if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures
I'm not so sure about that. I think the main reason is: there's a lot more "stupid money" at the poker table than there is in the market.
The bot as mentioned doesn't seem to do anything particularly fancy -- it just looks at the cards on the table and figures out your odds of winning based on that. This is information which is easily extracted mathematically, but which most players don't have direct access to. Good players will have a pretty good idea of these probabilities, whereas lousy players won't. If you can find yourself on a table full of lousy players, you're at a huge advantage.
In the market, on the other hand, there's only one poker table, and all the best players in the world are already sitting at it. Any time statistical arbitrage opportunities arise in prices, you can bet that D.E. Shaw and Rennaisance Technologies have already noticed it and moved a few billion dollars that way. If you want to win, you don't just have to be smarter than six guys in their basements doing calculations in their heads, you have to be smarter than thousands of overpaid quants with supercomputers.
Fair enough. You're probably right. I don't play online poker (and am a poor casual player) so I don't know what the level of skill is on those websites. I was just making an assumption based on how difficult I imagined it would be for a computer to play very good poker.
Comments
if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures
I'm not so sure about that. I think the main reason is: there's a lot more "stupid money" at the poker table than there is in the market.
The bot as mentioned doesn't seem to do anything particularly fancy -- it just looks at the cards on the table and figures out your odds of winning based on that. This is information which is easily extracted mathematically, but which most players don't have direct access to. Good players will have a pretty good idea of these probabilities, whereas lousy players won't. If you can find yourself on a table full of lousy players, you're at a huge advantage.
In the market, on the other hand, there's only one poker table, and all the best players in the world are already sitting at it. Any time statistical arbitrage opportunities arise in prices, you can bet that D.E. Shaw and Rennaisance Technologies have already noticed it and moved a few billion dollars that way. If you want to win, you don't just have to be smarter than six guys in their basements doing calculations in their heads, you have to be smarter than thousands of overpaid quants with supercomputers.
Fair enough. You're probably right. I don't play online poker (and am a poor casual player) so I don't know what the level of skill is on those websites. I was just making an assumption based on how difficult I imagined it would be for a computer to play very good poker.