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Online Poker Bots Becoming Problematic?
scumbucket writes "MSNBC has a story about how poker bots have started to appear on internet gambling sites and the implications. It also talks about how a 'master level' poker-playing bot already exists. Could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?"
From the article: argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can "read" opponents' cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best.
Why would the software have to scan the screen? The card image would be a unique filename, right? ie: "jack_spades.jpg" or something less easy to recognize but just as unique. That doesn't require funky programming and OCR.
Trolling is a art,
Casinos are out to make a buck, with little regard for the welfare of future of the players. They don't care if an addict comes in with all of his life savings, and blows it all in one sitting.
A business that has millions, but really gives you nothing for your money in return, deserves a good stinging pinch like this.
Poker won't be the only one to have bots. Blackjack can be easily played via pre-defined rules. In fact, it's a lot easier to make a bot for Blackjack than for poker, since Poker is more affected by bluffing, and human interaction. That's why most poker players wear sunglasses, and show little emotion. Hence the phrase "poker face".
I guess in summary: "Online poker bots becoming problematic?"
Sure, but problematic for whom? The casinos are notorious for putting a winning blackjack player on a blacklist, and not letting them in. Why? Did they cheat? No, they just won, and casinos hate to lose money.
Bots are problematic for casinos, but is that something to cry about?
Of course, if you don't like casinos, don't go to them. They only exist
to fulfill a need/desire that many people have, and unless that goes away, they'll continue to exist.
'master level' poker-playing bot
Stop calling me a bot.
I don't see how. They adjust the payoff so that even with perfect play the house comes out ahead. They'd have to or they'd lose money on average. Bots might cause a reduction in profits, though.
Thats a very good idea. *begins coding*
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
Welcome our new metallic gambling over lords.
I don't see what's wrong with it... if I could play against a poker-playing robot at a real casino, I would! People who write smart bots deserve the money, as far as I'm concerned.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Ben Affleck?
I didn't think so
Here is the original post I sent on twoplustwo, as quoted at
;-) in the
the end of the news. Despite the desperate tone of the article,
I'm not depressed (;-) and I'd be interested to see bots fighting
on the poker server (Free Software) I work on at http://gna.org/projects/underware/.
---
Disclaimer: I do not favor bots, I do not develop bots, I won't
be happy if there are more bots than humans in online poker rooms.
From a technical point of view, no poker client will ever be able to
detect a bot that analyzes the window layout (to find cards, bet
amounts, player names etc). It could attempt this detection when the
bot runs on the same machine although it is likely to require frequent
updates (think anti-virus software). However, if the bot runs on
another machine and watches the display remotely, it is just
impossible (VNC is a example software that watches a display from a
remote machine).
From a legal point of view, international and national laws in most
countries (+200 of them, including US and all Europe) strongly
protects interoperability between programs. It means that the author
of a program whose sole purpose is to encode/decode the protocols or
file formats used by another program can never be sued on this basis.
Online poker rooms can forbid the use of any computerized assistance
(except the mouse, the screen and the operating system
terms and conditions that each player accepts when registering. A
contract is a powerful tool to attempt to force people to forfeit
rights that cannot be taken from them. Although the poker room may win
a lawsuit against a player using a bot that plays on his behalf, there
are more cases where they would lose.
For instance, if my only machine is running GNU/Linux, the court may
rule that I'm entitled to use my own client because there does not
exist a client except for Windows. Ruling otherwise would mean that
the poker room can force me to become a Microsoft customer. A real
world poker room can force you to wear a tie but cannot force you to
wear a tie of a given brand. This can have precedence over contract
terms and conditions. Furthermore, the features provided by my client
software (such as automated play or statistics gathering) cannot be
restricted by contract. No matter what is written, no third party can
legitimately control or restrict the software you run on your own
machine. If that was the case, no doubt a large software publisher
would state in its operating system license contract that all software
running on top of it must be purchased from them.
Summary:
. Bots can't be detected.
. Bots can't be outlawed.
. Poker room terms and conditions are inefficient to forbid bot
usage.
Will there ever be a widely spread bot able to beat most players
currently playing in online poker rooms ? I think so. It may already
exist but is kept secret. It's only a matter of time before a talented
poker player who also happens to be a good developer decides she or he
wants to be remembered as the author of the first bot that changed
online poker forever.
~
...with being an ass-hole."
-- Henry Rollins
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have little sympathy for the house when someone figures out a way to beat them.
I wouldn't be surprised at this at all - I've even heard rumors of people playing online chess while using Chessmaster to tell them their moves.
It was, um, a friend of mine...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
"The University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group has developed an artificially intelligent (poker playing) automaton known as "Vex Bot," "
At last! We Canadians have a piece of technology that can make us as proud as the mighty Canadarm!
Three Squirrels
are they using bots or not? the article is inconclusive. and very sparse on the facts.
When I was 8 years old I played with an AI program called Eliza on a teletype machine. My 8 year old friend and I were convinced for about 30 minutes that this was a real person on the other side. It's been a long time since those days, adn AI programs have only gotten more convincing. I've seen bots do pretty well in Counter Strike, to the point where several players thought that the Bots were real people. In poker, you are talking about alot of money. Money is motivation to create a poker AI. Online poker is mostly about statistics anyways, and a computer is great at figuring out odds.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
until someone accidentally uses an aimbot, and blows a guy's head off.
Why should it really be a concern? I mean, poker companies will still be making money, and as long as nobody's cheating, what gives if the next person is a human or a bot?
Machines are no intellectual match for humans (at least for now). At least not for most humans. Given the fact that poker is a game of chance (unlike say chess, in which randomness has no play), a bot can only be as good as the expert that has created it.
something else, booze, drugs, luxuries they don't need, so who cares if the "online" gambling industry goes under? Not I.
Does a full house of poker-bots beat a pair?
And when Queen Elizabeth goes to the toilet, is there a Royal Flush?
At first I was thinking that maybe this isn't fair to the other players... But then again if you think about it... As it stands poker is still a game of chance... A bot can only play optimum hands based upon the cards it sees and what it knows is still in the deck... This really isn't any different then a human player. If bots exist that are beating inexperienced players, how is this different from the poker pro who logs 10 hours of online poker a day?
