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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


Thibault de Vassal    (2026-01-31 22:56:08)
Poker ELO

Hello Yeturu & very sorry, for some reason I completely overlooked that post.

Of course I agree that ELO is not ideal for poker, I quickly changed some parameters to make it a bit more stable.

There are many many ways to do it different & probably better, particularly when not only H2H is played, but the idea was to do it looking like chess, so this is just a choice among many others.

Reaching elo 2000 with constant all-in does not shock me much as players under this rating probably do not play as many as hands (it takes time & many games to gain points)...


Yeturu Aahlad    (2026-06-21 20:33:45)
Poker ELO

Games like 152549 happen, and they warp the ratings significantly when they do.


Thibault de Vassal    (2026-06-22 15:14:16)
Poker ELO

Poker ratings are most unstable than chess ratings, that is not abnormal... This time, Paul had some quite good hands to do what he does, maybe we have to wait for pairs to go all-in when he's lucky one or two rounds ^^