Poker-AI.org

Hi,

I'm a 2nd year computer science student with about 4-5 programming classes under my belt as well as 5 years of NL hold' em experience. I have decided to work with a group of 2 other people on an individualized 10 week long project as an independent study program. The topic our group decided to choose was a Poker AI bot. I am eager to start but obviously have a lot of questions since I have never made an AI bot before. I am looking forward to posting on this forum for some general advice and tips on where to begin. We are going to be programming this bot in Java and are going to start from the ground up. Our first step will be actually making the poker client itself and making sure the game works before we implement the actual AI. In addition I have some questions below that I will number and hopefully can get answered!

1) In terms of difficulty, what type of game would be easiest to first implement for a beginning group? I'm thinking that no limit hold em might be harder to implement just from personal experience. There are a lot of difficult decisions to be made in a lot of "tough" spots. Perhaps a limit hold em poker bot would be easier to begin with? Should we start with a heads up bot? A 6 max bot? 9 max? I know from personal experience playing the game for so long that the style of play changes dramatically based on how many people are at the table with you.

2) What are some general tips and advice on how to begin... After we create our poker-client the obvious hard part is the bot itself. I have a "general" idea on how the poker bot should play but don't know much about how AI works. Remember, we are a beginning group with not much knowledge on game theory or optimal play. We know we're not going to engineer the best poker bot out there but at least want it to be competitive and fun to play against.

With only 5 programming classes and 10 weeks this isn't going to be an easy task.

Limit is a lot easier than NL. Bluffing is a bigger part of heads up play than ring games. You can cut out out a huge amount of work by downloading a crack of Poker Academy and running your bot against their api. Poker Academy have gone bust so you aren't cheating anyone by using a crack. Run PA in a VM if you are worried about malware. Alternatively take a look at Poker Genius http://poker-genius.com/forum/Thread-Meerkat-API-help

For simplicity I'd suggest you just write an expert system, as all the alternatives involve too much work. But instead of expressing the rules in terms of cards, write them in terms of ehs and ehs2 to reduce the number of rules. Look ehs up on the forum. Make the rules output action probabilities, and then choose the action randomly from the probabilities.

At the moment Poker Genius doesn't support plug in bots as they obfuscated some of the Meerkat API in their code by mistake.. An update is coming soon that will fix the problem. However, for now I would highly recommend finding a cracked version of PA instead.

In this thread, you can find an open source Testbed, written in Java. I think you might find this very helpfull.

http://www.poker-ai.org/archive/www.pokerai.org/pf3/viewtopicfd37.html?f=3&t=3393

Hi guys. I'm new here and I'm really interested in developing and testing bots.

I purchased Poker Genius in February thinking that it is compatible with the Meerkat API but it was not.
There was a software update today and it seems like they have implemented Meerkat API: http://www.poker-genius.com/api.php

I've succeed with adding a few bots there. So may be Poker Genius will become a new testing platform for us.