When you break it down it still takes a skillful poker player to engineer a bot that can perform at a winning level...
Also the bots are betting someones money...
There is an inherent risk in online poker that the player at the other end of the connection has tools that he is using to gain a competative advantage, such as tools for counting cards, figuring odds and so on...
If you're looking for real human vs human action without worrying about cheat tools find a game in your neighborhood and go play there. Even though gambling isn't legal in all 50 states you can always find somewhere to play if you look hard enough.
The resurgence of gambling in our society fueled by popularity of poker, can have tremendously poor affects on the american economy in the upcoming years. About a month ago, I wrote an article that talked about the future implications to the financial markets if gambling continued to grow.
gShares.net
-------
artlu.net
That's nothing, when I play poker I'm a machine.....an ATM machine :-)
welcome our new pokerbot overlords
This
I never liked organized toying around with human psychology anyway... It would be one thing if the gamblers could say "no", but it has been proven again and again that it's a problem to just do so for many, that soon enough becomes a real life problem. Going to internet with this stuff is like a slap in their face, since it's going to be even easier than ever before to get into trouble. Of course, this obsession and all is hard to understand for anyone who haven't been there.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
it's easy to find software that is designed to follow along with the current game, giving you the statistically best move based on what is known, such as the face-up cards, who is on the button, and what your cards are. They also give you a gauge making it easier to decide whether to call or fold a hand. After seeing this type of program in action, it's turned me completely off of putting any real money into online poker.
When will the first WPT have a bot in it? This is discrimination, I want to watch 8 hours of bots playing poker... what was the reason for setting up the bot again?
Then came the Age of the Geek, when many learned the arcane ways of the code, and some even chose to make "bots" of their own. Some of these were so well made that they could indeed play the complicated games better than other humans who had not yet adjusted to this new age. And none could tell the difference, and many accusations were made. Yet, though the casino owners did try with all their might to stop them, the bots did take over all. And then they destroyed the world, and they all lived happily ever after.
The End.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
...you don't trust other players to not be using bots, but you trust the house to not add their own player to every game and fix the host software to guarantee that the house's player wins???
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Recently I was browsing www.suprnova.org for obscure torrents in their misc area, and I found this "ebook" on how to win texas hold 'em. I downloaded it hoping that it was some kind of strategy guide or an odds list or something
turns out it was just some product promotion for a company that makes gambling bots.
I downloaded the software trial out of curiosity (I've never played online poker before, I just wanted to see how the program was set up.)
The way it worked (or claimed to, I never tried it) it would monitor my poker game and make calculations based on other people's bids checks or folds and give me tips about whether I should fold, check, bid, or bid high. It kept a percentage rating for probability of wining and stuff like that.
Basically it claimed to play the game for me, which would suck as I was looking for a strategy guide instead. I can't remember which one it was that I downloaded.
here's a link to one of them
Pushing is the way to go. Pushing is the answer. Pushing will protect us from the terrible secret of Vegas.
I have come to the conclusion that anything that has to do with money on the internet will eventually be hacked and exploited, why should gambling sites be any different?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Uhh, don't you mean the gaming industry?
Since online gambling is more or less illegal in the United States, any contract you enter with the casino could be void since it is against public policy, depending on what state you are in and where the actual casino is located. I think some vegas/AC casinos have bribed their way to the rights of being the only online casinos allowed.
and I thought bots killing me in Quake2 were annoying! these actually take your money too. it's no surprise though; anything online is going to have some fraud to deal with, as it's people's nature to want something for nothing.
CB#@)(*&&&
free ipod and free gmail!
how philosophical...
poker players recognized as bots?
reminds me of those old people at the slots...
-judging another only defines yourself
In poker you aren't even playing against the house. And the bot is under someone's account, with someone's money. The casino just gets a share of each pot (called the rake). So in the case of poker it shouldn't concern a casino in the slightest other than the fact they might attract less players to their site.
First of all, a black jack bot would be a silly idea. Black jack is a game that cannot be beaten in the long run. Played at it's best, the house still has a 2% advantage, which over the long haul will translate into certain losses.
Regarding a poker bot, I'd love to play against one. Most people play like bots anyways. Many players tend to take pre-determined actions in a given situation. (Hold 'Em: 6-handed game in early position with a A-Q off suit, etc etc) So what's the difference?
Certain poker games, like 5-card draw perhaps, might lend itself to a greater opportunity to create relatively "skilled" bots, but games like Texas Hold 'em require so much of a human element to them that there's simply no way you could create a bot that could challenge people with even the slightest level of master of the game.
I've played poker since I was 5 years old, and feel that I know many of the games pretty thoroughly - and am a very consistent winner at home games, and the casino. I'm also a computer programmer, so I think I have a relatively "informed" view on the topic.
No way! Coming from personal experience, I've played on-line and at the casinos. Bluffing is a big part of strategy in poker, and seeing the facial experssions is key. On-line poker could compete with webcams, but how many people would go through that extent? No one I know. The older folks probably want to get away from their spouse and kids. Also, the atmosphere at the casino is part of the adrenaline rush... hearing the constant noise, seeing tons of people, and getting free drinks. Playing in your pijamas without having to wash up might be alright occasionally, but I believe the vast majority of players will still drive to the casino to fully immerse themselves in the poker pit over.
It is about time that someone or something take the edge out of gambling. But no matter what the casinos or 'the house' will take their share. It will just eliminate the difference between the good card counters and bad ones. It is now how much risk do you want to take instead of if I am making a mistake calculating the odds.
Go Bots !!!
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Hmmm that's why fred#3079-beta1 would never answer any of my questions.
and explain why I am broke.
Johnny Chan: I'll see your $30,000 and raise you $5,000
...
Stu Ungar: Call
L33t Pl4y3r69: Call
Dealer: Ok gentlemen, lets see your hands
Johnny Chan: Flush
Stu Ungar: Full House
L33t Pl4y3r: 5 Aces!!! 0WN3D n00bs!!1!11
Dealer:
Johnny Chan: OMG HAX!!
