> How much of a session is based on "reading players" vs "playing the odds"?

Several good answers here, but I will add my own take.

“Playing the odds” is basically playing good, fundamental poker. This is a baseline that most players will use when sitting down at a table of unknown players. This is often called a “balanced” strategy (note some people erroneously call this “GTO strategy, assuming the balance, which is not actually what GTO is).

“Reading players” is a thing, but it can be broken up into (at least) two categories: 1) physical tells, and 2) player habits.

Physical tells is not a big thing. Some people give off a lot of tells, but some folks are also decent (not good) at giving reverse tells. Honestly, you can be a wildly successful poker player while knowing nothing about physical tells.

(Side note: One of the most reliable tells is bet timing tells. This can sometimes even be a tell online, especially when people are taking shots at higher stakes or are deep in a tournament. It can also be faked, but some folks are super reliable with timing tells, and they don’t realize it.)

The second kind of tell is player tendencies — things like when players play too many hands or when they play too few (e.g., fold too often).

One very reliable way for good players to smooth out their earnings curve is figure out which players fold too often and in which spots. Once they’ve figured that out, they try to set up that spot and basically print low-risk (sometimes even no-risk) chips.

Taking advantage of these tendencies is called an “exploitative” strategy (as opposed to the “balanced” strategy mentioned above).

Really good players can take rec players on a journey through a series of emotions (and accompanying predictable gameplay) such that the good player can read the rec player like a book. The odds tip heavily in favor of the good player at this point.

Pro player and strong amateur players are so far ahead of recs in ways that the recs don’t even realize.

They offer (real) poker at some casinos. It's standard NLHE usually 100-200bb max buyin, sometimes match the stack etc.

Most common game spread is 9-handed $200 max $1/$2 NLHE. It's exactly like the game on the link, except more players and lower stakes.

In the game, you try to win the money of the other 8 players, not of the casino. The casino takes a rake each hand, and a player with a large enough edge can overcome it. The edge might be you're excellent, or it might be they're terrible (or drunk). But the house gets paid to deal each hand.

In the long term, poker outcomes are determined by skill. In the short term, they're luck. In the medium term, both. Most people never reach the long term, it's a lot of hands.

There's also table games, similar to blackjack, that they call "three card poker" etc. These can't be beat, they favor the house. Standard table game, with a poker flavor. I've never played one of these.

>How much of a session is based on "reading players" vs "playing the odds"?

I think the key is you need to watch for a person's play style.

There's a two axis system: tight/agressive and passive/active.

An active player sees more flops, and an aggressive player will call and raise more than a tight player.

So a tight, aggressive player sees few flows but bets strongly when they have a good hand -- this is considered "good" strategy.

Others might play a "tight-passive" strategy -- they'll play few hands but fold easily. They won't lose large amounts of money but they'll slowly bleed chips.

A loose, aggeessive player is the type you want at the table -- they're making a lot of bets, and often bluffing, and you can sit and wait to catch them.

Now, this is "reading" someone, but it's not the Rounders style "oh he just ate an oreo so he's bluffing" level reading of a player that movies

For context, I'm an OK player. I can make a few hundred playing 1/3 per session -- I'm not in Vegas so I can't move to the next tier without sinking a lot of money on a flight and hotel.

If your goal is a bit of beer money, it can be a fun hobby, but I wouldn't go into it expecting it to become a full time career.

I used to play A LOT at low and high levels.

At low levels, playing is ABC simple and mostly about following basic strategy for starting hands and pot adds for chasing. Don’t get fancy and keep your temperament steady and you’ll win.

To a slight degree, you can do better with reading players and identifying them in broad ways (wild, conservative, confused, etc.) but don’t let that allow you to get fancy. Stick to the basic fundamental strategy for hands, position, and pot odds to crush lower level games.

Hold'em is offered in casinos routinely, I'm not sure where else one even goes to play it aside from private games, but it is not against the casino. It's against other players, and the casino takes a percentage of the pot.

Others may differ and I am biased because 99% of my play has been online, but I'd say it's almost entirely playing the odds. Or at least, the popular romantic conception of looking for tells or whatever, is, I would expect, a really minimal edge compared to simply playing better.

You do learn the other players' tendencies and adapt accordingly, and table selection is very important, so in that sense it is very much about reading players.

A large part of my play was heads up where it's very much about understanding the other player's play as deeply as possible, and so if I wanted to be technically accurate about reading players vs playing the odds, I'd say both are very important. But if I'm answering someone who has the popular conception of what those phrases mean, I think saying "it's about playing the odds" would give them the more accurate picture.

You really want to be good at playing the odds, and you don't want to stray too far from fundamentally good play. If someone is learning how to play and I'm advising them, I'm teaching them all about playing the odds, and trying to get them to read players less. Only once they have a solid fundamental understanding of the odds would I teach them how to adjust.

> My initial thoughts are that poker such as TX hold 'em is not a game offered in a casino

Why not? Because you think it's a game where the casino can lose?

If so it's not an issue, as casinos that provide poker take "fees" from the stakes. Like how stock exchanges work: there are people making or losing money from stock market, but exchanges are always making profit.

You and OP are agreeing: "Better than most human players" is quite possibly the lowest skill bar in (at least live) poker.

there plenty of published preflop charts and GTO ranges

in fact, a fun project would be take a non-reasoning model, play on a lesser known game format, and see if it learns an "a ha" moment or explicitly simulate moves ahead

On Pokerstars it is the right move because you are going to get beat by someone going all in with 72o or something

but seriously at lower stakes there is just no respect for the art its just a shock and awe strategy: throw shit up, break the game and use that demoralization to bully others.

There’s no good way to play pocket jiggities @bradowen

That's, in fact, a much smaller mistake than I see humans make every hour.

Grok knows that pocket Jacks are a fast way to go broke.

Not really. Only as far as their table image mattered--in this case, zero. Otherwise, you can and should ignore your own past play.

What I'm curious about is if their innate training is enough to give them biases. Like maybe they think Grok is full of shit.

Presumably it's this course:

https://youtube.com/@jhupoker4850

https://hopkinspokercourse.com

To expand on this - an LLM will try to play (and reason) like a person would, while a solver simply crunches the possibility space for the mathematically optimal move.

It’s similar to how an LLM can sometimes play chess on a reasonably high (but not world-class) level, while Stockfish (the chess solver) can easily crush even the best human player in the world.

"Solvers" normally means algorithms which aim to produce some mathematically optimal (given certain assumptions) behaviour.

There are other poker playing programs [0] - what we called AI before large language models were a thing - which achieve superhuman performance in real time in this format. They would crush the LLMs here. I don't know what's publicly available though.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)

Well they can be watching all the action and thinking the whole time as the action leads up them, just like we do in poker. To me it's different, subtly perhaps.

Cool