Hello and welcome to the website. I’m Tim Reiff and I’m a “systems thinker”. I’m interested in philosophy, science fiction, games of all sorts, and computer programming.
Although disappointed by Black Friday in 2011, I still enjoyed thinking about poker so much that I continued to study the game as a hobby. Eventually, in a surge of motivation, I researched and implemented several of the latest artificial intelligence techniques and created a program that could actually play poker at a competent skill level. I began running several experiments, culminating in an agent named Prelude that I submitted to the 2014 AAAI Computer Poker Competition, where it achieved a 2nd place result in the no-limit hold’em instant runoff event. Not bad considering the winning team from Carnegie Mellon University used a supercomputer. 🙂
Still, I wanted to better understand the strategy for playing poker. How did the AI play each hand? How often did it bluff? To answer these questions, I developed the Unfold Poker software, which helps to visualize the strategies and provide all the probabilities involved with each decision. Of course it’s possible to play against the AI too.