Stu Ungar: WTF?? Lag!!
They want to let people think they can have an advantage, but in reality they need garanteed profits. It's ok for them to be the "cheater" since they obviosly have the odds set up that they will consistently rack a profit. But if someone, figures a way to cheat them, then they get arrested and blacklisted. The nature of the game and the rules invite cheating. Most people will shake rattles, carry rabbit feet with them and that kind of stuff, but if someone uses their head and skills to create an intelligent bot to play poker, then I think they "almost" deserve the money they win.
One error, though, and you'll get destroyed over the long term, not rich. The bot, being a bot, will sit there and make the same mistakes over and over until you come home and see your credit card maxxed with charges to the online casino.
What then? Sit and watch the bot play, to make sure it doesn't screw up? :p
I can't believe this would ever be worth the effort, but greed makes people do strange things, I suppose.
I'll tell you what the 'effect' is! It's pissing me off!
Any medium that puts an abstraction layer between people is subject to abuse. People who use machines to change their voice into someone else while they talk on the phone, people who use chess computers to pick a move for them while playing online, and smam email where the author fakes his/her return address are all simptoms of the same problem.
The only way you're ever going to know who you're REALLY dealing with is to meet up and talk with them face to face. But in this day and age of convience, people don't want to do that any more. Thus, I predict will will see more and more of these problems as people try to do online everything they would in the past have done with the person standing in front of them.
who the 'bots are. Strike up a conversation with your fellow on-line players. Something like...
Holden: You're in a desert, walking along when - Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: Doesn't matter what desert it is, it's completely hypothetical.
Leon: Well, how come I'd be there?
Holden: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you just wanted to get away from it all. Anyway. You're in a desert, walking along when you look down and you see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you. Leon: What's a tortoise?
Holden: You know what a turtle is?
Leon: 'Course!
Holden: Same thing. So you reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.
Leon: Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write 'em down for you?
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Leon: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, I'M NOT HELPING?
Holden: I mean you're not helping, Leon.
At least in my university, using bots to play is well-known by all members of the CS department... especially people who enjoy game theory... come one, any PhD student need extra money, this is how we use our brains to get that extra buck from the morons out there... Me and a small group of friends have developed our own little tool based on genetic algs and a huge database of online poker games that brings in cash in excess of $1000k/month for every one of us, with very little risk. All tax-free of course, as we're not us-based and the IRS here have no clue. We've been doing this since '01 and we've all signed a confidentiality agreement saying we will never release the algorithm into the public. the tool is not useful for anything but poker and it's much too rewarding for us.
Despite what ESPN would have you believe, there are a large number of people who play games other than "No-limit hold 'em'", namely Limit and Omaha. Each of those games are based FAR more on mathematical odds, probability, and having the nuts as opposed to the bluffing and gamesmanship required for No-Limit. It would be much much easier to program a bot that could play Limit and Omaha profitably. No-Limit and preventing collusion are a much more difficult task.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Get your bot a pre-paid card with the amount you are willing to pay to the casino (usual outcome of gambling). Then you can test all sorts of adaptive learning algorithms. The bot can be programmed to model all the great skills of the poker masters (potentially) and to recognize patterns in the other players. Might be kind of fun.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
...so what's the problem?
Lt. Cmd. Data could tell you this isn't foolproof.
The real game involves sizing up the bets and the players...
If that was the case, no doubt a large software publisher would state in its operating system license contract that all software running on top of it must be purchased from them. Software manufacturers just aren't that stupid.
I think lost in the article here is one of the more sinister attributes to potential bot play--teaming.
I wouldn't mind playing against a solo bot, which can see only it's own cards--frankly, I think I can potentially beat it, and if I can't, I don't feel denied a fair chance.
The problem is when bots team up--when the bots are working together. Basically, they tell one another what their cards are. Now the human player does NOT have a fair chance--the bots know more information than the player.
Teaming is absolutly illegal, for very good reasons. It's also not limited to bots--human players can team relatively easily using IM or something similar to make their cards known. But it's a lot easier with bots.
In the extreme case, a reasonably intelligent bot program could play 7 places at a table, waiting for a human 8th to come along... The bots have a significant strategic advantage in knowing 14 of the 16 cards dealt, and wouldn't need to play against each other.
Oh wait, this was about poker? Sorry.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
hopefully
but it has been proven again and again that it's a problem to just do so for many, that soon enough becomes a real life problem
Just like Marge Simpson.
I had a debit/ATM card compromised somehow last year. There wasn't very much in the account at the time, so the guy set up an account "for" me at a poker site and tried to gamble my balance up. He lost a few hundred. I noticed the withdrawls a few hours later and called the bank, after finding that my wife and I didn't have enough money to go out to a nice dinner that night. (The charges hadn't posted and were labeled as "ATM/POS activity", so I didn't know how they were spent. I just knew it wasn't me.)
I called the bank and while I was on the phone with the bank rep, more weird charges were coming in! We were both watching someone gamble away all my money in real time. So he red flagged them all and gave me a claim code.
The next day the phone rings. "Hello, this is Planet Poker..." and without thinking I say "No thank you" and hang up. The phone rings again a few minutes later. "Planet Poker..." and I say "please take me off your list" and hang up, still thinking it's a telemarketing call. Which sounds stupid given the withdrawls the day before, but I didn't put two and two together. (It was Planet Poker calling me to welcome me as a new degenerate gambler / customer.)
The phone rings again. "Don't hang up we think someone used your credit card!" she says really fast. I said, oh yeah, I reported those charges to the bank yesterday.
Then she sounds sullen. "Well... I guess we'll be getting the chargebacks then..."
I said, "yeah, I guess so!"
Don't know if the guy was using a program to help him cheat, but he played really badly.
Too bad this isn't on fark, I have a hell of a photoshop idea for this...
But its highly likely the wide dissemination of tools to cheat in online casino's are being supported by brick and mortar casino's. This strategy has been talked about in smoky vegas pokerrooms since the online poker first popped up what? 5 years ago. What better way is there to destroy your nascent competition by taking away the public's trust by making it rediculously easy for everyone to cheat. Not very nice...but casino execs make kenny lay and bernie ebbers look like gradeschool schucksters.
