Adam Wolf

IGN

Howard Lederer Talks WCP

The Professor talks World Championship Poker and why computers will never be better poker players than humans.

The game of poker, and specifically Texas Hold'em, has exploded in recent years thanks to an ever-increasing number of celebrity players and more and more home games forming around the world. Crave's latest edition in its WCP franchise, World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer "All In", is set to hit stores in mere days, so its cover boy, namesake and one of the best poker players in the world took the time to talk with us about the game.

IGN: First off, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Howard Lederer: My pleasure.

IGN: Aside from lending your name to the World Championship Poker series, what's your involvement with the franchise?

Lederer: I have been involved in a couple iterations, the last game and the new one coming up, and basically what happens is that I was always insistent that it have good AI. So in the middle of the development phase for the second game, they showed up at my house with a beta version and I played it for an afternoon, and a couple of the developers were there… And they had done a nice job, but I kinda plugged up some of the big holes, or at least told them that this was a problem, this was a problem... What I like to make sure is that what the AI won't allow you to do is just have a trick, where if you do a certain thing every hand you win. I thought it played pretty well and I know that the reviews were pretty good.

When they came back this year, I thought it played much better than last year, so it was much further on, and again, we played for many hours and I found much fewer issues, but I did find a few issues, and I would expect it to be much stronger this year. And I also talked to them about Career mode and some of the game selections and that kind of stuff, and I think if you compare this year's Career mode to last year's in terms of the flexibility, and the things you can do week-to-week, and the point system that goes season-wide and also within tournament series themselves, I think that that whole aspect of the game has gotten a lot better also.

IGN: One of the things about videogame poker is that a lot of times there isn't any sort of penalty, at least at the beginning until you have a huge bankroll, for going all-in on every hand or taking huge risks to triple-up or quadruple-up in your first tournament because you can just start over again. What sort of steps can you take to make sure players are watching their chip count and playing reasonable hands early on?

Lederer: Within a tournament, nothing can stop you from playing poorly early and try to either get some chips or just go broke. But that's the tournament you chose to play that week, and if you make some bad decisions just because you either feel like doubling-up or going broke, in the long run, in terms of your total season points, that's not going to do well for you.

IGN: Well, what we're getting at is that it's easy to just start again if you mess up your first tournament and lose all your money. You might as well just go for broke at the beginning...

Lederer: When you're talking about the first tournament that someone plays in, I don't know, that would be beyond my scope. I do know that once you get going and you're a couple weeks in, and this thing's designed for 52 weeks, you're going to have a character there with a track record that you're going to want to protect. And certainly within other aspects of the Career mode, like the apartment and other things that you can collect along the way, there's tremendous incentive to not just lose your money. But if we're talking about the first few hands or the first few games that you play with this particular save, I don't know that there are any protections in the game, and I don't know what we could do. I mean, someone's always going to be able to create a new game.


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IGN: Moving on to the AI, poker veterans know that it's more important to be able to read players than it is to get good cards. Some guys are said to be able to play without ever looking at their hand...

Lederer: Now I would actually disagree with that quite a bit. The betting patterns in poker are absolutely the most important part of any poker player's reading repertoire. People can talk about staring a guy down, and I know that I even have a reputation of being able to stare people down. And not that it's undeserved - there are times that I think I'm in good reading mode and I take some good reads, but you have to understand that when I go into that type of mode where I'm trying to just take a read on someone in the physical world, that's because I have a very difficult decision based on the odds of the pot and the betting pattern that's happened. The odds that the pot is offering me and the betting pattern that this player has presented me during the hand will be, absolutely, 90% of the time, that is what I base my decision on. So when you're playing this videogame, most of the time you're going to be thinking, "What did my opponent do on each street, and what does that tell me about their hand?"

