Matt Maroon: Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living

http://www.thepokerchronicles.com/archives/000947.html

by kf • 19 years ago

44 60 19 years ago

mwerty2• 19 years ago

sounds a lot like trading.

utnick2• 19 years ago

the cool thing about poker v trading though is you need solid 6 figure bankroll to make a stable living trading, you can start poker with a few K or less

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

Online you could turn a $2k bankroll into six figures in a year, and it's actually fairly easy.

rms5• 19 years ago

There are still some sites that will give you a free $50 to start playing. I made more money exploiting affiliate schemes like that than I did playing poker. For a while, Party Poker required a $50 minimum to open an account and paid out $65 for referred account + around $25 in bonuses + free polo shirt, hat, and jacket. So I bought a Fark ad and gave out a bunch of Party Poker accounts.

Party Poker wouldn't pay me my money for 6 months, but they got a new affiliate manager who eventually cut me a check. I wonder if they cut their losses or if my players actually generated enough rake to pay me back.

vegashacker2• 19 years ago

I was hoping for a few juicy poker details, but, that aside, thanks for the very honest and engaging post.

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

What sort?

greendestiny• 19 years ago

I've always been curious as to whether the whole reading people thing was exaggerated for the tourists. I'm sure poker strategy is a lot about trying to gauge what an opponent is doing, but does it really come down to people scratching their noses funny?

I used to play soccer quite a lot, and playing well is a lot about knowing whether both your players and their players are going to go. The thing is though that it has nothing to do with explicit tells - its all about the geometry, the state of the game and how they are playing.

I've always though past a certain level there would just be no way a poker player was going to reliably give themselves away.

vegashacker2• 19 years ago

You know, like, "I was playing 30-60 at the Bellagio, and I got cleaned out..." Something along those lines.

rms5• 19 years ago

There are years of archives if you want to read about poker. Matt's blog was the only poker blog I ever got into. I think I found it from Fark.

gregwebs2• 19 years ago

Matt's implication that poker is more complex than chess is entirely unfounded. Computer scientists have been trying to create the best chess programs since the days of the first computer as a test of artificial intelligence. Poker has been ignored because a computer can easily figure out the odds (figuring out the strategy is the hard part), and it was never as popular as it is now. I would expect that a computer will be the best poker player in the world in a few years, one is already close now. http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9750210-7.html

Phil Laak (one of the best) didn't start playing poker seriously until he was 25. Contrast this with chess, where if you didn't start studying by the age of ten for hours every day, you don't have a chance at being the best.

utnick2• 19 years ago

you are incorrect imo

chess computers are better than people because chess computers brute force the problem, they can think millions of moves in advance and plan out every possible game path, a human can only think several moves in advance, so huge advantage for the computer.

in poker, there are only a handful of cards in play, only a few decision spots per hand, a pro poker player could probably program a computer to be as good as he is by giving it the rules which he plays by, but it is unlikely a computer will ever surpass the talent of the best players imo

Elfan2• 19 years ago

A few minor corrections. First, most chess programs don't literally "brute force" the problem. A lot of work goes into pruning the search tree and only looking along the most promising paths. Second, humans can actually think many moves ahead along certain paths.

As other's have stated in this thread chess is particularly well suited to be played well by a computer program, but that does not make it trivial.

ntoshev4• 19 years ago

Computers can brute force poker too. The way computers and humans play chess is also very different, although there is superficial similarity in that they both enumerate future moves.

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

You are very incorrect. Here's where you're wrong:

1. Phil Laak is not one of the best poker players. Not even top 100. The fact that you think he is shows how little you know about poker. Also, I don't even know who Ali Esmali is.

2. The game (which I think was No Limit Hold'em) played was the simplest form of poker for a machine. Even if one became better at this than humans (which probably is possible in the not too distant future) it will be far from beating a 2-7 Triple Draw player.

