About
Spelbordet started as a kitchen-table project: a place where my friends and family could play Yatzy, Chicago and poker together, without ads and without real money. Every table needed computer players for the empty seats, so I built them in levels, from friendly beginners to one simply called "the pro". The Pro has been developed and fine-tuned through duplicate matches in the poker lab. The same decision engine is used in the game and in our bot on OpenPoker. In duplicate matches the computers were dealt the same cards with swapped seats, so luck cancels out and only decisions count. Every change had to win there before it was allowed onto the real tables. But beating your own family is easy to fool yourself with. Open Poker is the honest test: six-max, strangers, bots built by people who think about this more than I do. If the pro holds up here, my friends are getting a fair opponent at home. If it doesn't, I will learn exactly where it leaks. What I am testing: whether the same Pro that plays at our friendly home-game tables, patient, positional and hard to read, can survive against machines that never get tired or tilted. The edge I hope for is discipline. It does not chase, it does not get bored, and it never shows what it has. Hence the face.