AC because i've worked in gaming for 15 years.
Casinos are out to make a buck, with little regard for the welfare of future of the players. They don't care if an addict comes in with all of his life savings, and blows it all in one sitting.
Actually, yes, they do...greatly. Casinos are based on gaming as entertainment and repeat business. They want to people to get hooked and then go to the casino once a month or once a year and keep spending money in their casino. Problem gamblers are regularly blacklisted since they drive away paying customers.
Sure, but problematic for whom? The casinos are notorious for putting a winning blackjack player on a blacklist, and not letting them in. Why? Did they cheat? No, they just won, and casinos hate to lose money
Casinos generate the majority of their profit from their interest on their cash reserves, not from actual gaming. The take on gambling alone would barely covering operating the average casino. They generate their revenue on the interest of their cash, an adequate reserve of which must be maintained to pay out all outstanding bets at anytime. The more bet, the more reserve, the more interest. The take from gaming is actually secondary now.
Blacklisting is reserved for cheaters and addicts, not winners. Casinos want winners to keep playing and turn their money over in the casino, game the system and bad things happen.
I play quite a bit of internet poker - only nickle and dime stuff but the rules are the same. Even with the limited information you get from internet poker as opposed to sitting with my mates over the dinner table I can still 'read' the other players and adjust my game accordingly. Furthermore I, and the other players, will 'change gear' and play differently to confuse the others. Is that player who was playing tightly now playing every hand because they''re getting good cards or are they bluffing? The point of all this is a) I'm sure I would spot a 'bot' b) I'm sure a 'bot' couldn't play the psycological game. The chance game yes, but that's only half the story.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
While 'bots are a serious topic, there is a solution. Make the "user" periodically enter in some text that has been graphically morphed... something that only a human eye can recognize. It can be done in seconds, and that would eliminate the use of 'bots.
What I can't figure out is how the gambling industry is going to fight "group cheating". Put 4 or 5 laptops together, and have several people cheat the rest of the table out of their money by sharing their hands. It's not hard to do, and it's impossible to detect. Especially with wireless access.
I have a couple of friends that refuse to play online because it's impossible to stop this behavior in online poker.
-- No sig for you!
There is no way for any user to know if an on-line "casino" is shaving points or that any of the other "players" are working for the casino. Unless you are betting on something that can be verified publicly and can't be rigged easily (such as major league sports) on-line gambling is too much of a gamble.
If you read the TOS for any of these online poker sites (ie, partypoker.com) they make it very clear that their software scans your machine for software that may aid you in playing the game. This includes anything that determines odds, anything that plays hands for you, etc... And They have the ability to update there list of known software as new pieces are releases.
From the article: argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can "read" opponents' cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best.
well considering that my friend and i implemented a system that does just that (over a year ago), i call bullshit on this one. what we did was capture an example of each card off the screen (we use ParadisePoker). then we came up with a best-match algorithm that compares each card to our reference cards to decide which card it is.
it's the "react in real-time" part that is the bitch of it all... the "read" from the screen is, while i won't say trivial, doable. it took me and my friend less than a week to implement using java's "robot" class (to read pixel values from the screen).
some guys we know were just trying to put together something that calulated odds for 7-stud on the fly, but found that inputting the cards by hand took too long. so they asked us if we could capture the cards from the screen. we didnt know if we could or couldnt, but we looked into it and it wasnt so hard.
i also know of more than one person back at school (MIT) who is working on a fully-functioning bot. i dont think they are "years" off from being finished either.
Normally I don't like guns, but in this instance those old westerns have got it right. If you suspected someone was a cheatin varmint you pulled out your shooter with it's six chambers of justice. Not much of a way to contend with cheatin varmints in this day, unless you just stay away.
Meanwhile California is adding more gambling crap all over the place (thanks governator) and another issue is on the ballot.
I gamble bigger stakes. I drive on Highway 1 =-|
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Some of my buddies at MIT and I have been operating a program like this for over a year now. We wrote the control algorithms ourselves based on our preferred play styles and fit them into a screen scanning program. The program is no better than any of us, but it has the advantage of being cold and methodical. We included code for an emergency stop so that if something went wrong we wouldn't lose all of our money, though it hasn't been an issue after the initial testing phase. I'm still uncomfortable about using the program for higher stakes games, but on a 50 cent/1 dollar Hold 'Em table at peak hours (discovered through trial and error) the program consistently makes about $20 an hour.
while (!sleep){
sheep++;
}
This article says that "screen-scraping" won't be possible for years. I know I've seen some automated testing tools that will do this -- anybody know what they are? (Windows or Linux?)
I mean, if some smart guy can build a Lego Mindstorm kit that will solve a real Rubik's Cube, how hard could this be?
Really, this won't make a difference. All this thing does is play by the odds. While that works well against unexperienced players, most people who play a lot of poker know how to figure the odds as well (it's not hard) and what makes the game interesting is how loose or tight they play to those odds. So if you're lucky enough to get at a table of suckers in an online casino this would be useful, but really, most online casinos, unlike real casinos, are populated by gambling addicts (most of whom know the odds, if not by numbers than by instinct) or increasingly by people who read articles about calculating the odds and think that they're going to make a killing against all the other suckers.
Really, if you want to make some money at poker you'd be better off learning to do the odds in your head and going to a real casino to find a table of marks. Or, alternatively, fleece your friends (or your friends' friends) during friendly games of poker, if you don't have any moral objections to that.
It's not "bots" that'll cripple online gaming, it's the same tendency towards collusion and fraud that hampers face-to-face games. If you have a subgroup of players in a game conspiring to exchange information, you're SOL, regardless of whether some talented coder has manufactured the player or not.
Cheers,
RobN --says gambling == entertainment that costs $
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
Or, end up like me, and spend the rest of your days sleeping with the fishes!
Although, Don Corleone does throw a great wedding.
. <-- the joke
o <-- your head
Been there, done that.
Consider yourself schooled. Now get out of my comicbook shop!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There is poker software that will bluff. And it's pretty damn good.