Now, the fun thing that's built into this game is that there are some physical tells, and as you get better and you play these little mini-games, you can throw off false tells and the opponents you play against, the animated AI opponents that you're up against, will either be beginner or expert type players, and particularly the beginner players will actually give tells that you can learn as a player. So the physical tells are built into the game. They're obviously a little bit of a gimmick, but again, you could turn off the tells and just play sort of a straight, online game, and that's 90% of the game at least, maybe 95%.

IGN: Since you don't have casual chatter between players or things like that that you'd find at a real table, it would seem that you'd need to exaggerate the AI's play styles in order to make them unique. How do you do that while keeping them good and not having to have them constantly play bad hands?

Lederer: As I recall, seeing the interface when they create a player, there are four or five categories - there's hand selection, aggressiveness, bluff frequency, and then there's the overall expert or beginner setting, too. So that's the top toggle - are they good or are they bad, or somewhere in-between - and I would imagine they've created a number of profiles and you're up against these characters that'll populate the game. As you move up and play in tougher tournaments, you're going to play against a more expert player.

IGN: On a similar note, being able to bluff well and play with what seem like poor hands and take pots that way is a big part of the game. How do you get the AI to be able to play like that without and not seem like it has no idea what it's doing when it gets caught?

Lederer: You don't, but certainly built into the computer and built into it's bluff frequencies, it's going to occasionally play a funky hand. That's what humans do. You know, you aren't going to see a lot of the cards the computer plays. It's gonna make plays, it's gonna bluff you out. It might show you the cards, it might not... I've played quite a bit, and particularly the expert quality AIs are pretty tough. The interesting thing about poker is that the cards aren't turned over a lot, so you have to make guesses as to what they had and every once in a while, you're right, the computer's going to turn over a hand and you're going to go, "What was it thinking?" Well, obviously some part of its AI triggered it to make that strange play, but it doesn't make that strange play all the time and you're not know the next time it makes that strange play. And, I don't care how weird or funky anyone plays, whether human or computer, nothing says that they can't be dealt the aces, either. So you never know when you're just running into the hammer.


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IGN: How do you personally feel about the mini-games, trinkets you collect and the ability to essentially call for a good hand once per game when you're leveled up enough. Do you think that messes with the game of poker?

Lederer: Well, yeah, but again, this is a videogame. A lot of players will be very casual players looking to have a good time. These are fun things that you don't have to use - you can turn a lot of this stuff off. If you just want to play a cash game, you can set it all to expert and just play some tough poker, too. I think it's nice that, particularly for people who have no interest in playing for money, who just likes watching poker and wants to have a good time with the game... It's gimmicky, but at the same time it's fun. These are features of the game that I might not be all that interested in, but some people are, and I think it's great that it's a very flexible game, because you can get involved in these side things that add to your enjoyment level if you're into that stuff. But if you're not, you can play some serious poker, too, and you can play the online modes.

IGN: Wrapping up, how do you hope that poker videogames will improve in the future?

Lederer: I have mixed emotions there. I want to see the story and the Career mode, at least in my game, get more immersive and more interesting. I'd like to see the AI keep getting better. I think that's how the game gets better. You can play online, you have a really immersive storyline and you have very tough competition - I think that's what poker games have to offer.

Of course, as a human, I'd like to think that the AI will never be able to beat the best poker players in the world. I think that's one of the great things about the game of poker, it's such a human game. I just don't think that programming and computers are tailor made for games of incomplete information. I think people really underestimate how hard it is to get good at the game of poker. One of the things that makes it so difficult, particularly for computers, is that you don't have all the information. They've licked chess and they've licked backgammon. Yes, there's a chance element in backgammon but all the information you need to make the correct decision is available to you at all times in backgammon. The same goes for chess. That's not the case in poker. You can make decisions, they could be right, they could be wrong, but you won't know. That's a fascinating part, that's what makes it human, and so far, humans have the edge, and I would like that to continue but at the same time I'd like to see the AI keep getting better. So I have mixed emotions for sure on that.

IGN: Thanks for taking your time to talk with us.

Lederer: It was my pleasure.