I wrote Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’em, a two volume work motivated by the desire to make the fundamentals of game theory accessible and useful to poker players. The focus is on heads up (i.e. two-player) play, because that’s my specialty, and it’s where a lot of the theory is most useful, but a lot of the ideas covered apply to any form of poker.
I like to think it differentiates itself from other works in the field by being rigorous enough that readers should come away with the ability to analyze new situations from first principles, while staying focused what’s most important – how to make more money in real games.
- Will Tipton began playing poker online in 2007. He steadily moved up in stakes in online HUNL tournaments to become a regular winner in the high stake games. He recently completed his PhD work at Cornell University and has taken a position as a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay area.
- Poker I wrote Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’em, a two volume work motivated by the desire to make the fundamentals of game theory accessible and useful to poker players. The focus is on heads up (i.e. Two-player) play, because that’s my specialty, and it’s where a lot of the theory is most useful, but a lot of the ideas covered apply to.
- The author Will Tipton, a PhD candidate at Cornell University, demonstrates how decision trees can be used to model complex poker decisions. Starting with simple preflop-only situations, he moves on to consider deeper concepts such as balance, the analysis of ranges, and the theory behind optimal bet sizing.
Both volumes were published by D&B Poker, and tables of contents, free chapters, and more info are available:[Volume 1: D&B,Amazon],[Volume 2: D&B,Amazon].
More recently, I contributed a chapter to Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em, edited by Jonathan Little.
Will Tipton Poker Tournament
Will Tipton: Yes this is really broad. I think the big idea is to just pay very close attention. Of course, every time you see a showdown, you should go back over the hand with his hole cards in mind, thinking about every decision he made with those hole cards. What does each decision say about his strategy? I know Will Tipton's book is good, but it came out in 2012, and we have some new books written in the era of solvers like Modern Poker Theory, Michael Acevedo / No Limit Holdem for Advanced Players, Matthew Janda / Play optimal poker, Andrew Brokos.
Will Tipton Poker Player
I’ve also produced a couple video series. The first covers a variety of extra topics supplemental to the books. See D&B Poker or HUSNG.com for more info. The second walks players through the design and implementation in iPython of software to solve for equilibria of model poker games. It’s easy, I promise(!), and a few hours of sample content are on youtube. Check it out at HUSNG.com or D&B Poker.
Playing a toy poker game with Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) has had some high-profile successes lately, e.g. AlphaGo, but the basic ideas are fairly straightforward. Let’s try RL on our favorite toy problem: the heads-up no limit shove/fold game. This is a pedagogical post rather than a research write-up, so we’ll develop all of the ideas (and code!) more or less from scratch. Follow along in a Python3 Jupyter notebook!
(more)Games, Strategies, and GTO Strategies
This is Part 1 of 6 of an adaptation of my chapter “Game Theory Optimal Strategies: What Are They Good For?” from Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em edited by Jonathan Little.
Much of the reason I wrote Expert Heads Up NLHE was to explain the ideas of game theory, poorly understood in the community at the time, to the average poker player. Heads up no limit (HUNL) is my game of choice personally, so it made sense to use it as the primary example. However, HUNL is something of a simple case, and there’s a bit more to be said about how game theory applies to other games. In this chapter, I’ll give a quick introduction to game theory as it applies to a variety of common poker formats. We’ll see when it’s useful, and more importantly, when it’s not – when it’s appropriate to use game theory-inspired strategies, and when it just can’t really guide our play. I promise to cover a practical skill or two as well.
(more)Solving the Shove/fold Game with TensorFlow
Google recently open-sourced TensorFlow (website, whitepaper), a software package primarily meant for training neural networks. However, neural nets come in all shapes and sizes, so TF is fairly general. Essentially, you can write down some expression in terms of vectors, matrices, and other tensors, and then tell TF to minimize it.
I ran through a couple of their very well written tutorials and then decided to try it out on one of my standard toy problems: the HUNL shove/fold game.
(more)Running it up, Part 3
We doubled up twice – time for round 3!
(more)Running it up, Part 2
We doubled the roll once, can we do it again?
(more)Running it up, Part 1
Tonight, Carbon was down, but Black Chip Poker gave me a few dollars to play with, so I’m going to try to run it up.
(more)Value categories in C++11
One of the most important additions to C++ in the C++11 standard was the introduction of movable types. This feature has consequences for many common programming tasks such as assigning variables and passing arguments to or returning objects from a function. Move semantics are a bit subtle, and when reading documentation, it helps to understand some vocabulary: value categories.
(more)EDVis v1.1
Changes from v1.0 to v1.1:- Control fractions of individual hand combos- View and set fractions of hands of a particular suit- Account for card removal effects when drawing the distributions
(more)Debugging
Pretty much any nontrivial piece of software will have bugs during development. Fixing bugs is thus an unavoidable part of programming, and it’s important that all programmers have some skill at the task. I recently made a video series about developing some poker-related software. The focus was on the problem domain, but much of the audience was new to programming, and I didn’t talk too much about what to do when things don’t go perfectly, i.e. when there are bugs. So, this post is a quick intro to debugging methodology in general, but I have my poker audience in mind.
(more)Arbitrarily-deep nested loops
I finished a first pass at my lattice regression library over the weekend. The idea with that is pretty straightforward. Essentially, there’s some function we want to model, and it’s unknown, but we have a bunch of observations of inputs and corresponding outputs. So, we throw down a lattice (i.e. a regularly-spaced grid) of points over the space of inputs, and we use the data to “learn” some values of the function at the lattice points. Then, we discard the training data but can predict new values of the function by interpolating between the values at the lattice points. For more details, see, e.g. this paper.
Code-wise, one challenge of the project was in representing and dealing with the lattice. For example, suppose the function we want to model has 4 inputs. Then, our learned values on a grid over the space of inputs might naturally be stored in something like a 4-D array,
(more)Eclipse: Computing Git status for repository LatticeRegression
I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Eclipse CDT over the years, but I wish it was less buggy. And the UI could be better. Anyway, today I open my laptop (on an airplane), start a new C++ project, and soon notice (thanks to a battery indicator reading under 2 hours time left) that Eclipse is using 350% of my CPU. I check the Progress tab and see that Eclipse is “Computing Git status for repository LatticeRegression”.
(more)Job fairs and SWE interviews
I have a different perspective on the job search thing now that I’ve successfully done it once and seen things from the other side. I manned a booth at my alma mater’s job fair recently and didn’t think most students asked the right questions. Ideally, almost all of a job fair conversation should consist of the student telling me what he’s good at and passionate about in as straightforward a way as possible (there’s no need to be modest or subtle). Reading resumes is mind-numbing work, if I have to use a lot of imagination to see you as a successful candidate, you’re likely to be disappointed. If you do ask questions, and I do the talking, you might as well take the opportunity to try and get as valuable of information as possible.
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Will Tipton Poker Club
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