Poker ELO

  

Poker ELO


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Yeturu Aahlad    (2025-11-25)
Poker ELO

Proposal: re-examine Poker ELO

Why? ELO is a heuristic designed for full information games involving no element of chance. In that space, it has stood the test of time. For games incorporating an element of chance, such as Poker, it is not ideal. As a data point, my evidence from FICGS is that a Poker player who goes all-in on every hand converges to an ELO of slightly over 2000. My last observation is from a long time ago, and one of these players (the much better one) has abandoned this strategy since then. There are many earnest players who deserve to out-rank such a simplistic strategy but don't.

Action: This subject has been studied, and the emerging recommendation is a simple change to the heuristic for games which incorporate elements of chance.

Research: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZXdehn029SaV6a5mxsn7WAMsxYNZPGHzZHKiBbeaxrw/edit?usp=sharing