Play BluffBot – Heads Up NL Poker Bot

Posted on Oct 26, 2009 by Gugel in Poker Strategy

BluffBot: A Pretty Advanced Poker Bot

BluffBot: A Pretty Advanced Poker Bot

SuitedAces made an amazing post on the AnskyPoker.com HU Forums.  He’s a limit player that’s transitioning to NL and he brought up Hyperborean-Eqm, a poker bot that won the 2009 Poker Bot HU NL Championship.  Now Hyperborean-Eqm (made by a team from the University of Alberta) beat another poker bot, BluffBot for 1.8bb/100.  Unfortunately, you can’t play against Hyperborean-Eqm online, but you can play BluffBot!

And guess what, it’s actually not that bad!  I beat him (caught him bluffing in a big pot), but I was pretty impressed.  He adjusted pretty well to my game and it’s definitely an awesome learning tool.

I do wonder how much better Hyperborean-Eqm is and how long before a bot can grind out microstakes NL hold’em…

Buy Hand Histories

The more you know about your competition, the more you can profitably exploit them.  You can buy hand histories to boost your Hold'em Manager or PokerTracker database and help you better reads on your opponents.

Site Price Coverage Website Quality Overall Rating
hand-histories.com $$$
hhdealer.com $
pokerhandscout.com $
PokerTableRatings.com $$
handhq.com $$

7 Responses to “Play BluffBot – Heads Up NL Poker Bot”

  1. Gugel

    26. Oct, 2009

    Actually, I played it a bit more, and it’s pretty nitty if you just start raising all-in with like 75% of your range. It’s not even using the unexploitable short-stack strategy when it’s less than 10 big blinds deep.

  2. Stef

    26. Oct, 2009

    True Gugel, i agree

  3. SuitedAces

    27. Oct, 2009

    Yes, you’re right of course. But what you need to remember about these things is that they are designed only as a solid equilibrium strategy. In other words they won’t employ SAGE and they can’t remember what happened in the last hand, so if you start pushing with any two it can’t remember and adjust accordingly. That also means that it didn’t adjust to your game, but just had enough randomness to give you the impression that it did.

    The fact that it was able to make a game of it with an obviously decent human player such as yourself means it must be pretty good, and a good learning tool, but at the end of the day any decent human will eventually work out how to exploit its strategy.

    I’m pretty sure you would find the Hyperborean bot to be tougher, due to the way it is made. Maybe you should try to contact UofA, you never know they might let you host a copy on your site as a learning tool – I wouldn’t hold my breath though!!!

  4. Fairewin

    28. Oct, 2009

    That is really cool. However, I played BluffBot and my conclusion is – I am really not worried about bots taking over online poker just yet :) BluffBot, while clever in a few situations, was easily exploitable by a human player who can recognize weaknesses and adjust very quickly.

    Now, I am *not* a HUNL player (fr limit and 10-person NL sng mostly). I wonder if my style was so wrong that it confused BluffBot. Maybe I just got lucky.

    @SuitedAces – why wouldn’t BluffBot adjust its game? Is that part of the rules, or just a matter a complexity that hasn’t been tackled yet?

  5. Gugel

    28. Oct, 2009

    @Fairewin

    Yup, I was pretty impressed the first time I played it. But within a few minutes, I found huge, massively exploitable holes. HU NL is also the most difficult for Hold’Em and I image it’d be like a million times easier to create a winning bot for a full ring limit.

  6. alex

    16. Dec, 2009

    Actually making full ring bots is tougher. The best Bots in the world are heads up.

  7. Rob

    11. Jan, 2010

    Pretty tilting that my hand is folded when hitting enter… even if no bet has been made, it just open folds.

Leave a Reply