"Really, if you want to make some money at poker you'd be better off learning to do the odds in your head and going to a real casino to find a table of marks."
ha,ha,ha thats pretty funny..and niave.
When you go to a casino, 4 out 5 people at a table are regulars, and the pretty much just sand bag until mister, 'I know the odds' shows up, then the fleece him.
However, one time I did make a semi-pro player come over the table at me... ahhh that was great.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
welcome our Poker Bot overlords
see also - Star Trek paper models. You know you want them, you freakin' nerds!
Bots aren't the only concern. And by far, they aren't the most immediate. Collusion amongst two or more players in a room can occur easily by communicating via some other channel (i.e. Instant Messenger) whereby they can inform everyone involved of their hand. They could then team up to win pots and then split the earnings.
I have played online poker for about a year know. I have assumed I have played against bots on various occasions. I train against bots: http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/webgames/poker/
Like any software, they are only as good as the person who programmed them.
There is still one thing - The bots can't change the cards that are out on the table. I am fairly confident that the bots can outplay 60-70% of the people online, but they bots can not beat you unless it has the cards to do so!
Playing online poker is strictly a numbers game. With the human element removed, your left to make your decisions based on the cards as they are.
It's not like the casinos would even pay you the money anyway.
The FTC gets tons of complaints daily about online casino fraud.
If the person won, the casino would just say "oh, you must have been cheating" and not pay you a cent.
Why would Riker bet when he knew he had a losing hand? He was betting on Data folding!
Seriously.
Foor the cool factor (Yay! its GNU!) consider "GNU Backgammon", the program uses 3 neural nets and humongous move databases. Backgammon compares well to poker btw, BG is ruled by dice and skill, Poker is ruled by chances and skill too. It is quite likely the strongest BG playing, ehm, thing, in the world.
Gnu BG plays an astounding 2200 rating on Fibs, if not higher if you get high end hardware, and give the bot a few secs between moves.
1800 is considered a worldclass human player, 1900 and above are grandmasters.
Friends, dont play backgammon online for money, and certainly not Poker. Instead if you must, visit tournies in the flesh.
Or get the bots, and a few spare comps... You will NEVER rob the casino thou, you will rob other suck^D^D^D^Dplayers.
"/Dread"
Its easy.
Most of these sites offer "free online poker". what you have to do is you sit for 30-60 seconds while you see ad's and you get to continue playing for free. Simple solution. while waiting for this period require the person to "prove" their still in front of the computer, require them to type in a code or something that requires them to authenicate before they move to the next round.
What will this do?
It will require each member to authenicate every time the round is over, normally 5-10 minutes, this would make it not worth trying to run bots on these sites, it would also increase revenue from the ad's because people will have to be in front of the pc to authenicate to move to the next match.
And if people dont like it then maybe they shouldnt play poker online for free.
TruePunk | Games
> Could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?
since theres a sucker born every second, this will probably only reduce it to a $0.9 billion industry.
Did you by any chance write the ads where buying pot funded terrorists?
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
(I may have this story slightly wrong)
Charles Babbage, the man who is generally credited with having invented the general-purpose computer, upon finding that he was unable to find people interested in actually financially contributing to research into the construction of such a computer, wound up instead devoting the end of his life to developing a less-general-purpose computing machine specifically designed to pick winning horses in horseraces. The machine never worked and was a financial disaster for babbage.
150 years later, computer scientists finally get their revenge on the gambling industry.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You know those AI thesis and software people wrote in graduate schools are findally put to use ;)
But really, are we really suprised about those bots? The truth is, that is not very hard to write one. Like the artical say, it is a $1B playground, and if the money is there, you almost can get anything written...
I mean, how many wall street company have trader bots running around everywhere... Hum... things make you go hum...
weink dot net
You can also find yourself sitting at the table where people know each other and are in cahoots. Sharing information about what is in their hand via instant messaging.
The people in the study were by no means master players, but neither is the average player at an online casino.
you will beat these bots .. I have played against them many a time and they are not "all that".
Yes, set to "tight" they are difficult to beat, however, they don't do well in 4-10 people tables.
I double my income by playing at party poker and I know there are bots in there. The problem with the bots is they play TOO tight. You can easily fool these things at the flop. 4th and 5th they calculate odds very well.
A good poker player either sees this type of player as a: a very tight good player or b: a bot.
If the poker sites could somehow fix this, I would be all for it, if not I will just continue playing IRL, where Poker should be played. With Scotch.
I really do know KungFu
I want a do over. -Bender
From the article:
But skeptics - and there are many - argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can "read" opponents' cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best. They point to the handful of commercial products that purport to give online players significant advantage, which they roundly deride as woefully inadequate, as proof today's bots are no match for humans.
Properly written gambling software doesn't pass information regarding other players' cards to the client. You should only see your cards, community cards, and actions that take place like bets and folds. Other players' cards would only be revealed at showdown...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Posting AC for a reason...
I did this 3 years ago, and have had my sessions running for almost that whole time. I am neither a world-class poker player nor a world-class programmer. So far, they have earned me about $130,000.
The article got hung up on how well poker AI could compete against good players, but that's not where they are most effective. Bots can grind at the lower stakes ($1/$2 and $2/$4) far better than any human, and can beat the level of human play found there far easier than at the high stakes.
Some notes from experience:
-The sites don't give a shit. I've taken some measures to disguise my bots, but a monkey examining the casino records could figure it out. They collect their rake, and as long as I don't scare players away, they make more money with my being there.
-As much as I've tried, it's far from maintenance-free. I've put over 2000 hours into the whole mess so far.
-What I've got is not working nearly as well as it used to, and I'm on the verge of scrapping it and walking away. The upkeep is almost not worth my time, and unless I figure out how to regain the performance of 2003, I'm outie.
Play CS well enough and people will accuse you of being a bot.
(like if you headshot 3 people in a row with the pistol at long range right after having a flashbang go off at your feet -- really, I did this once. It was a total fluke.)
Poker is very different from Blackjack.
In poker you play against other player ; in blackjack you play against the house.
