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/

by reillychase • 10 months ago

112 163 10 months ago

blog.rchase.com

sans_souse3• 10 months ago

Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.

reillychase15• 10 months ago

Nice! It's legal here in Michigan and a few other states, where are you from?

skulk• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

I mean, according to the graph he's losing money, so not that great I guess? :)

splonk• 10 months 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.

fallinditch• 10 months 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?

reillychase15• 10 months 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

SaltyBackendGuy• 10 months ago

Aggression generally wins the day but pay attention to the size of the bets and their position. Generally, you want to make a lot of small bets to show action (they can fold for a minimal investment) and leverage table position to make other players make hard decisions.

hawk_• 10 months ago

In poker, like in trading, the key is knowing when you have an edge and being aggressive but also knowing when you have a losing have and cut your losses. It's the balance that makes a good player/trader.

niwtsol• 10 months 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.

reillychase15• 10 months 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.

iEchoic2• 10 months 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 perfect GTO. But you can do a lot of solver work to get reasonably close.

jkercher3• 10 months ago

Super System is old, but I wouldn't call it outdated. Definitely still worth a read. The more books you've read, the bigger your tool set. The key here is that it works in both directions because each style you learn, is a style you may recognize other players using. The pitfall of Super System, is by now, everyone's read it, and it's quite easily recognized:

- limp-shoving under the gun

- always trying to go on runs

- over playing suited connectors (JTs specifically)

But, you still get the advantage of being able to recognize it. There's lots of good wisdom in there that isn't as prescriptive either. Read as many books as you can. Poker is information warfare.

algo_trader• 10 months 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?

jkercher3• 10 months ago

I don't think so. I don't play nearly as often as I used to, but I still do alright. Though, I usually play tournaments where "game theory optimal" can only get you so far. There is a lot more nuance in a tournament where your style should change as it progresses.

bluecheese4526• 10 months ago

Pretty much. Not impossible but the effort reward ratio simply isn’t there.

dataengineer56• 10 months ago

It's become a lot more difficult to win online since online poker was banned in the USA. The USA sat at a huge net loss online and every other country profited.

sans_souse3• 10 months ago

When I left (or, got shut out, so to speak) in 2011 the games were getting a lot tougher, less big fish and more reg on reg with marginal if any edge, where you're essentially just paying the rake (-%rakeback).

rhubarbtree2• 10 months ago

Played a random game the other day and I love it! What’s the best way to learn and get involved? I just want to play socially, happy to lose a little money each time as the cost of fun.

reillychase15• 10 months ago

I like reading BlackRain79 and watching his YouTube videos. Nothing beats experience though. Start playing without money for a long time first to learn the rules of the game. I actually downloaded a Game Boy emulator for iOS and the ROM for GBA World Poker Tour (2005). After playing that for a long time I finally got the basics like muscle memory of knowing what hand beats what and what possible combinations could be out there based on the board cards, stuff like that. Then from there if you live in a legalized state like I do you could start playing the lowest stakes online like .01/.02 NL.

gdilla• 10 months 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.

reillychase15• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

reillychase15• 10 months ago

Good take

svachalek• 10 months 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• 10 months 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

henry2023• 10 months ago

The more software there is, the more maintenance and willingness to build more software will be.

On top of that, LLM output is so mediocre that even marketing firms are doing most “copy(s)” by hand.

throwzasdf• 10 months ago

Then I started building my own Python script automations to export my hand history from PokerStars, import it into PokerTracker 4, check my balance, stuff like that.

If it works like it did with ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) back in the day, then doesn't the app now have all of your decision bias? Restated, isn't the app a reflection of how you play poker, not how an AI would play if it were truly artificially intelligent?

reillychase15• 10 months ago

I didn’t build a poker playing bot only a poker hand history analyzer

crimsoneer• 10 months ago

I did something similar with Risk, in case of interest

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

sherlock_h• 10 months ago

Well done! Interesting post. How long did it take you to build this?

averageRoyalty2• 10 months ago

Great write up. Love the Terry Prat chett reference!

mattmaroon5• 10 months ago

I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?

reillychase15• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

TrainedMonkey• 10 months ago

Bots mostly don't play fair. One strategy I've seen is having multiple bots play passively to minimize losses, unless at least 2 get placed in a single game. In that case the bots can share information bully the rest of the table by playing aggressively.

deadbabe• 10 months ago

Depends how good your bot is.

