I was pretty excited when the Pokibot incarnation of Jennifer Harman first sat at my table. Pokibot is an artificial intelligence system that’s supposed to feast on your weaknesses, and Jennifer is a seasoned and hyper-aggressive poker pro, so I assumed that my money would be siphoned away from me with relative ease.
Thirty minutes later, my chip stack had increased considerably because I was running over everybody -- including Jennifer. And so it became clear that there were holes in Pokibot, the very system that was supposed to take advantage of how I played poker.
Let’s get this out first: the A.I. players of Stacked are actually excellent training partners. They’ll hand your rump to you on a silver platter if you just mindlessly throw your money into pots, and they’ll break you if you play your cards foolishly. They’ll also mirror real play better than most free online poker sites do -- the Pokibot players are very selective about starting hands and will play fairly cautiously, so it’ll take a bit longer before you can bust someone. Furthermore, the A.I. players are extremely helpful to players new to the game, because they’ll help beginners avoid the common pitfalls that inexperienced players fall into (mainly, putting money into pots they shouldn’t be involved in).
"...the A.I. players of Stacked are excellent training partners."
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Beyond being training tools, however, the Pokibot players won’t offer much more (that includes the Pokibot A.I. on hard mode). They’re content to just wait around for good starting hands, and that lets you steal pots away from them right under their noses. Even when they finally do decide to join the fray, you can easily push them out of pots -- they’ll usually fold if they don’t have something good on the flop, without even considering if you’re bluffing at them (and yeah, it’s a cakewalk bluffing at them).
The Pokis simply haven’t read up on any advanced strategies for war -- they don’t know how to put consistent pressure on anybody, they don’t know how to take two random cards and make them look like monsters, and they’re completely in the dark about how to adapt correctly to a player who’s running right over them. It might be fun dominating your weak opponents for a while, but you’re not learning much and you’re not making any real money in the process. For me, it was pretty frustrating knowing that so few pots were being contested -- it seems like the A.I. players have absolutely no desire to win at all. I might be able to trounce the Pokis again and again, but that doesn’t necessarily make me a great player. It just means that I know how to beat players who make it a point to tell me what they have each and every time.
The A.I. players basically play in the same style, too. They play defensive poker and make weak plays, which definitely isn’t what Daniel Negreanu is preaching in this game. It’s as if they paid no attention to Daniel’s included 45-minute tutorial, which would have raised their game considerably. The result is hour after hour of dry, unimaginative, and just plain boring play, which you can exploit by betting far more often than you would against real players. In short, there’s essentially nothing to learn from the Pokis once you’ve got basic strategy down.
"Beyond being training tools, the Pokibot players won’t offer much more..."
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You might be surprised on occasion, though. The Pokis can suddenly display random bursts of brilliance: bluffing at you on the flop because you’ve been playing too tight, or slow-playing top pair against you because you’ve been betting constantly. Those intelligent moves certainly took me by surprise, and that’s a good thing, but the sad part was that I was surprised because the Pokis almost never make those sorts of moves. Hopefully, they’ll be programmed to perform more dastardly tricks that push you around and make you scratch your head if Stacked gets a sequel.
Poki aside, probably the most commendable inclusion in Stacked is the Ask Daniel feature, which lets you ask for advice if you’re ever unsure how to play your cards. Plus, "Ask Daniel" could also change into "Pro Tip" when you’ve encountered a certain situation that would benefit you greatly to know how to handle. Sure, the information is scripted, fairly generic most of the time, and flat-out strange and incorrect at times, but it’s usually spot-on and will arm you with the basic knowledge to play pretty well against many types of players.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing else that’s attractive in Stacked once Ask Daniel is said and done. The game’s smile and frown feature, which lets you put a visible expression on your character’s face for a few seconds during the heat of battle, doesn’t seem to have a big impact on play. The visuals are mediocre, occasionally turning into a blocky mess filled with slowdown for long periods of time. Then there’s almost no music in the game, and the annoying comments from the A.I. players don’t make things any more tolerable.
"There’s a lot more Stacked could have accomplished..."
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The online play of Stacked disappoints as well. It takes forever to complete just one hand (probably because of the lag from player connections), and that means you’re going to be bored to tears. Apparently, other players also have little interest in playing Stacked online, because there are very few people to play with in the first place. In the end, it’s simply better to satisfy your craving for poker at an online poker site, where you’ll have a lot more fun and learn tons more than you would playing Stacked.
Yes, Stacked is a decent poker game, and yes, the game’s A.I. is better than the A.I. of many other poker games out there. But there’s still a lot more Stacked could have accomplished; what it really needed to do was give players a real run for their money. Hopefully, the sequel will succeed in that respect.