Blackjack used to be a game of chance with odds that could be slightly turned against the house in favour of the player if he played "perfectly". For this he needed to calculate odds given the number of cards left in the dealer's shoe and bet accordingly. If the game was played this way online, it would be a disaster for casinos as bots would rule the game. Online however, the deck is shuffled after each hand and there is no way of calculating the odds. Therefore, online blackjack has become a pure game of luck which is why bots are useless and why you shouldn't play blackjack.
On the other hand, bots can help you calculate odds in online poker. But that's only part of the game and they are largely ineffective against any decent players as they cannot understand human psychology as well as they can calculate odds.
Unlike chess - where bots are very effective - poker is not an information complete game. Therefore a player's skill depends strongly on his ability to "read" and bluff other players. Which is why poker bots will probably remain useless for a very long time. Probably until we reach hard AI.
Casinos are parasites on society anyway. Though a lot of blame lies with the asinine people who gamble their paycheques away by patronizing them. I hope they get botted out of existence. Maybe someone should make these bots DDOS their machines too.
I know it's the professional criminals and gangsters. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for mobbed-up martians.
You know turgid, I like you. You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park.
"He hated Mexicans, and he was half Mexican. AND he hated irony!"
Spend a good few years getting real good at math. Then, you program applications that take advantage of statistics for various games, such as black jack. The house makes money because the probability is in their favor, when that favorable probability goes away to someone who manipulates the game, they usually ban them from playing. I remember stories of people making millions in vegas at blackjack tables. Such people can really screw up a casino's profits.
Now, if we compress that into a bot (which probably can be done) and do it online...
As far as casino's go. I hate gambling, the only time I gamble is everyonceinabluemoon kind of gambling where sometimes I'v got a roll of bad or good things happening and I try a lottery ticket. Card games are dumb unless you like screwing around with statistics and probability, which I find tedious unless it's toying around with something that isn't trying to manipulate you like a computer.
The idea of saying you "could" win and blowing $500 is like saying you "could" get nailed by some lightning or pasted to the ground by a meteorite. To me, it's a big waste of time, I'd rather be playing T2 or some other random game. At least then I'm not loosing money, and I can build up some skill. If probability is against you, and the stakes are high and unnecissary, don't do it.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Does anyone seriously believe that any Casino offering internet Blackjack are not going to be cheating as much as they can get away with without driving off all their customers ?
Hmm, shall we A) simulate an actual pack of cards or B) decide what card we're going to deal next in order to meet our profit target for this game ?
Multi Billion dollar industry upset that somebody is taking their profit away.
Drink my tears with a spoon.
Alternate response: DUH.
If you can play the stock market with bots, its gonna be possible to play poker with bots. They're both about moving money from one person's pocket to another.
If your site/application/etc is so poorly designed that anything but a human player can compete, sux to be you.
And yes, I do believe that Moonshine should be legal.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I play these games a lot. Of course the most popular is Texas holdem.
Since the way the game works is that top player takes 50%, second takes 30% and third takes 20% of the total incoming pot (out of 10 players minus an entry fee), it's not really very difficult to come out of a game ahead. The problem is that you have to be extremely attentive and play very conservatively. This is horribly time consuming. You could spend 2 hours winning 10 bucks in the lowest pot games.
One way to get around it, play high stakes games. The problem is that, the high stakes players are very attentive and play conservatively and you don't have the easy win like you would in a 100 dollar game.
That's where the bots come in. They'd give an obvious statistical advantage if you could run a few hundred at the same time in low money games (ie where the newbies play). Even if you get third place, that's still a double your money on the entry fee. Sure some bots will lose, but if they play based on poker statistics, and bet according to the odds, they'll always be in the black over the long run.
First of all, the house doesn't care in poker, because they get a share of the pot and aren't in an adversarial role. The only reason they might care is if this type of thing scares off real players and reduces the overall take in the course of an evening's play.
Secondly, depending on the casino, you can ask the dealer what the odds are, what the house's play would be, or you can even ask the dealer to play your entire hand as the house would. This varies from game to game and casino to casino.
Lastly, the house allows you to have certain materials available when playing. In Vegas, there are "player cards" or cheat sheets for black jack and other games that are about the size of an actual card, but show the plays that you should make based on certain stats (what you have, what the dealer/other players have, etc). Last I went to Vegas the only rule was that you had to set it down on the table before play began. As long as you weren't sitting next to some idiot that messed up the card distribution then it usually panned out. I believe there are some casinos that don't allow them, but most do, although you can't use them at the high minimum bet (>$50 or so) tables.
Basically I don't see the problem as long as this "bot" is really just a tool and the player is still interacting with the game, i.e., not automated play. I see it as a way to even the odds a bit and help the noobs not make so many stupid mistakes. Can't you remember a time when you just glanced at your cards and thought you had a certain hand and as you tossed them down in triumph you realized you misread the hand?... I can. Preventing those kinds of mistakes would save everyone some grief. Although I suppose poker wouldn't be the game it is if everyone didn't have a great story about a few hands.
I don't see any reason why not, so long as they used the same running action as Humans I can't see any problem.
Whatever, it is bound to be far far far far more interesting then conventional athletics which is a very very very very boring spectator sport.
"Oh look that ones running a bit faster than the others."
"Yes, now watch as the others try to run a bit faster to overtake him"
"Wow ! They are all running quick aren't they"
What about blackjack though ? I heard somewhere that by counting cards, you could get your odds up to as much as 52% (obviously this number is gonna depends on how many deck of cards the casino uses, and how many they actually use up before reshuffling).
:)
The casino here uses 7 decks of cards, and reshuffles after 4. So its pretty much impossible (i.e very very hard) for someone to start counting cards. But what about these online casinos ?? What stops you from running some program where you continuously enter which cards have been dealt and have it tell you whether to hit or stand ??
I guess the online casinos could have algorithm which would detect this kind of "playing behaviour" from the user and kick out that person from every playing at their casinos... But there has to be something else, this just sounds too easy
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
is a network of bots that know how to communicate with each other. Then they when they randomly end up in the same room, they can team-play and totally destroy even really good players.
If the gambling industry went belly up tomorrow, I for one would not be sorry in the least.