3. Figuring out odds is trivial, but virtually useless. Figuring out odds as well as a human, who has the ability to put his opponent on a range of holdings, is not.

4. No poker bot ever made could come anywhere close to me in an 8 man, limit hold'em match, and there are far better players than me.

5. I don't know if chess has had more man hours dedicated to it. It probably has. But Polaris has been worked on for 26 years. That's certainly not insignificant. Phil Laak has probably been playing for 10 or so.

6. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect. (I'm not sure if it would be unbeatable, as it is possible that with perfect play one side will always win.) I could not do that with poker.

7. Chess may be harder to learn for a human (though even there I'm not sure) but that doesn't mean it is also harder for a machine. Calculating the 18th power of 2 is harder for a human than picking out an apple from a group of pictures. Not the same for my PC.

imsteve2• 19 years ago

The poker bots out there mostly suck because they don't need to be great to win lots of money from the weak players. The real problem the bots face is getting around anti-bot security measures.

But, although almost no effort has been put into poker bots, they're already pretty damn close:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/25/289607.asp...

If poker bots analyzed a massive database of how pros play like humans or the chess bots do then I'm certain that the poker bots would blow you away.

> No poker bot ever made could come anywhere close to me in...

You'll be seeing this quote again:)

tlrobinson2• 19 years ago

6. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect.

Yeah, IF you had infinite processing power, it would be a nearly trivial exhaustive search program. IF I had a way to read my opponents emotions, etc like humans can, then I could write a fairly trivial program to do well at poker. But those are two very big "IF"s.

The problem is the two games are very different. Chess is a game of perfect information, where both players know the entire state of the game. Poker is not, plus it has an element of chance.

You can't really compare the two.

ntoshev4• 19 years ago

I have actually programmed game AI and I can say none of your arguments is convincing. It is a very bold claim you are making, with very little to support it.

aidanf4• 19 years ago

2. The game was limit holdem, which is easier for a computer to solve than no-limit.

gregwebs2• 19 years ago

Chess and poker are fundamentally different problems. Unfortunately this argument is going to come down to arguing about the definition of "complex" and things like that.

But I will still reiterate these points:

1. A great deal more effort has gone into computer chess than computer poker. When that amount of effort is put into computer poker, computers will be better than humans at poker.

2. The argument can be made that poker is harder or more complex than chess for computers, but the opposite is definitely true of humans today. If you don't study chess hard from the age of ten and then dedicate your life to it starting in your teens, you can't be the best. The amount of study (not playing) is probably an order of magnitude difference. In practice this means that any great chess player could switch to poker, study hard, play hard, and have a chance at making it, but no great poker players could switch to chess.

Fundamentally, sports in which real money is gambled will probably never reach the competitive level of play of non-gambling sports. Chess has a rating system and is setup so that the players of similar calibar play each other. Contrast this with poker where professionals are always actively seeking to play against worse players (with higher bank rolls).

aquateen• 19 years ago

I am not the parent, but:

1. Subjective, with a nice insult thrown in there.

2. Do you really think the simplest form of poker for a bot would be a No Limit game?

3. Are you implying poker bots don't take opponents possible hands into account? wrong

5. No reason to cast doubt, chess has had much more effort put into it. Polaris has been in the works for 17 years, not 26. Compared to over 50 years for chess engines.

6. I don't think writing any chess engine is easy, but your main point, yes chess is a finite game. A computer isn't expected to win every time at rock, paper, scissors, so why poker? Like blackjack, there is a certain amount of available information, and poker bots can make the best play off that.

7. Amateurs with 1 year of poker under their belt win a WSOP bracelet.

DocSavage2• 19 years ago

Why is it unfounded that "poker is more complex than chess"? Chess lacks chance and bluffing. There is perfect knowledge of the state.

The long apprenticeship in chess doesn't mean chess is inherently tougher for computers than poker. It means for humans, chess is a difficult game that requires a lot of training. Humans would take a long time to memorize and incorporate book knowledge. Computers could suck in that knowledge in no time.

