The Sunday Read: ‘How A.I. Conquered Poker’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you didn’t think poker and artificial intelligence could be bedfellows, think again. Keith Romer delves into the history of man’s pursuit of the perfect game of poker, and explains how the use of A.I. is altering how it is played: individuals using an algorithmic “solver program” to analyze potential weaknesses about themselves and their opponents, thus gaining an advantage. While it feels futuristic, this desire to optimize poker isn’t new. Are these new generations of A.I. tools merely a continuation of a longer pattern of technological innovation in poker, or does it mark an irreversible structural shift? One thing’s for certain: The stakes are high.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of The Daily is sponsored by BetterHelp.
0:03.5	Why not take the next 10 seconds to focus on your breath, whatever you are doing, wherever
0:08.1	you are.
0:09.1	Breathe in.
0:10.9	Breathe out.
0:12.5	BetterHelp is therapy online via video, phone or message and is now available in the
0:17.4	UK, making mental health affordable and accessible.
0:21.2	Sign up and get matched with a therapist.
0:23.6	Listeners get 10% of their first month at BetterHelp.com slash daily pod.
0:28.4	My name is Keith Roemer.
0:35.4	I'm a contributor to The New York Times magazine.
0:39.0	So I've been playing poker recreationally for a couple of decades, not anywhere near
0:43.5	on the level of the people in this story, but enough to understand what they are trying
0:49.3	to do and what they're trying to achieve.
0:52.7	I have probably played hundreds of thousands of hands of poker in my life.
0:57.3	And it is a game that is fundamentally about decision making, about when to bluff, when
1:04.3	to call, when to raise.
1:06.3	And we do this over and over hundreds or thousands of times in a single game of poker.
1:13.3	For a long time, poker strategy was something that you learned by reading books, or you
1:19.2	could watch other good players playing and see what they were doing.
1:22.5	And it was kind of an open question.
1:24.3	That is the right way to play a particular hand in a particular spot.
	...

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