most people (including here on HN) are complete n00bs when it comes to understanding how poker is played and how computers can play it, so just to straighten y'all out at the git-go here:<p>computers are <i>better</i> at bluffing and randomness than humans are. Bluffing is an important optimizing strategy in playing poker well, and it entails tracking the expected value of a pot (which includes cost expectations, don't forget) and it entails randomness, necessary to obfuscate patterns of betting that could give away evidence of your bluffing strategy. Like chess and go, we may not be "there" yet with computers, but n00bs need to understand the theory.<p>What computers <i>can't</i> do is read "tells", so if you are a master poker player via tells (whether it's unconscious or conscious thinking on your part) then you will beat other humans better than a computer will; but, by the same token, the computer will not give you tells to read nor be fooled by your fake tells. I think the mistake in thinking newbies (even highly experienced ones) make is mixing together "the psychology" of the game with the mathematics of the game.<p>So to give an oversimplified concrete example of a poker bluffing strategy (inspired by Nesmith Ankeny's book), if odds of you drawing one of the cards you need to win a showdown are 1 out of 4 but the expected payoff is 20x then you not only need to stay in purely on expected value, but it is also an optimal time to bluff if you don't get your card. It is informationally better to have a bluffing strategy that masquerades as an "I have good cards" strategy <i>and gives random information after the showdown</i> rather than "bluffing" being something you do sheerly when you have shit cards. And to enforce a <i>random</i> strategy on yourself, he recommends using a system of the cards in your hand as the random number generator to tell you whether to bluff or not: as you can see, his strategy designed for human players is more perfectly implemented by a computer.