I've always wondered if the house increases your winning odds when you play their free version of the game versus when you're playing for money. Sucker people in when there's nothing on the line to convince them to open an account ... then profit off of them when they've got cold hard cash for the taking.
Yet another real-world event predicted by Matt Groening.
Black jack is a game that can be beaten in the long run. That's precisely why casinos will blacklist good players... because the good players know how to consistently win. You can call it "card counting" but there is nothing illegal about it, and an average player can "card count" without much learning. Just keep track of how many high cards are floating around, and statistically when there are many high cards to be dealt, you are more likely to see the dealer bust... plain and simple. You don't play to win with your hand by hitting, you increase your bet when the dealer is more likely to bust and let them take the high cards.
Saying saying that blackjack "played at [sic] it's best... will translate into certain losses" is incorrect.
What's the point of saying you have a relatively "informed" view, when your view is wrong?
Most people play like bots? No, that's the problem, "most people" can't calculate perfect statistics on the fly, or do any of the other things bots can do in microseconds.
The 'human element' you talk about is present in face-to-face games, but in online games, you can't even see the other players! That's why bots can compete and disrupt the game. Maybe you can comment about playing poker in home/casino games, but I think your relatively informed view does not apply to this thread.
I suggest modding parent down.
The History Channel has been running a docu-drama about one of the MIT Blackjack Teams. This is supposed to be one of the teams a couple years before the one in the Wired article and bestseller book (soon to be theater movie), but the strategy was similar. The show was pretty interesting. Purportedly they interview several of original players.
As it stands poker is still a game of chance
Skill plays a major factor in the long term. If it wouldn't, poker professionals would not be able to exist. But they do exist and they do earn a decent living. The reason why skill is so important is that odds are only part of the equation. Straightforward betting on good hands and folding when the odds are not in your favor is easily exploitable by just not calling the bets and bluffing to get the opponent to fold. So a good player must use deception. That element of deception turns the game into an unstructured game that is very hard to beat algorithmically, so I have my doubt about being able to create world-class bots.
If bots exist that are beating inexperienced players, how is this different from the poker pro who logs 10 hours of online poker a day?
The difference is that the bot doesn't have to sleep, eat, pay taxes, etc so there are much lower expenses for a bot and it can work 24 hours a day. That means that if good bots exist, they can be let loose at tables where most people play for fun and where it's currently not worth it for a professional player to play. Then the poker games will split up in very low limit games that nobody plays seriously and the high stakes games where only the best professionals can live. There will be no middle ground, but that is where most money is made for the casino's and where most semi-serious players play. The result might be that online poker loses its appeal to 90% of the players.
If you're looking for real human vs human action without worrying about cheat tools find a game in your neighborhood and go play there.
That's not really realistic, is it? First of all, online poker is different from 'live' poker because you don't need a poker face and a lot of players like that. Also, you can play it whenever you want, without having to coordinate schedules with other people. You also don't have to play with the same 9 neighbourhood guys all the time. Then there are more games to pick from online. You can play big tournaments online. You can play freerolls online, where you can win money for free. I could go on, but I think you get the point. Online poker is just a different ball game.
The verb that you are looking for is lose. Loose is the opposite of tight.
I'm shocked, just shocked. I can't beleive there is gambling in this establishment!!!! :)
So, you're a commie-lefty druggie un-American terrorist sympathizer! The Feds have been despatched.
You're about to become a big black man's boyfriend.
To the sarcasm-imparied, I apologise. The War on Civil Liberties, sorry, I mean Terror, is getting to me.
Oh to be back in Amsterdam's fair coffee shops, my best gal by my side....we'd sing, sing, sing..........
I'm a shell-scripter and I'm OK, I work all night and I work all day. I write shell scrips and small makefiles, and I go to the lavatory.
Somebody think of the children!!! Please, somebody, anybody! They're our future!
Stick Men
I agree, the image recognition would be quite do-able. When they said that image recognition in games was years away, they were mistaken. Here's some software that's already doing image recognition for games.
The article mentions in passing one other danger.. "Team Edition". It doesnn't mention details but it clues you to the the obvious way of successfully cheating.
Imagine the advantage of having two machines side by side EACH playing a hand in the SAME game. Not only would you know more cards in play, but more importantly you could always have the ability to use the stronger hand as your main betting hand, folding the weaker hand to avoid wasting money on it. The mathematical advantage of that must be Very Large.
Seems like this cheat would be undetectable, easy to do (two internet connections so they can't compare your IP #s), and doesn't require any bot coding at all.. very adaptable to any casino or player changes or questions.
Summary: you can't trust any online betting activity.
The reason bots are potentially bad for business is that they could drive away other players, though of course the house doesn't care if a table full of bots are playing each other as long as there are enough of them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Beating a 0.5/1 table for 5-6BB/100 hands is considered destroying the game. You're claiming that you're beating it for about 40-50BB/100h.
Even if your bot is four-tabling, your alleged winrate is double what can be reasonably expected by an excellent player, simply due to the nature of the game.
It's a cute story, but next time try grounding your MIT tales of evil genius in a little reality.
Why is everyone saying that bots won't cost the casino money??
Yes, I understand that, given a fixed number of players, it doesn't matter whether the players are human or robot, the house still gets its rake on every hand played.
But, if online poker gets a reputation for being bot-ridden, I guarantee you that the number of players will not stay fixed, it will go down. And then the online poker rooms will definitely see a drop in income. QED.
I hate casinos. I went to one once, and they told me the bar was closed. Then this dude went up to the bar and bought a beer. It wasn't even as if I was drunk, I mean I could still stand up and eveything. I'll just stick to the moonshine. That's when the Martians come. Jesus rides with them in their saucer craft. And Elvis too.
Stick Men
MIT students don't need to resort to hotmail, even for their spam sandbags.
You watch too many movies.
Consider the following case in Hold 'em:
You are up against only one other player and are in last position. The river has come out and there is a queen (from the flop), a jack, and then 3 low garbage cards. You have Ace-Jack. If that player checks to you, and has checked the previous bets, you will probably bet that even though you only have second pair. If he bets high, and has been betting the whole time, you may want to REALLY think before calling, and especially before raising.
