AI, poker, and mind games, with Max Chiswick

Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Max Chiswick, a former professional poker player turned AI educator, to explore how poker intersects with decision making. They discuss how the online poker boom created unprecedented opportunities to study decision-making at scale and how computational advances have transformed both the game's theory and practice. They dig into how poker serves as a laboratory for studying decision-making under uncertainty, pattern recognition, and opponent modeling, while also examining the sometimes problematic incentives that emerge in both online gambling and AI development.

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Full transcript available here: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/ai-poker-max-chiswick/

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Sponsor: Check

Check is the leading payroll infrastructure provider and pioneer of embedded payroll. Check makes it easy for any SaaS platform to build a payroll business, and already powers 60+ popular platforms. Head to checkhq.com/complex and tell them patio11 sent you.

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Links:

• Max's website: https://maxchiswick.com/
• Max's startup for AI and Game Strategy: https://overbet.ai/
• The Expected Value Foundation & poker camp course: https://expectedvalue.org/
• Patrick's Bits about Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/

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Twitter:
@chisness
@patio11

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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(00:26) Max's background and journey into poker

(03:45) The credit card rewards game tangent

(06:12) Why poker matters: reasoning and decision-making
(07:49) The problem areas in the poker AI space
(09:38) Poker as an assistive technology for reasoning

(10:59) Online poker history

(16:14) Understanding multitabling

(21:14) Casino economics and gambling regulation
(22:55) Sponsor: Check

(26:32) PokerStars VIP program and professional incentives

(29:47) Playing a million hands in a month

(37:26) AI poker history and counterfactual regret minimization

(43:35) Poker complexity

(45:01) The impact of solvers on modern poker

(45:52) Understanding poker game theory and decision trees

(49:26) Recent developments in poker AI education

(50:27) Teaching programmers to build poker bots

(53:05) Wrap

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Complex Systems is part of the Turpentine podcast network, the network behind Econ 102 with Noah Smith, The Riff with Byrne Hobart, and Turpentine VC. Turpentine also has a social network for top tech founders: https://www.turpentinenetwork.com/