Analysis: winning at poker use to be about reading people, but it's now a game of advanced strategic concepts and complex computer simulations
For many Irish people of a certain vintage, poker meant digging out the spare change jar and playing 5-card draw a couple of times a year. 15 or 20 years ago, poker seemed to be everywhere, a boom fuelled by the advent of online poker and televised events where viewers could see the players’ hidden cards.
This allowed the world to see an amateur player pocketing over $2 million by winning the 2003 World Series of Poker. The aptly named Chris Moneymaker won the $10,000 buy-in to the tournament in an online qualifier for an investment of just $30. A wave of "if he can do it, then so can I"’ swept the world and there were almost 9,000 entrants to the same tournament in 2006, up from 800 in 2003.
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From RTÉ Archives, Caroline Erskine reports for RTÉ News from Dublin's Thomas Prior House on the Irish Eccentric International Hold-Em Tournament in 1982
While some view poker as being little different to other casino games, there is an element of skill to the game: a better player will triumph over a weaker one in the long run. When the online poker boom began, a flood of money was deposited at the various poker sites and skilled players who studied basic strategy thrived.
Online poker meant the introduction of automated shuffling and a timer for every action, which in turn meant that one could play up to 5 times the number of hands per hour that a live game would see. There was also the chance to play at more than one table if you had the mental processing power to do so.
Some websites offered the opportunity to play up to 24 tables simultaneously. Multi-tabling tabling legend Randy 'nanonoko' Lew, won millions of dollars while playing about 50 hands per minute for several hours per day. It was estimated that players like Lew would cram in more hands in a few months than live poker legend Doyle Brunson, (who died in 2023, aged 89) played in his entire career.
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With the ability to play a large volume of hands, skill levels increased quickly. Good players were able to test out strategies quickly which would have taken the old masters a month. Around 2007, several successful players realised that they could make a sizeable amount of risk free money by sharing their strategy via paid subscription services. Numerous ‘training sites’ popped up where students would pay a monthly fee to watch the biggest winners talking through their thought process while taking a screen recording of them playing.
By about 2013, even players at the lowest stakes typically had some grounding in basic strategy. While many still retained a skill edge over weaker players, it wasn’t sufficient to beat the cut taken by the ‘house’ - in this case, the online poker room - and show an overall profit.
Around this time, professional players began to use game theory, an approach to strategy developed by mathematicians like John Nash (subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind). Essentially, they attempted to employ what is known as a game theory optimal (GTO) strategy, meaning that the best any opponent could do against them was to break even. Game theory applies to any game where there is a finite number of players and options. For example, we can use it to show that optimal strategy in Rock, Paper, Scissors is to use all three options with equal frequency as a starting point.
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In poker, attempting to play a GTO strategy means playing in such a way that makes it extremely difficult for your opponent to figure out what your cards are. This is achieved by playing the same way with weak hands as with strong ones and betting the same amounts, such that it doesn't even matter how they decide to react. A game theory optimal style of play works by trying to understand all of the possible hands that you both could have in a given situation and balancing actions, much like the rock, paper, scissors player.
But implementing this kind of strategy perfectly is beyond the capabilities of the human brain so it wasn’t long before players started to employ computing power. A number of 'solvers’ were developed, which use machine learning to arrive at an optimal course of action for all of the possible hands you might have in any situation.
You might think that you could download one of these solvers and log on to an online poker site and clean up. However, all sites ban this type of what they call 'real time analysis' and they have sophisticated methods of sniffing it out.
Solvers can also take several minutes to spit out solutions (which gives an idea of the complexity of the decision-making process). The best that a player can do is to review how they played a certain hand after the fact and see if their play was ‘approved’ by the solver. Over time, they can build up a feel for the solver-based strategy and become better at implementing it.
These days, it’s largely those who spend the most time studying that rise to the top of the game, rather than the most creative thinkers, or naturally talented players. One thing is for sure, poker strategy has moved on a long way since the days of looking someone in the eye and deciding whether they’ve got you beat.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
