- cross-posted to:
- balatro@lemm.ee
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- balatro@lemm.ee
- games@lemmy.world
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That’s right, it’s Jimbo’s world now… and Jimbo will fucking cut you like a deck of cards.
Honestly, Balatro probably would have had an easier time if it had just been a card game that wasn’t based on a poker theme.
Being based on poker does mean that players enter with probably already knowing the hands, but honestly…I’m not even sure that that buys that much. And in the past, I’ve wondered whether use of poker “hands” is actually a good idea – that is, Balatro has one “build around” a hand, and in that context, the hands aren’t really balanced the way they are in poker.
I think that what Balatro accomplished is to show that there’s a lot of unexplored space in computer deckbuilding games. I’m not sure that the decision to use a standard playing card deck or to theme the game on an existing card game (which doesn’t actually bear all that much resemblance to the real challenges in Balatro) actually contributed that much to Balatro’s success.
It was actually a net negative from my standpoint – I held off getting the game for a while because I’d played video poker before and considered it to be pretty boring, and the fact that Balatro looked like that wasn’t a plus.
I’m pretty ambivalent either way. I like watching Poker tournaments, but I don’t like playing poker, yet poker themes in games don’t really bother me (lots of games have a “full house” or “flush” concept). So it being based on poker neither improved nor hurt my opinion of it, it’s just a design decision to reuse poker concepts.
I wonder if Balatro would’ve had a similar impact if it wasn’t based on poker. A lot of people care about poker, and using poker terminology has a certain flair to it. I imagine people were attracted to the “forbidden fruit” of a poker-themed game, helping with marketing.
But then the PEGI rating surely also caused issues. So I don’t know whether it was a net positive or negative. Either way, it’s a fun game that has very little to do with poker other than theming.
So it being based on poker neither improved nor hurt my opinion of it, it’s just a design decision to reuse poker concepts.
It’s not so much “poker” as a broad theme that I have an issue with, but specifically video poker:
I held off getting the game for a while because I’d played video poker before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_poker
Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. It is played on a computerized console similar in size to a slot machine.
Video poker is a single-player game. The problem with video poker is that it’s a pretty simple game. It’s been solved. You can go dig up the numbers for when to do what to play optimally, given the information you have. It’s repetitive. There’s just…not a lot going on with it as a game, even if it kinda looks like traditional poker.
Traditional poker is a multiplayer game. Different players are playing against each other. That introduces bluffing, and that makes for a more-complicated game.
That being said, even traditional poker is mostly solved. It’s just complicated-enough enough to do that most people aren’t going to play optimally.
Von Neumann solved poker – including bluffing – for optimal play back when he developed game theory (and in fact, did his work with the initial intent of solving poker).
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/neumann.html
For Von Neumann, the inspiration for game theory was poker, a game he played occasionally and not terribly well. Von Neumann realized that poker was not guided by probability theory alone, as an unfortunate player who would use only probability theory would find out. Von Neumann wanted to formalize the idea of “bluffing,” a strategy that is meant to deceive the other players and hide information from them.
In his 1928 article, “Theory of Parlor Games,” Von Neumann first approached the discussion of game theory, and proved the famous Minimax theorem. From the outset, Von Neumann knew that game theory would prove invaluable to economists. He teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist at Princeton, to develop his theory.
Their book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, revolutionized the field of economics. Although the work itself was intended solely for economists, its applications to psychology, sociology, politics, warfare, recreational games, and many other fields soon became apparent.
To the extent that poker remains unsolved, it’s trying to determine whether someone is playing non-optimally or has other weaknesses and trying to take advantage of that (e.g. exploiting information leaks via tells, something like that).
traditional poker is mostly solved
It’s only solved mathematically, but that’s not the interesting part of poker to me, the interesting part is the psychology of it. You communicate through your bets, posture and posture at the table, as well as when you show vs hide folded hands. The actual statistics are only interesting when trying to decide whether someone is bluffing or playing “optimally.” And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
So yeah, exploiting tells and other non-book actions makes poker interesting to watch at the higher levels.
None of that relates to Balatro at all. There are no stakes, no bluffing, etc. How you play a given hand is a lot less interesting than how you construct your deck. It doesn’t play like poker at all, it plays like Slay the Spire w/ a poker theme.
And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
Any theory, to have any impact, must change how you act.
You can’t get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker. The best you can do is exploit what I mentioned – information leaks, or try to find someone who isn’t playing an optimal strategy and exploit that. But if poker player X is playing according to what von Neumann would advise, they have a bluffing approach where, no matter the strategy you adopt, you will not tend to come out ahead in the long run. The best you can do is equal them. They can tell you that that’s their strategy, say “I went and read up on game theory, and here’s how I’m playing”, and it still won’t permit you to do so.
Now, that’s a conservative strategy. Minimax relies on the assumption that the other player will play optimally, given the information available to them. A “von Neumann” player won’t necessarily exploit weaknesses that someone else has as strongly as some other strategy might. So, let’s say that a player absolutely never folds, for example. It’s possible to adopt some non-von-Neumann strategy that permits a player to “win more” against a player playing suboptimally…though a von-Neumann player would still be winning as well. It just means that no other player in poker can get an advantage, over the long run, over someone playing what von Neumann would recommend.
None of that relates to Balatro at all.
I agree — bluffing is outside its scope. Balatro’s similarities are to video poker, not traditional, multiplayer poker (and the real gameplay is in the deckbuilding aspect).
You can’t get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker.
These types of “solved games” make some pretty hefty assumptions, such as limiting possible actions. But that can only really happen with online poker, when you do it live, you introduce a ton of variance that a good player can exploit.
Algorithms may have “solved” a game, but that doesn’t mean a human has. It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move, which will give you the best possible outcome. Does that make chess uninteresting? No. At the highest levels, it’s less a strategy or tactical game and more psychological. The idea is to surprise your opponent and play something they aren’t prepared for which gets them into time trouble figuring out your plans, and the clock becomes a piece you can use against them. So the prep for a game is studying their past games and guessing what they might be preparing against you, and preparing something they won’t expect to use against them.
When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit, and that’s interesting. So the game of live poker remains interesting.
It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move
Chess isn’t solved: chess computers have outplayed the best current human players, but they can’t always provide an optimal move, can’t look down branches far enough. Although they do use Minimax!
But it is similar to the extent that you can get not-perfectly-optimal play that will probably do better than a human.
When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit
That’s probably true.
they can’t always provide an optimal move
After the first 10 moves or so, they can. There’s something like 9 billion possible chess positions after that point, and opening theory is well established, so it’s largely solved. Computers can calculate something like 100 moves deep (and nearly all branches), though they do use heuristic to eliminate unlikely branches.
There are some interesting games between top bots because of that heuristic, but any of the top bots will consistently beat a human because they can compute orders of magnitude more possible game states.
So it’s essentially solved, meaning that, in practice, a top AI will pretty much always beat or draw a top player. The difference in rating between a top bot and the top human player is something like the difference between a GM and someone aiming for IM, and we expect a similar performance difference.
