BOOK 2 · FRONT OF THE BOOK
Start Here
What this book is, who it's for, how to read it, and what you'll need. Five minutes, and then you can pick your own way in.
What this book is
This is a book about thinking, using poker as the lab. You'll play robots, write down why you made each move, build robots of your own, find the point where rules run out, and then sit down with AI players from five different companies. Along the way you'll learn the habits that matter most when working with AI: asking for the why, judging decisions instead of results, and keeping a person in the loop.
It follows one path in three steps, and the steps are the book's three Parts:
| PART | YOU… | WHAT YOU LEARN |
|---|---|---|
| I · Play | Play rules-based robots and keep a hand journal of your reasons. | The language of poker, and how unreliable your own reasons can be |
| II · Build | Turn your reasons into a robot, make it smarter, and hit the wall. | Rules carry what you already know. They can't learn. |
| III · Battle | Meet AI players: the heads-up agent, and the tournament between five companies' models. | What AI adds, what it costs, and why a person still has to check it |
That order is deliberate. Robots that roll dice came first, then robots that follow rules, then smarter rules, and only then an AI you can talk to in plain poker words. Each step makes sense once you've felt the limits of the one before.
What this book isn't
It isn't a gambling book. In Book 1, Kevin put it this way, and it still holds:
Gambling is a tax on people with bad math skills. We're here to help with the math.
Kevin, Book 1, Part 0
No real money is played on HoldemRobots.AI. Nothing here is gambling or financial advice. Students under the legal gambling age are welcome to study the math and the code, but should never play poker for money. If gambling is a problem for you or someone you know, call 1-800-GAMBLER.
Four kinds of pages
Every chapter is labeled at the top, so you always know what you're reading and what you can skip.
- Student chapters tell a story, give you steps to do at the table, and end with an exercise and its answer key. A student working alone can do every one.
- Teacher chapters explain how to run a session with a class. If you're on your own, read them anyway: their questions work just as well as questions to ask yourself.
- Diversion boxes mark something unequal, uncertain or easy to misread. The full list, from the AI tournament, is at the back of the book.
- The Backroom Dialogs, in Part III, tell the story of the AI tournament as conversations. They're written for anyone curious, and especially for IT people and decision makers.
Every student chapter starts with a box called If you only read this page. Read just those boxes and you'll have the whole argument of the book. Each chapter also ends with The AI lesson: one line connecting the poker idea to working with AI.
Pick your way in
| IF YOU'RE… | START WITH |
|---|---|
| A student, on your own | Part I, from the beginning. Print the hand journal at the back of the book first. |
| A teacher or club leader | "The Class Plays the AI," then "Running a Crawl Session." Then read the student chapters you'll assign. |
| Into poker, curious about AI | "What Were You Thinking?" and "Read the Player, Set the Trap," then jump to Part III. |
| An IT leader or decision maker | "Two Weeks," then the Backroom Dialogs, especially 5, 8 and 10, then the diversions at the back. |
What you'll need
- For Parts I and II: the HoldemRobots.AI website, or a Raspberry Pi running the HoldemRobots release. The Pi version needs no internet at all. It was built that way on purpose, because in much of New Mexico a connection isn't always there.
- For Part III: an internet connection, because the AI players live in the cloud.
- For building with an AI partner, as this book was: the lowest-priced Claude plan above the free one is enough to start. Move up only when you keep running out of usage.
- Always: a pencil and the hand journal.
A student's path through Book 1
This book stands on its own, but it's the second of two. Book 1, The Road to an Honest Opponent, tells how a twenty-year-old poker table was caught cheating, made honest, and given an AI player. You don't need all of it. Here's what to read, and when.
| BEFORE… | READ IN BOOK 1 | WHY |
|---|---|---|
| Part I · Play | Part 0, and Parts 1 and 2 | What the project is, and the robots that could see the future |
| Part II · Build | Parts 12 and 22 | The table on a Raspberry Pi, and writing your own bot (with three doors left open) |
| Part III · Battle | Parts 4 to 7, 15 and 16 | The AI arrives, a beginner's guide to AI agents, and how to beat one |
| The advanced exercises | Parts 11, 20 and 27 | Memory for bots, catching a cheat from the data, and Peeker |
The rest of Book 1 (the servers, the cloud, the costs and the workbench) is for builders who want to run their own copy. Skip it until you do.
Written by Kevin Swinson with Claudette, the pen name for Claude, the AI from Anthropic that helped build HoldemRobots.AI. The no-gambling note follows Book 1, Part 0.