I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI

[mattmaroon]

I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?

[CobrastanJorji]

Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.

[albatrossjr]

Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.

[iEchoic]

You can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots.

The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.

[reillychase]

I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.

[vmg12]

Online poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.

[danbrooks]

I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.

[JohnMakin]

Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.

Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.

[nadermx]

I dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.

[charlieyu1]

Not really. It is more about rake, and US regulations that make it hard for recreationals to play

[deadbabe]

Depends how good your bot is.

[sans_souse]

Cool write up. I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown. AMA, always love talking poker strategy.

[niwtsol]

I read doyle's Super System back in the day and used that as the basis for my poker strategy from high school to mid-twenties. In talking to some friends who play competitively, they say SS is just super out dated and you would get eaten alive at any cash game. I'm curious what, in your opinion, is the "standard" playing strategy that is most effective in today's poker rooms? I'm curious if that answer is different online vs in person.

[algo_trader]

> I played online professionally for the year leading up to the big online shutdown

Are today's online tables simply impossible to win? (bots, collusion)

Or are players simply too evenly matched and the house rake/fees kills you anyway?

[rhubarbtree]

Played a random game the other day and I love it! What’s the best way to learn and get involved? I just want to play socially, happy to lose a little money each time as the cost of fun.

[reillychase]

Nice! It's legal here in Michigan and a few other states, where are you from?

[fallinditch]

Probably a dumb question but when I watch poker on TV I see that the aggressive players tend to win, so why do the losers let themselves get intimidated?

[skulk]

what do you think about OP's 40% VPIP? It seems to me that in low-stakes online play you'd want to play tighter than that, but I know very little about poker strategy beyond what I've absorbed from seeing people talk about it.

[crimsoneer]

I did something similar with Risk, in case of interest

https://andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-play/

[sherlock_h]

Well done! Interesting post. How long did it take you to build this?

[averageRoyalty]

Great write up. Love the Terry Prat chett reference!

[discordance]

I like this approach:

“ What it all means for the future

It's not really my thing to give too much thought about macro-trends that are out of my control or worry about what negative consequences they might have on my life.

The short answer, I really don't know what this means for the future of the career of programming, the business of software, or anything else. Instead of worrying about that I'm going to try to focus on the here and now, the upside potential, and the unique set of advantages that I have available to me to build something valuable, have fun, and maybe profit.

I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, try to learn some new skills and create things.”

[GenerWork]

If you're looking for a tool that may be a bit better than Cursor for UX, you could potentially look into Lovable. If you know what you want and the proper design terminology, you can potentially make some slick looking UIs.

[reillychase]

Thanks! Can I use Lovable to design and then bring that back and have Cursor implement it?

[Jhsto]

Have you cross-referenced with the other hand trackers whether the numbers add up? Alternately, could someone explain why wouldn't a LLM hallucinate with numbers in an application like this?

[reillychase]

Yeah I used PokerTracker 4 to cross reference and kept working with Cursor until it got very close like within 1% of accuracy but there are still some edge cases I might not have found yet. In the beginning it was hallucinating a bit by “estimating” what the percentages “should be” etc but I kept working it until it was doing things right.

[NumberCruncher]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414905

[throwzasdf]

> Then I started building my own Python script automations to export my hand history from PokerStars, import it into PokerTracker 4, check my balance, stuff like that.

If it works like it did with ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) back in the day, then doesn't the app now have all of your decision bias? Restated, isn't the app a reflection of how you play poker, not how an AI would play if it were truly artificially intelligent?

[reillychase]

I didn’t build a poker playing bot only a poker hand history analyzer

[afaik69]

sorry op is a fish. or more a whale. look at this hand from him (op is "reillychase")

calls a 3bet from small blind with A7o - very bad openjams with bottom pair on a flush flop into 2 players...wtf is this?!

but op uses AI....lol

PokerStars Hand #257890817589: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02 USD) - 2025/10/08 22:04:41 ET Table 'Acrux' 6-max Seat #4 is the button Seat 1: MillyPoo42 ($2.61 in chips) Seat 2: Pershgn ($10.14 in chips) Seat 3: Sikcat95 ($3 in chips) Seat 4: gcee3 ($5.79 in chips) Seat 5: prljaminone ($0.82 in chips) Seat 6: reillychase ($2 in chips) prljaminone: posts small blind $0.01 reillychase is disconnected reillychase is connected reillychase: posts big blind $0.02 ** HOLE CARDS ** Dealt to reillychase [As 7c] MillyPoo42 is disconnected MillyPoo42 is connected MillyPoo42: raises $0.04 to $0.06 Pershgn: raises $0.04 to $0.10 Sikcat95: folds gcee3: folds prljaminone: folds reillychase: calls $0.08 MillyPoo42: calls $0.04 ** FLOP ** [8d 7d Qd] reillychase: bets $1.90 and is all-in MillyPoo42: calls $1.90 Pershgn: calls $1.90 ** TURN ** [8d 7d Qd] [8h] MillyPoo42: checks Pershgn: checks ** RIVER ** [8d 7d Qd 8h] [6d] MillyPoo42: bets $0.61 and is all-in Pershgn: calls $0.61 ** SHOW DOWN ** MillyPoo42: shows [5h Ad] (a flush, Ace high) Pershgn: shows [Kh Kc] (two pair, Kings and Eights) MillyPoo42 collected $1.15 from side pot reillychase: shows [As 7c] (two pair, Eights and Sevens) MillyPoo42 collected $5.68 from main pot ** SUMMARY ** Total pot $7.23 Main pot $5.68. Side pot $1.15. | Rake $0.40 Board [8d 7d Qd 8h 6d] Seat 1: MillyPoo42 showed [5h Ad] and won ($6.83) with a flush, Ace high Seat 2: Pershgn showed [Kh Kc] and lost with two pair, Kings and Eights Seat 3: Sikcat95 folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 4: gcee3 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 5: prljaminone (small blind) folded before Flop Seat 6: reillychase (big blind) showed [As 7c] and lost with two pair, Eights and Sevens

[reillychase]

I was on tilt last night had a bad night I don’t usually play that bad. I agree this was a super dumb hand. I don’t use AI to help me play. No one would need AI to know this was a dumb hand though.

[gdilla]

Yup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is having a viable business, not the software development of X.

[reverendsteveii]

our industry has existed on the cutting edge doing what's hard since its inception. it's just that there was a time when sending a piece of text across a wire was hard. Now that's easy, so we do more with the tools that make that easy. When what's hard today becomes easy we'll do that quickly with the tools that make it easy and then do more hard stuff. We can say we've achieved AGI when the tools are doing better on their own than a tool plus an engineer would do, and I think that's a long way off.

[reillychase]

I still think that might be oversimplifying what software creation is which is being able to explain to a computer what it is you want. I think of Cursor as Python was to C. It's a higher level language but you still have to be able to think like a hacker, which will always be a rare skill.

[henry2023]

The more software there is, the more maintenance and willingness to build more software will be.

On top of that, LLM output is so mediocre that even marketing firms are doing most “copy(s)” by hand.

[asdev]

sw engineering will be at an even higher premium if you've seen the code AI creates. AI will raise the bar to entry for sure though

[throw-10-8]

you havent needed ai to build this for decades.

these random posts are so tiring: “i used ai to make something college freshmen were building in their dorm rooms 20 years ago”

[alansammarone]

after reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding.

at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.

then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.

yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.

[viccis]

Yep. AI is and will always be good at making stuff where the main coding knowledge requirement is having read the tutorials.

[NaomiLehman]

they used AI because they don't know how to code. That's the point of this article, I think.