Comment by cowthulhu
1 day ago
To expand on this - an LLM will try to play (and reason) like a person would, while a solver simply crunches the possibility space for the mathematically optimal move.
It’s similar to how an LLM can sometimes play chess on a reasonably high (but not world-class) level, while Stockfish (the chess solver) can easily crush even the best human player in the world.
How does a poker solver select bet size? Doesn't this depend on posteriors on the opponent's 'policy' + hand estimation?
GTO (“game theory optimal”) poker solvers are based around a decision tree with pre-set bet sizes (eg: check, bet small, bet large, all in), which are adjusted/optimized for stack depth and position. This simplifies the problem space: including arbitrary bet sizes would make the tree vastly larger and increase computational cost exponentially.
No, I'm not super certain, but I believe most solvers are trained to be game theory optimal (GTO), which means they assume every other player is also playing GTO. This means there is no strategy which beats them in the long run, but they may not be playing the absolute best strategy.
Nash equilibrium. Optimal strategy for online poker has been known for like literally 20 years right now
Typically when you run a simulation on a hand, you give it some bet size options.
To limit the scope of what it has to simulate.
It's unlikely they're perfect, but there's very small differences in EV betting 100% vs 101.6% or whatever.
Not only to limit the scope of what it has to simulate, but only a certain number of bet sizes is practical for a human to implement in their strategy.
How would an LLM play like a human would? I kind of doubt that there is enough recounting of poker hands or transcription of filmed poker games in the training data to imbue a human-like decision pattern.
Also, if you set the bar for human players low enough, pretty much any set of actions is human-like. :p
I don't have an answer, but there's over a decade of hand history discussions online from various poker forums like 2p2 and more recently Reddit.
You are of course correct but to be pedantic:
Stockfish isn't really a solver it's a neural net based engine
Unlike Chess, in poker you don’t have perfect information, so there’s no real way to optimize it.
You can still optimize for the expectation value, which is also essentially poker strategy.