If the bot is playing a Nash equilibrium then it doesn't need to devise the opponent's strategy. It's guaranteed to tie the opponent in the worst case (the opponent is also playing Nash equilibrium) or else win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

However, if the opponent is playing sub-optimally you can win _more_ by deviating from Nash equilibrium to take advantage of their specific strategic shortcomings. The risk in doing so is if you are wrong estimating their shortcomings.. you are no longer guaranteed a tie in the worst case scenario.

You can see this play out with a small toy game and a card calculator. Suppose a two player game of Texas Holdem where each player has 8x big blinds. The first player must choose to either go all in or fold. The second player must choose to either call the all in or fold. Players must pick a range of hands to perform either action prior to looking at their cards.

https://openpokertools.com/range_equity.html

Suppose a silly strategy by the second player of folding any hand except pocket aces. You'd be wise as the first player to go all in with any hand and pick up a free big blind with 99.5% certainty. However going all in with every hand is also an easy strategy to take advantage of...

(You can actually go back and forth maximally exploiting the other player's strategy and you will eventually reach Nash equilibrium)

If you're talking about Libratus (the CMU AI that beat poker pros in heads up no limit), then that's not true I believe.

During the competition, Libratus used 4 million core hours on the Bridges supercomputer for analyzing it's prior gameplay and changing strategy.

> During the tournament, Libratus was competing against the players during the days. Overnight it was perfecting its strategy on its own by analysing the prior gameplay and results of the day, particularly its losses. Therefore, it was able to continuously straighten out the imperfections that the human team had discovered in their extensive analysis, resulting in a permanent arms race between the humans and Libratus.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libratus

Definitely not true for the top bots.

I believe over multiple poker hands that advantage from luck would quickly diminish and then disappear. I would be very surprised if any normal chess player, a total novice at poker, would be able to beat the best poker player in the world if they sat down to play for a couple of hours straight.

It might seem to be to simple, but don’t underestimate the power of boredom and curiosity. The new player won’t know what you’ve been folding the whole time and will have had nothing else to do but call a sudden change in behavior to see what you have, or fold and keep the pattern going.

One player (beginner) wants to have fun (maybe not overtly, but this is usually the case), the other wants to make money.

You’d be surprised how boring it gets at a poker table when you don’t get good cards for a hour. Folks get bored and play suboptimally.

Part of what poker teaches is patience.

No, total beginners have all their mental power focused on trying to find patterns between the cards on the table and the ones they have on their hands, while trying to remember all the combinations of poker hands. They also need to pay attention on which turn is next and how much they need to pay to keep playing and figure out if it’s worth it, they also need to learn the common poker language, a lot of things going on for a beginner. Once you have all that in memory it becomes easier, your processor power is free from those memory tasks and you can start reading people’s intentions.

I’ve used the strategy in some pretty big games. People get bored, drunk, lazy, etc. It’s pretty easy to consistently make money at poker if you aren’t playing anyone who takes it seriously.