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Sounds like we're in similar boats. I created my first ever poker bot about 9 or 10 years ago. It was a FL 7-Card Stud player using a rules based system and a commercial odds calculator called PokerPal. It was quite profitable but sadly, 7CS lost popularity as hold'em became more and more commercialised.
Yeah I started with FL. Two years of AI writing before it won decent money then FL vanished. I have a killer FL AI and its really not even worth using now as there is just not enough loose tables to make it worthwhile. I remember PokerPal..My first bot used Holdem Inspector before I finally wrote my own calculator.
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In the short and medium term there is no good reason to change, especially if you have expert knowledge. But I reckon that eventually a rigorous mathematically based approach will win, just like it has in most other games like chess and backgammon. Eventually might be a very long way off.
Ah ok..that makes sense. I have heard that 100BB is somewhat within reach but 200BB is way way down the road I guess. One pro I ran into said "200BB will not be solved in my lifetime".
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There is nothing really wrong with expert systems other than two things:
1) They take a lot of time to write down and lots of iterations to plug holes that you will inevitably create in your IF...ELSE statements.
2) You need an expert that knows what he is doing and is willing to share his knowledge.
In academia, the primary goal is to develop solutions completely disconnected from expert knowledge but instead based on game theory. The only thing you know is the rules of the game and now you're supposed to create a good (or perfect) strategy. That's where simulation, NNs and other approaches come into play.
Ok..well I will continue on my IF THEN journey for now then. I do have access to pro knowledge and have learned more about poker theory in the last 6 months then I have in the last 10 years. One particular bit of info changed my whole way of thinking of how poker should be played. The difficult part was programming the bot to come up with the same answer as the pro. It is working pretty well but is consuming too much cpu time in order to come up with the answer so I am going to have to get a new box as 3 seconds is just too slow. This is the complicated routine I have using to narrow the villains range based on his actions and board. I think what I need to do to fine tune it is run it against hand histories to determine its accuracy.
Thanks for everybodys insight as I have a better understanding of what simulation systems do.