I think we need to make a distinction between two kinds/styles of play:
1. Coming up with an unexploitable strategy, then scaling it up by playing as many hands as you can, earning the slim expected value each time.
2. Picking a good table / card room / 'scene', and then trying to extract as much value from it as possible.
You most often see 1 online, and 2 live, for obvious reasons.
A skilled human would be a lot more successful, I believe, than a bot in case 2. For 2, important skills are:
1. Be entertaining. You have to play in a way that is entertaining to those playing with you, such that they want to continue playing with you (and losing money to you). Good opponents (i.e. that are bad at poker but want to play high stakes) are hard to find, it is vital that you retain them.
2. Cultivate a table image, then exploit it. Especially important for tournament play, where you have the concept of "key hands" that you really need to win to potentially win the tournament. With the right table image, you may be able to win hands you otherwise wouldn't have won.
3. Exploit the specifics of the players you are playing against. Yes, that also makes you exploitable, but the idea is to stay one step ahead of your opponents.
Note that 1) is only true if your opponent is also not making many mistakes. Which fails to be true for most humans, where the combination of randomization and calculating state appropriate ranges is very difficult. This means that weak players can still lose heavily from mistakes/poor play within a reasonable number of hands, it need not be slim.
Furthermore, you can kind of account for such players by including more random or aggressive profiles in the inference/search stage.
1. Coming up with an unexploitable strategy, then scaling it up by playing as many hands as you can, earning the slim expected value each time.
2. Picking a good table / card room / 'scene', and then trying to extract as much value from it as possible.
You most often see 1 online, and 2 live, for obvious reasons.
A skilled human would be a lot more successful, I believe, than a bot in case 2. For 2, important skills are:
1. Be entertaining. You have to play in a way that is entertaining to those playing with you, such that they want to continue playing with you (and losing money to you). Good opponents (i.e. that are bad at poker but want to play high stakes) are hard to find, it is vital that you retain them.
2. Cultivate a table image, then exploit it. Especially important for tournament play, where you have the concept of "key hands" that you really need to win to potentially win the tournament. With the right table image, you may be able to win hands you otherwise wouldn't have won.
3. Exploit the specifics of the players you are playing against. Yes, that also makes you exploitable, but the idea is to stay one step ahead of your opponents.