JohnMakin3• 10 months 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.

bluecheese4526• 10 months ago

Heads up no limit holdem bots crush the best players in the world even 200bbs deep. So kind of like the same situation as chess. Not solved but not beatable.

mattmaroon5• 10 months ago

I don’t believe it. There are just as many variables involved in writing a short story.

Anyone who thinks machine learning can’t conquer poker is fooling themselves. I used to have bots collect every hand played on major poker sites in the early aughts so I’m sure there’s infinite training data.

And if it can be done we know there’s sufficient financial incentive. So I (former long time professional poker player) feel reasonably confident online poker must be unwinnable by now.

nadermx• 10 months ago

I dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.

iEchoic2• 10 months 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.

jagged-chisel3• 10 months ago

I used to work for an online poker outfit. The boss wanted weak bots populating the tables so that we looked popular. Of course, he had a “crack team” of bot writers for playing on “other sites” to make money, too.

brightball3• 10 months ago

Why wouldn’t you put the bots together at the same table if you could detect them?

albatrossjr2• 10 months 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.

Waterluvian2• 10 months ago

And then there’s all the bots you aren’t spotting.

raincole• 10 months ago

Sites have very a strong incentive to make you believe this. Otherwise no human would join anymore.

kyleblarson• 10 months ago

Then you have to worry about the site itself being shady. Live poker is really the only path. Plus it's so much more fun.

danbrooks• 10 months ago

I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.

morkalork• 10 months ago

I heard it was poker-sites banning the (human) sharks

bluecheese4526• 10 months ago

The biggest by far was american laws and regulations. the us uiega law in 2006 and “black friday” ie the doj raiding full tilt and pokerstars in 2011.

This decline was underway a full decade before bots really came on the scene.

vmg1211• 10 months ago

The problem is specifically with unregulated sites that don't verify the identities of players. The bots aren't so much the problem as the fact that they can collude and share hole cards. But fyi, bots aren't actually good at playing poker outside of specific scenarios vs bad players or in scenarios where the decision tree is not large (ie short stack tournaments where the decisions are pre computed, you can imagine how massive your edge can be when you have a pair of 9s and you know there are already 3 dead aces and your decision is only all in or fold)

LostMyLogin• 10 months ago

The decline of poker started when I woke up on Black Friday to FT, PS, and UB all having the DOJ logo on them.

CobrastanJorji• 10 months 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.

monero-xmr4• 10 months ago

Cash games in person are pretty bad too. Casinos need to make money and they only get it off rake, so they have lately turned a blind eye to collusion. The only safe poker (except among friends) is tournaments, in person, so they randomize the tables properly.

vmg1211• 10 months ago

Online poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.

bluecheese4526• 10 months ago

It is for most variants of 2 player poker. Multiway still too difficult to solve.

remify• 10 months ago

Poker is "solved" for low level and high volume which is what a bot would be good at.

charlieyu1• 9 months ago

Not really. It is more about rake, and US regulations that make it hard for recreationals to play

GenerWork2• 10 months ago

If you're looking for a tool that may be a bit better than Cursor for UX, you could potentially look into Lovable. If you know what you want and the proper design terminology, you can potentially make some slick looking UIs.

reillychase15• 10 months ago

Thanks! Can I use Lovable to design and then bring that back and have Cursor implement it?

vunderba• 10 months ago

You can have Lovable do the design and then sync it to a GitHub repo. Then you can pull it down locally and further refine with Cursor.

Just be aware that under the hood Lovable is strictly react (or at least it was the last time I checked it) so that might be a important variable to consider since I saw that you were using Laravel.

GenerWork2• 10 months ago

Potentially. Like the other poster said, you can go through Github, but if worst comes to worst you could take screenshots of what Lovable makes and have Cursor modify the UI based on the screenshots. If you're using Sonnet 4.5 as a model it should be able to handle it pretty easily.

NumberCruncher• 10 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414905

Jhsto• 10 months ago

Have you cross-referenced with the other hand trackers whether the numbers add up? Alternately, could someone explain why wouldn't a LLM hallucinate with numbers in an application like this?

reillychase15• 10 months ago

Yeah I used PokerTracker 4 to cross reference and kept working with Cursor until it got very close like within 1% of accuracy but there are still some edge cases I might not have found yet. In the beginning it was hallucinating a bit by “estimating” what the percentages “should be” etc but I kept working it until it was doing things right.

discordance• 10 months ago

I like this approach:

“ What it all means for the future

It's not really my thing to give too much thought about macro-trends that are out of my control or worry about what negative consequences they might have on my life.

