I've read alot of this, it seems that people think it's beatable because it makes weird plays preflop, but then makes awesome laydowns and calls later. Sounds to me like it's been lazily written preflop and on the flop and it makes it's edge back by seeing the river or opponents cards at the end.

I played this thing for maybe 4 hours during my vegas trip and it seems to play terribly. lolsamplesize though.

A bit tricky to play against. Making some weird moves

Head's up is on at Rio! Played the IGT machine this afternoon at the Rio Las Vegas.

Don't know when they installed them but there are 2 machines tucked in
the middle of the dollar reel slot machine area across from the high limit
slot area.
Two things I noticed different from Aria and the Bell, at the Rio I earned rewards
credits for my play and they only had $2/4 limit, $1/$2 blinds.

Anybody seen other machines at other Ceasar's properties?

I just got back from Vegas and played against one of these machines at the Rio. There's actually a little corner on the way to the WSOP rooms (just after leaving the casino area) with about 8-10 of these machines alone. A few booth babes were handing out $10 free coupons the morning of the WSOP ME final table.

I also noticed that these machines did allow a Total Rewards card to be used and that stakes were fixed at $2/$4 (stakes denoted on machine as $1 = small blind). I called a few service/floor staff over and they couldn't figure out how to change the denomination saying that they're unfamiliar new machines and probably not multi-denom.

I did find some multi-denom machines at Aria though (just outside the poker room).

I didn't check if they're still there but during the WSOP in the summer, there were also multi-denom machines at the Bellagio.

Overall, I found the machine's play quite strong.

How much is the rake on these machines? Probably it's written somewhere in the thread, but....

IIRC someone said in one of the other threads that there is no rake. No first hand experience to confirm that, though.

Correct. No rake. It depends on it's superiority to beat humans to make a profit. It took me for $100 at $2/$4 limit at the Rio in about 15 minutes. It throws bets at you with unreal aggression. It didn't help that it liked to 5 out me on the river either. IMO, only top HU limit players could consistently beat the machine.

I think you're confusing some things here. The results of 15 minutes could be +/- 25 bets, almost without regard to relative skill level. Losing 50 bets to a horrible HU opponent happens all the time, look at HULA where a novice HU player often will beat a HU pro. Even "player of the year" honors can go to bad novices with a 4 match hot streak. A few hundred hands is the realm of luck. A few dozen hands is ,

Unreal aggression is standard in HU LHE, only an amazingly bad player wouldn't be aggressive. Maniac = tough style to play against.

As far as top HU LHE players beating or not beating the machines, I think that has yet to be demonstrated. We've had a few people report good results, we've had a few high stakes players say "don't bother", and we have no reports of lines of LHE pros waiting to turn the machine into their personal ATM.

It plays you HU rake free, until you decide to quit it. Gauntlet thrown by owners/creators of device, no house edge other than skillful play.

I always had zero concerns about internet poker being rigged, but would have some degree of concerns about these machines being at least slightly rigged.... And lack of rake is exactly the reason. If operator of the machine would profit from rake, I wouldn't be concerned.

The question is about relative probabilities of two things. 1) They got a rigged game through gaming. 2) They were able to grow an algorithm that you can't beat. I'd actually be more concerned about 2 than 1, but maybe I have too much faith in gaming. I guess it is possible that the losses from bad players are so much greater than the occasional win from a good player that there is possible edge, however, it would seem that a player who could beat the thing for a good number would self select to play a lot of hours and at the highest stakes.

Maybe somebody is printing money off this thing at the new huge stakes offered at Aria and keeping quiet. From what we've heard, nobody is crushing these things. It could be that you're the best HUHU player that is willing to give it a go. Still, news from the field doesn't sound encouraging. As to whether rigged or too good to beat is the reason, I'm not sure how you'd tell.

Many of the hands that have been posted as being suspicious only seem so if you don't know a lot about how to play HU LHE. Of course, by pointing this out, you essentially put yourself in the position of educating the fish.

Others are more questionable, but as Sklansky has pointed out, the designers admit that the game has more than one AI personality. It's certainly conceivable that there's a "bait and switch" going on, wherein weaker personalities play a certain percentage of the time in the hopes of drawing people in (perhaps especially at the lowest stakes). The rest of the time, a top personality runs -- likely a near-GTO approximation that has been proven to beat most human players.

I'd go so far as to speculate that this is what DS was doing when he was seen jumping around between machines. He may have thought that he had found a "tell" for one of the weaker personalities...

It could also be that when the machines have been removed (for updates? afaik no-one really knows why), such percentages were adjusted, which would explain why some people think the machines were softer when they were first introduced.

All idle speculation. Anyway, as long as you can find exploitable human opponents to play elsewhere, I'm not sure it's worth messing around with.

yeah most of the speculative hands are posted by people unclear about advanced HU LHE concepts, I'm curious to play it just for fun when I'm back in the states.

cold brag, breaux

I'm not your bro brah, actually I am, not much of a brag, missing US lifestyles, just dove with sharks though at the Great Barrier Reef, it was pretty tight