An AI bot is good enough now to regularly beat experts in 6-handed No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, per this new article in Science. Results:
Yes, it beat that Chris Ferguson. Strange way of expressing winrate, though I guess it’s the norm in AI game research. If I’m reading it right, it won at 32/1000 X 100 games, or 3.2 bb/100. Which is pretty decent.
There is very, very little that humans do that an AI will not be able to do better. In fact, there may be nothing that humans do that an AI will not be able to do better.
Well, that would depend on the stakes they were playing. This needs SenorBeef or another poster whose name escape me (gadarene, I think), but both of whom have claimed to have made a living for a few years playing online poker. Absent them, this site claims 90 hands an hour is a decent expectation when playing 6 max. How Many Hands Per Hour in Online Poker? Here's the Numbers | BlackRain79 - Elite Poker Strategy
90 hands an hour × 3.2 bb per 100 hands is ~2.9 ish bb per hour. Play 500/1000, and that’s 30 bucks an hour, assuming no multitabling.
I played poker for a living for several years when I lived in Las Vegas. In those days there were probably only a couple hundred people in the world who could actually earn a living as a full time poker player while there were a significant number who were able to be winning players at low stakes games but who couldn’t win enough to earn a living.
Think it was 1998 or 1999 when online poker first started. I was intrigued with the concept. I lost my first buy-in of two or three hundred dollars in a $2/4 game to see what the games were like. A nice thing about on-line poker is that you have the stats of every hand you played available. I looked over the stats, found the weaknesses in the players, and pretty quickly ended up leaving the tough live games of Las Vegas to live in the mountains and take the easy money from the clueless players while on-line poker mushroomed.
I earned a good living on-line until the American government shut down on-line poker (I think that was 2010??) I took a look at the state of current live poker games and decided to retire.
I don’t really have any info on the current state of the game. While I played all games I really hated No Limit and didn’t much care for tournaments or short-handed games – my main game was $10/20 Hold ‘em playing four games at a time.