Babies acquire visual recognition and speech in a smaller time period than adults go from novice to grand masters in chess. So it depends on what you are learning, not just the time it takes.

It's also interesting that the computer vs human poker contest tried to remove "luck":

"The man vs. machine poker contest was designed to eliminate the luck factor by dealing the same cards in each hand, but in reverse. So in one hand, Laak might get lucky with two aces, but in the other room Esmali would be unlucky as the computer was dealt two aces. To finalize a winner, officials added the two human scores and two computer scores separately, and the highest number won."

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

That is a novel way to attempt to do so (though I still think is far from absolutely successful). Most previous attempts dealt only with sample size.

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

Also, interestingly enough, since poker is all about optimization, it would still be hard to play perfectly even if you had perfect knowledge of the state. Even sometimes knowing what someone had, it's hard to decide the perfect play.

Tichy• 19 years ago

Cool idea for removing the luck, but I think it has no bearing on the computer's strategy, only on the analysis of the results by the human observers.

ntoshev4• 19 years ago

Chess lacks chance compared to blackjack too. Does it means chess is simpler than blackjack?

Elfan2• 19 years ago

Figuring out pot odds is an elementary part of poker. Most who play poker well can do that correctly, that is just as well as a computer. On the other hand combining those odds with an estimate of what other players and how they may react is a damn interesting problem for a human player or a computer programmer.

Isn't strategy the hard part of chess after all?

Poleris• 19 years ago

Here's an honest question. Why isn't more research being done into solving Poker compared to the amount put into Go or Chess?

> It seems to me that it is an interesting question that combines elements of computation, AI, and psychology.

> One can see instant practical results by playing your bot for real money.

> Poker is a fun game. :)

Any answers would be appreciated, especially as I'm thinking about doing a PhD and am currently exploring open problem domains.

ntoshev4• 19 years ago

Chess has been researched much, much more than Go.

In research, you are looking for problems that can be solved in isolation, not ones that combine many diverse topics.

Perhaps poker is not researched more because gambling is tainted negatively by the society.

aidanf4• 19 years ago

There is quite a bit of research being done about poker in the last few years. In fact poker related research has got best paper awards at a couple of the major AI conferences in recent years.

Check out http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/. They're probably the leaders in this field.

aidanf4• 19 years ago

It's widely accepted in AI circles that Poker is a much more difficult to solve than chess. The main reason is that chess is a game of perfect information whereas Poker is a game of imperfect or partial information. It's much more difficult to find an optimal (or even a consistently successful) strategy in Poker.

marcus2• 19 years ago

Chess doesn't even need processing power in theory, only a very large database with state lookup in the big book of chess.

There is a nice proof in game theory that any turn based game with 2 players, limited number of board positions, and finite max length is subject to the creation of the perfect game book - basically a simple table of board positions and the ultimate correct decision for every board position. using it you are guaranteed to win/draw optimally (depends on first mover advantage) against any player.

You just can't create a "big book of poker" it doesn't meet the requirements.

PS: Go is also subject to this treatment despite being several orders of magnitude more complex than chess, it is still a finite 2 player turn based game.

edw519• 19 years ago

No matter how well you do something, sooner or later you reach the point where you question the value you are producing for others.

This sorta reminds me of the guy who got paid a fortune to dig holes in the beach, only to see them filled in by the ocean each night. No matter; he just got paid to dig them again the next day. Wasn't long before he thought, "This doesn't make any sense - I wanna build something that lasts and that others can use."

I wonder how big a role this kind of thinking played. The fact that you're part of ycombinator suggests that it's > 0.

testapplication• 19 years ago

Read the Myth of Sisyphus by Camus...

mattmaroon16• 19 years ago

Little to none, though I'll cover that in a later part.

Matt Maroon: Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living

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