The short answer, I really don't know what this means for the future of the career of programming, the business of software, or anything else. Instead of worrying about that I'm going to try to focus on the here and now, the upside potential, and the unique set of advantages that I have available to me to build something valuable, have fun, and maybe profit.

I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, try to learn some new skills and create things.”

throw-10-84• 10 months ago

you havent needed ai to build this for decades.

these random posts are so tiring: “i used ai to make something college freshmen were building in their dorm rooms 20 years ago”

viccis• 10 months ago

Yep. AI is and will always be good at making stuff where the main coding knowledge requirement is having read the tutorials.

alansammarone2• 10 months ago

after reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding.

at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.

then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.

yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.

throw-10-84• 10 months ago

took me a week to build a poker bot in 2006 that earned me $1000 a week during college, and that was self imposed because I didn't want to raise any flags.

It was based on a world of warcraft bot that I modified, and I learned a lot during the process.

What you call wasted mechanical work I call the foundations of a career that changed my life.

Take away the AI and this guy has nothing but an idea. An old idea that has already been done to death, and none of the skills required to actually implement it and maintain it.

You might not like writing code, but that is the job no matter how many natural language layers you put on top of it.

NaomiLehman• 10 months ago

they used AI because they don't know how to code. That's the point of this article, I think.

throw-10-84• 10 months ago

so instead of learning a useful transferrable skill they talked to their magic mirror and got an output that approaches correctness without the necessary knowledge to verify it or maintain it going forward without their magic mirror.

To quote the author:

"The insane part is I didn't write a single line of this code. All of this was created through conversations with the Cursor AI agent. I don't even know how we got here with AI."

This is about as interesting as your average TODO MVC tutorial.

afaik69• 10 months ago

sorry op is a fish. or more a whale. look at this hand from him (op is "reillychase")

calls a 3bet from small blind with A7o - very bad openjams with bottom pair on a flush flop into 2 players...wtf is this?!

but op uses AI....lol

PokerStars Hand #257890817589: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02 USD) - 2025/10/08 22:04:41 ET Table 'Acrux' 6-max Seat #4 is the button Seat 1: MillyPoo42 ($2.61 in chips) Seat 2: Pershgn ($10.14 in chips) Seat 3: Sikcat95 ($3 in chips) Seat 4: gcee3 ($5.79 in chips) Seat 5: prljaminone ($0.82 in chips) Seat 6: reillychase ($2 in chips) prljaminone: posts small blind $0.01 reillychase is disconnected reillychase is connected reillychase: posts big blind $0.02 ** HOLE CARDS ** Dealt to reillychase [As 7c] MillyPoo42 is disconnected MillyPoo42 is connected MillyPoo42: raises $0.04 to $0.06 Pershgn: raises $0.04 to $0.10 Sikcat95: folds gcee3: folds prljaminone: folds reillychase: calls $0.08 MillyPoo42: calls $0.04 ** FLOP ** [8d 7d Qd] reillychase: bets $1.90 and is all-in MillyPoo42: calls $1.90 Pershgn: calls $1.90 ** TURN ** [8d 7d Qd] [8h] MillyPoo42: checks Pershgn: checks ** RIVER ** [8d 7d Qd 8h] [6d] MillyPoo42: bets $0.61 and is all-in Pershgn: calls $0.61 ** SHOW DOWN ** MillyPoo42: shows [5h Ad] (a flush, Ace high) Pershgn: shows [Kh Kc] (two pair, Kings and Eights) MillyPoo42 collected $1.15 from side pot reillychase: shows [As 7c] (two pair, Eights and Sevens) MillyPoo42 collected $5.68 from main pot ** SUMMARY ** Total pot $7.23 Main pot $5.68. Side pot $1.15. | Rake $0.40 Board [8d 7d Qd 8h 6d] Seat 1: MillyPoo42 showed [5h Ad] and won ($6.83) with a flush, Ace high Seat 2: Pershgn showed [Kh Kc] and lost with two pair, Kings and Eights Seat 3: Sikcat95 folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 4: gcee3 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 5: prljaminone (small blind) folded before Flop Seat 6: reillychase (big blind) showed [As 7c] and lost with two pair, Eights and Sevens

reillychase15• 10 months ago

I was on tilt last night had a bad night I don’t usually play that bad. I agree this was a super dumb hand. I don’t use AI to help me play. No one would need AI to know this was a dumb hand though.

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

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