit specialists this time.  We’ve been doing a lot of pre-match testing, though, and the experts we’ve been playing against seem really impressed.  When poker pros say after a match that “I’d let it play my chips any time”, we know we’re on the right 
track.

Anyone who follows poker knows that the World Series of Poker has grown far beyond its humble beginnings of decades ago.  No longer is it the old, strictly American event that got little coverage outside of a page 2 news article.  Now it is played in the lavish Rio amongst thousands of great players that fly from all over the world just to compete in the Mecca of poker. 

But recently, there have been people bashing the WSOP because it doesn’t screen out certain people who choose to buy-in into its events - the most notable being the popular sports blog that goes by the name of Deadspin.com and Gambling911.com.

First the Deadspin, Will Leitch (who also owns the blog), went on a rant about how he didn’t even know the WSOP was going on and that its demise came at the same time Burt Reynolds movies are made about it.  Then he talked about how Ernie Scherer III, who is possibly a suspect in the murders of his parents, is attending the event citing Gambling911.com as the source.

Tracing the story over to Gambling911.com I found that they not only reported on Scherer III but they also talked about Shahram Sheikhan who was convicted on charges of sexual battery and annoyance or molestation of a child.  There is a move to get him deported back to Iran for his crimes.

Now Sheikhan obviously committed a terrible crime and may be forced to close up his six tattoo parlors en route back to Iran for it (in addition to the jail time he served).  And if Scherer truly murdered his parents, this is a huge travesty that should be punishable by death so there is no problem in reporting on these two’s whereabouts. 

But then Gambling911.com tries to make some sort of connection between the morals of the Olympics and the NFL vs. those of the WSOP by using comments from a reporter named Tom Somach.  Somach’s comments are as follows, ”Seriously, do you think a guy convicted of child molestation and serving nine months in jail would be allowed to compete in the Olympics or the Super Bowl for that matter?  Or anything of substance?  But he can be in the World Series of Poker and nobody cares.”

One thing that is missing in this whole equation though is that the Olympics and Super Bowl don’t charge buy-ins for the players to participate.  The WSOP does making it totally different from the other two.  Tons of other differences can be made but the bottom line is that the WSOP should not be made into some kind of criminal circus because a 2 of the 50,000+ players have, or may have, committed awful crimes.

Amazingly enough, there are quite a few people out there that will play a winning session of poker and not quite comprehend why they’ve done so well.  Some of it could be chalked up to the fact that they’ve improved their skills since the last time they played.  Some of it could be that they’ve just become a great player over night. 

But the most likely explanation though for someone who has good sessions here and there and doesn’t realize why is that they are finding fish to play with.  No matter how much one wants to harp on how great their skills are, a lot of players know that in the end the major money will come from the players who can’t play poker.  Not from amazing duels between two exceptional players.

Just knowing that profitable games come from playing with a lot of really bad players doesn’t help one out though if they don’t know how to find them.  The truth is that fish will be found at every poker room and at every table.  But it’s the quantity of fish that really makes the difference. 

One thing that I do when I go fishing is to examine the player’s money counts as soon as I get in the room.  For example, if I jump in a six-max Pot Limit game and see that three out of the five players that were there before I entered have way over the maximum amount of money you’re allowed to enter with, I know that they’ve been doing something right.  And that something has probably been taking money from bad players.

If this is the case, I usually try and get out of the room if there are plenty of these types in there and go find another room.  In addition to doing this, I also try and play at the peek hours when players who don’t play poker for a living are on.  I find that when it’s late at night or early in the day, the grinders will be playing  to make their living. 

It’s definitely good to avoid these types and stick to the easier players.