Philip Atkinson

Upsetting poker traditions as CEO @UnrationalGames. I designed the feature you hate in @unpoker_rivals (coming soon). The occasional foray into matters @nufc.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

The number of losers at online poker has been increasing. Every hour. Every day. For over a decade. Yet not a single person who has played for real money thinks they are a poor player. This is the crux of why the online poker product is ‘broken’.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

@kwansfull @Lelepokerr The solvers etc are just the latest manifestation of a two decade trend. There’s no going back, and LLMs (and more) mean it only downhill from here.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/YZQ8DF2Ak8

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

I wrote the final article in a series about the decline of (online) poker. This one is about the boom that never was. Have a read here 👇
https://t.co/VunoAbok54

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/Ok0OSllwZI

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/Ok0OSllwZI

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

I wrote the third article in a series about the decline of (online) poker. This one is about the perception of unfairness. Have a read here 👇

https://t.co/cxkKcqZOtt

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/lMnRQGlDEj

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/lMnRQGlDEj

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

@astraffon I feel like this is a gap between what people who work inside the industry understand and what those outside do. No structure, whether sports book/exchange/etc is neutral, and the overall balance is hard to find. Wrote about it here: https://t.co/TtI7JoKHr2

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/3aEJU8IWtS

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

I wrote the second article in a series about the decline of (online) poker. This one covers the development of the surrounding tool/learning ecosystem and the impact it had on new players.

Have a read here 👇https://t.co/P6mFAO5g7T

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/YZQ8DF2Ak8

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/YZQ8DF2Ak8

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

The issue is that many plans for making a product better, especially in a muture product, are often team efforts. You can often end up blocked/waiting on other aspects from other people. This previously lead to a sort of inefficiency of unusable resources (which AI helps resolve, but not in the most optimal sense).

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

I suspect that what you are seeing here is a function of how coding agents have entered product mature organisations (basically engineering outwards). In that scenario, developers, who now have the bandwidth to handle the nice to have refactors/resilience improvements which they could never quite get round to, have simply pushed onwards.

The problem is that, in many cases, such work was marginally useful, or impossible to link to relevant end outcomes (if you improve a set of tests to handle an edge case, but that edge case never got reached in real world use, is the system any more stable?). The bull case is that such work is finite, the bear case is that it is not (and that down/upstream coding changes driven by AI effectively create ever more marginal work).

For most of the last 14 months, @steipete was my AI productivity North Star (in so far as it is possible to adopt Peter's approach, which is basically sui generis). I think I am actually more aligned with @badlogicgames and @mitsuhiko now - it's about a more slowed down, thoughtful application of these powerful tools.

I think pretty soon you will see a different type of organisational structure appear, one where the whole framework is a sort of agentic entity that wraps human activity. @jack somewhat spoke about this recently (and Peter is sort of a forerunner of that as well in a way).

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly.

https://t.co/xUhZvtpwah

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

This is the first (of a few) articles, that I have been planning to write for a long time, on what caused the demise of online poker (in this case how it relates to prediction markets now).

Going to give credit to @mattkalish - the recent prediction market kerfuffles inspired me to get writing. I would note also that @SteveRuddock has been saying essentially the same thing for a long time - strongly recommend you read his newsletters.
https://t.co/t5U7BUU58W

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/3aEJU8IWtS

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

https://t.co/3aEJU8IWtS

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

Sharps and fish are relative concepts. A person might be a sharp relative to 98% of the players on DK, but they could easily be a fish to the top 10% on a PM. Forced to trade with that group, they would eventually lose their money.

Note that even in a scenario where you have a specific market advantage against the best, one of the defining features of 'sharp' play is the ability to very quickly realise when you are at an informational/skill disadvantage and adjust your behaviour accordingly. This is why you see specific behaviours in poker rooms / some of the more established betting exchanges which are detrimental to the overall ecosystem etc.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

It’s one of the fundamental problems poker had as well - the product that caters to your most valuable customers is not the one that is optimal for the players they want to play against.

Inside @PokerStars (which was teaming with serious poker people) I used to describe it as ‘building for the person you actually sit beside rather than the one you want to sit beside’.

Very difficult to square that circle.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

It’s one of the fundamental problems poker had as well - the product that caters to your most valuable customers is not the one that is optimal for the players they want to play against. Inside @PokerStars (which was teaming with serious poker people) I used to describe it as ‘building for the person you actually sit beside rather than the one you want to sit beside’. Very difficult to square that circle.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

One of the interesting things about the evolution of online poker (having seen it from the inside and now outside) is that, in general, the love for the game itself never died. Ultimately, many players just became cynical and jaded about the product.

Sports betting, especially on exchanges/PMs, has a much shorter skill level feedback loop and less core product engagement than poker, so you have to work extra hard to keep the retail flow.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

One of the interesting things about the evolution of online poker (having seen it from the inside and now outside) is that, in general, the love for the game itself never died. Ultimately, many players just became cynical and jaded about the product.

Sports betting, especially on exchanges/PMs, has a much shorter skill level feedback loop and less core product engagement than poker, so you have to work extra hard to keep the retail flow.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

@sbjosh02 @mattkalish @Kalshi @DraftKings @Betfair The platform doesn't prevent skilled betters from making money, but more skilled/resourced entities certainly do. I'm not making any assumptions (or claiming for certain what will happen) - just pointing out what ~25 years of data shows.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

I find some of the responses to @mattkalish's posts on @Kalshi (mainly from the people who have been restricted by the likes of @DraftKings) really odd.

Speaking as someone who was (back in the day) limited on every major UK book (and only had @Betfair as an option), I can understand the frustration, but to then make the argument that PMs are superior as they, in theory, allow all participants makes no sense.

One of the things exchanges/PMs always end up doing is revealing the true hierarchy of participants. We saw this all the time at @PokerStars - people would simply not sit at/leave tables when they knew they were facing comparable or superior opponents.

All those people who have had a bit of success with a "sophisticated" model that spots a pricing inefficiency when teams play at altitude, or think that sitting court side gives you an edge on in-play tennis markets, eventually find themselves proverbially looking across the spread at the likes of a Starlizard. At that point they learn the difference between the sort of people DK prefer to restrict and the entities they really, really want no action from.

With exchanges, ultimately the uniformed liquidity dries up (it always does), the informed liquidity becomes hyper cautious and sports betting has always been a game of relative skill. When the revenues drop, the PMs will have to squeeze their remaining customers - the very same people who are ranting at Matt about being restricted.

[Philip Atkinson @UnrationalPhil]

@Gugabed @mattkalish @Kalshi @DraftKings @Betfair Is that a particularly US thing with their relationship to Vegas/books in general (I never sensed as much outrage about the practice in the UK, although obviously there wasn't the X algo feeding it back then)?