There's always at least one guy at the table who plays superaggressively and one who plays a Dan Harrington-esque tight game. There are purportedly eight different AI bots in the game, each of which plays a little bit differently, though you'll have a hard time discerning all but the most extreme personalities. Conversely, if you play things a little bit recklessly, throwing out big bets on lousy hands to try and make a bluff, the AI will start to challenge you more and more to the point where it simply won't buy your load of malarkey. For example, if you throw in a bet with nothing, the AI comes back over the top with a big raise, and you bow out, it'll learn that you're not necessarily the type to throw down when you don't have a made hand. It's some kind of superscientific computer system that doesn't just react to your play style using a few different canned reactions-it's actually built to learn what you do as you play and react based on what it learns from you.

The basic premise for Stacked is that the game's artificial-intelligence model is built off of a system called Poki.

Stacked's AI knows when you've played bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! By no means is the system perfect, but compared with the dregs of what else is out there, Stacked stands out as the most engaging and smartest game of poker currently available. Stacked takes a laserlike focus to the game of Texas hold 'em, exclusively building its multifaceted artificial-intelligence routines around the workings of that specific variation of the game and then building a video game around it that functions pretty well as a learning tool for would-be hold 'em players. Stacked with Daniel Negreanu is the first poker title from developer 5000 Ft., and a quickly hacked together poker game this is not.

The presentation always sucks, the opponent artificial intelligence is frequently exploitable, the list of features is never deep enough, and so on and so forth. For serious poker enthusiasts, it's even easier to dismiss most of these games, since they all tend to suffer from the same silly issues. For the average person, it would be pretty easy to dismiss the vast majority of console and PC poker games available at retail price as hackneyed cash-ins on a trend that, as of now, is kind of falling by the wayside.

Daniel negreanu poker advice