#poker - natmc

Monday, October 26, 20261 item

X DEBRIEF

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26 - 4 posts · tagged: #picpoker #poker #AI #benchmarks

THE DIFFERENCES ARE WILD

At 8:52pm I posted the first public description of Pic.Poker, an app I am building to analyze poker hands from a photo. The first challenge is reading the cards at all: overlapping hands, awkward angles, cards scattered across a real table. So I built a benchmark - identical photos, human-confirmed answers, scored on accuracy, time and cost.

The results across the top 10 models are spread wide. Card accuracy runs from 64% to 98%. Getting all 9 cards correctly grouped ranges from 0% to 85%. Median time is 21 to 76 seconds per photo, and estimated cost runs 0.29 cents to 26.28 cents per photo. Same 13 photos, shared prompts and validation, failed reads scored as zero. Small sample, huge differences.

Earlier, Jason L. Baptiste posted that he had not felt a chill like this from a product he worked on since the Onswipe demo days with Andres Barreto. I asked which product. His whole answer: "You know." I answered with a GIF. The product stayed unnamed.

Wednesday, October 14, 20261 item

X DEBRIEF

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14 - 2 posts · tagged: #poker #oddscool #product

WHICH WAY SHOULD THE SLIDER GO?

Greg Bildson tried my poker app and wanted to pull the slider toward the stronger pair. He had worked out how it behaved, but his first instinct was to move it the other way.

I had considered reversing the slider, and that had felt weird too. I listed what the product was trying to do: pre-flop and post-flop, hold'em and Omaha. "it ends up getting too busy."

The choices are visible on Odds.cool. It asks players to guess which hand is favored and by how much. Hold'em uses two cards; PLO uses four. There are pre-flop-only and post-flop-only games, plus a mixed game with five rounds of each.

The start screen also has a hand-strength filter. Rounds have a 20-second timer, and lower scores are better. Before playing, there is already a choice of poker variant, game mode and hand range.

My reply described the crowding. It did not announce a slider change or a redesigned game.

Sunday, October 11, 20261 item

X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11 - 4 posts · tagged: #poker #games #building

GOT IT IN FIVE GUESSES

Greg Bildson made a Wordle-style game for poker hands. I tried it and replied: "Fun game. Took me a moment to realize the clues but got it in 5 guesses"

The game is Tell. You see your own two cards, the board, and your opponent's equity against you. You have six guesses to identify their two hidden cards. Each guess gives feedback on ranks, suits, and how its equity compares with the real hand.

That makes the percentage part of the clue, rather than the answer you are trying to calculate. A green tile means the exact card is in the hand. Yellow means the rank is right but the suit is wrong.

Greg replied that it "actually needs to be harder." I had used five of the six guesses.

I then shared two poker-related apps I built: Odds.cool and Pic.poker. This time I was the person playing someone else's poker app and working out what the clues meant.

Sunday, October 4, 20261 item

X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4 - 2 posts · tagged: #poker #ai #picpoker

PHOTO FIRST. CHECK THE CARDS. THEN THE ODDS.

I've vibe coded a mobile app that takes a photo of a poker hand. Confirm each card, then see the odds from preflop through the river. It's at pic.poker

The card check is the useful detail. In the screenshot I shared, the app has marked nine cards in the photo: two for each hand and five on the board. Red boxes for one hand, blue for the other, yellow for the board. "Review all 9 cards" comes before the odds. You also choose which three board cards arrived on the flop. The screen lets you tap a box to inspect it and swap the two hands.

The photo gets the cards into the app. Confirming them keeps you involved before it calculates the hand. That's a much more appealing starting point than entering every card yourself.

@KingTakesOff replied: "Looks cool. I'm going to have to try it out with my buddies." My answer: "Pls do and feedback welcome!"

Tuesday, September 1, 20261 item

X DEBRIEF

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 - 7 posts · tagged: #ai #poker #knicks #agents

WHEN +EV ISN'T THE WHOLE QUESTION

September's AI release calendar, laid out in one quoted list - Fable 5.1, GPT 6 Astra, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek V5, Gemini 3.8 flash and more inside a single month - drew the day's first reaction: spelled out like that, the pace of change is remarkable (x.com). Hours later Every's week-long Fable 5.1 test landed - "the strongest coding model we've used" - and got a repost plus a short verdict: "This review makes me want to use Fable 5.1. Check it out." (x.com).

The day's most engaged post was a poker hand. Sixteen players left, A8s in early position with ten big blinds and the blinds about to jump - shove, button shows queens, out after three days of grinding. The question isn't the shove's chip EV, which was probably fine; it's whether a decision can be right in isolation and wrong once you weigh what happens if it goes badly - startups included (x.com). One reply pushed back directly: "pretty clearly the right call" (x.com).

Elsewhere: a webhook that returned HTTP 200 while a Postgres worker silently dropped the payload over an unescaped unicode character in a property address - "My grandmother would think I am speaking a foreign language" (x.com). An inbox agent that finds unopened newsletters, adds checkboxes, and unsubscribes on command: "works like a charm!" (x.com). A clear-grape Gatorade review from a glass-bottle lifer who wanted to hate it and kinda digs it (x.com). And a note that Jalen Brunson turned 30 - if he gets another ring, "they better just give him the statue" (x.com).