Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days, from doing your child’s homework, penning presidential speeches, and enhancing the offering from poker sites. It’s the latter that we are most interested in, but is AI helping or hindering online poker as we know it?
Free Poker Information and Strategy
When playing on any of the top 10 poker sites in the world, it is very easy for players to access AI either on another screen or device. So what can they gain from this? They can tell the system what cards they have and what is currently on the river, and then the AI will work out the probabilities of winning and how strong your hand is. It’s only text-based but given its deep and ever-expanding knowledge base, it knows the game metrics and can give advice.
While there are premium subscriptions to AI services, ChatGPT 3.5 gives out this type-and-receive information for free. Poker players needn’t shell out on exorbitant fees for poker lessons or strategy books. Which in its most primal of attributes, is a good thing as it means you’ll have more money to spend at the poker table.
AI Provides Decent Poker Practise Arena
‘Practising poker’ can be very difficult to execute. Simply playing by yourself can prove to be tedious and not very fruitful. However, AI does present decent opportunities for practice when coupled with a pack of cards. A player can lay out a table as if they were hosting a poker night reveal all the cards, and input all the card values and community cards when they arise. While not perfect, it allows players to get a good understanding of how the game plays out and evolves.
There are also countless video games focused on poker which do all this hard work for you. These AI opponents vary in quality (usually, the earlier the game was released the worse the quality of the opponent) but given that most games can have their difficulty changed, this gives any player a very good practice space to try out new poker strategies against different opponents while not losing any real money.
Questionable Quality of Poker Information
While AI can present lots of good information, it can be subject to mistakes. All AI services have disclaimers at the bottom of them as they can’t be sure that they are completely error-free, not right now anyway.
They also lack the human touch and experience of playing poker. After all, poker is a very emotive game where players must judge one another and play accordingly. How many games of poker has this AI system ever played? Zero. While it might present you will all the statistical facts, it can’t comprehend how another player is acting. Therefore, even having the facts presented to you by AI is not a guarantee of success.
Unfair Manipulation
Another very concerning attribute of AI in online poker is the possibility of it being hijacked to present unfair advantages to players. Unfortunately, there are some nefarious people out there who want to part honest players from their hard-earned cash. Artificial intelligence could in theory be programmed to multi-account and subsequently give an upper hand to select players at the table. Online poker websites are working hard to ensure that bots and other related technologies are not employed like this on their sites.
AI Already Hard at Work in the Background
If you’ve been to a live casino or even watched a movie set in a casino, you will probably have seen countless security staff monitoring tables and games to ensure that nobody is cheating. There are other systems in play but a lot still rely on humans catching untoward trends. Online poker doesn’t need a physical presence of security, instead, it uses complicated software and AI to spot trends, patterns, and behaviors from players and flags up anything that looks unsporting. It’s these systems that try their best to stop the unfair manipulation discussed in the prior paragraph.
Loss of Human Touch
Is poker losing its human touch? Well, some people already believe started to do so when the game went online with some veteran players only playing their poker with physical cards at tangible venues. AI in online poker is another step in the direction of poker becoming more automated and technologically dependent. While newer generations might not care as much as others, there will be some who feel like the game of poker is losing its social, reading of opponents, and other human interaction elements and is a detriment to the pastime.
Poker of course can be a very nice way to spend time with friends or loved ones, teaching and learning the game together. AI can be very efficient but it can’t replace spending quality time with your friends and family around a poker table.