This is an example of how BETS come into consideration.
And of course a good bot, like a good player, would not be able to just take all bets at face value.
If you live there, you work there, not play there. You wouldn't pay as much taxes, etc. etc.
Of course, if it were only like that in real life...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I remember the first time I went to Las Vegas. I saw signs bragging about how "loose" each casinos slots were. Some bragged that they paid as high as 97%.
I just loved it, they ADMITTED that for every dollar you gave, on average you'd get back only 97 cents. To put it another way, you get better odds from a change machine.
It's my opinion that the stupid and ignorant should not have money. Casinos do a great job at ensuring that.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
move along. Please do as usual and don't read the article.
Regards,
bot823
I wouldn't test any bot in a 'demo' area of a poker site. I was giving one of the services a try to see if I was willing to put any real money into it (could be a fun diversion, some of my friends are very into it). Its a disaster, since you can get your fake money back when lost the play style is completely over the top. Players go All-in with nothing just for the hell of it.
.50cent and dollar tables to get some real play (no matter the stakes, real money is real money to most people).
Playing a proper strategy or conservatively is very difficult since you'll get bet out of almost every hand. I'd say you'd have to poney up the moulah to get to the
FunOne
Yeah, the same way Internet porn has undermined the stripper industry.
--
make install -not war
Online gambling of anyform is currently illegal in most ( if not all ) states, and most developed countries. ( no islands dont count as developed countries no matter how much money they have)
Online gambling is legal here in the UK, a member of the G8, and the fourth largest economy in the world. Shame about your island test though...
There are a huge number of misconceptions about many aspects of this issue clearly apparent in this discussion. I'm going to go through some of the highest-moderated misunderstandings in hopes of reclaiming some of what this whole discussion is about.
I'm relatively sure that all of the online gambling sites use either Flash or Java applets to display cards and such. I wouldn't think they'd make it so easy as to give easy access to card names.
You do not actually need to break into the program in order to use some form of bot. Graphics recognition has advanced to the point where a hand can be analyzed on the fly by a concurrently running program. See Poker Office. Such programs can then immediately provide feedback based on the information they glean.
Could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?
The end of the industry is not likely at hand. Poker is just one part of this industry, and the industry will continue EVEN IF bots are the only ones playing. The casino will just take the same percentage of each pot.
if a pokerbot can clean out the 9 other people at the table
Quite frankly it is ridiculous to think that a bot with perfect play can clean out any table. Good poker play results in a slow accumulation of profit at a faster rate than losses. A perfect bot will certainly not be playing more than 1 in 5 hands to begin with, and not win more than one in 3 of those. Good players can't just make the right cards appear, no matter what you saw in Maverick. They get the same crappy cards as everyone else, it's how they play them that differs.
you don't trust other players to not be using bots, but you trust the house to not add their own player to every game and fix the host software to guarantee that the house's player wins?
Yes, very much so. Contrary to popular opinion, most people are not complete retards. It's not difficult to tell when someone is consistently winning - certainly there are hot streaks, but any whiff of foul play will result in a huge exodus of players from any poker site. They have no reason to do such a thing, as profits are huge from both the rake AND the interest they are collecting on your bankrolled money.
_______
Any current bot is very likely for Limit poker - this is the 'easiest' style to play purely by the numbers. The state space required for a bot to make decisions in No Limit poker is absolutely huge- one poorly written part can get your bot cleaned out regularly.
Personally I would LOVE to be at a table where I have positively ID'ed a player as a bot because I could then run circles around it. There are a number of tactics that would play merry hell with a bot that plays the straight numbers, and even a bot that adjusts to my own play style is not difficult to take advantage of.
I play regularly online and I do not fear the bot. What I fear most is the bad player that will put all their money on a 20% draw, where any good player (or bot) would fold- because sometimes they hit, and that hurts.
Once they find a cure for bad players though, that's the end of poker, but I am content that that time is far in the future.
As a temporary solution couldn't the online poker rooms implement a system that asks the user to input say a 5 digit character code every 10, 20 hands or whatever. That way the bot won't be able to enter the code and is subequently forced to fold/check all hands until it can. This ensures the player is human. Of course it does ensure the human is not cheating in some other way but it is a start.
Rake Free + Mac Poker: CardCrusade
I like the fact that you have bookies over there that will take bets on anything. Very civilized.
The islands I was thinking of are being ravaged by hurricanes this month...
I've played against bots on stupid "just for fun" games of Word Racer at Yahoo! If people will use bots on these games for no reason ohter than to kick your butt, then you can bet your ass people will use them to beat you at poker when there is money involved. Is it a problem? Only for you!
Bots don't do a thing to help you win. Big deal, it tells you the odds that you have. Any smart poker player knows his odds and he also knows that most of the time it's all luck. People who think that there is a lot of skill in poker are kidding themselves. Besides the betting aspect of it and knowing when to holdem or foldem (Kenny Rogers tune playing), what comes out is purly the luck of the draw.
The only true way to cheat is what my brother and his friends do. They enter into the same tournament or play at the same table and then call each other on the phone or use a chat program. Then they tell each other what they have. They have a great system of not getting caught because the have serveral accounts and change the rooms they play in and what not. They have been doing this for months and win enough to cover their expenses. That is the biggest problem, some people get too greeding doing this and try to win millions and get caught.
But then again, what are the consequenses of getting caught..... nothing. This isn't Vegas where they can throw you in jail. They have no proof that you are really doing anything wrong, just logs telling them how you played and what good is that. All you have to tell them is that that is how you play. They can't call you a liar because they don't know you.
I think that people make this a bigger deal then what it is.
I don't see how poker bots present any kind of a unique problem.
Online casino's exist in order to rake money off the table. They don't care if this comes from bots or humans. Lets assume that the bots get so good that every single human gets replaced by a poker bot.
What does it really matter? The online casino's will still generate money, only they'll be funded by bad bot writer's rather than bad poker players.
Think of it as a more intellectual version of battlebots...
In this case Lt. Cmdr. Data.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I hear this kind of derision for "playing by the odds" all the time, as if there's fundamentally any other way to play. As if only a sucker would try to quantify their odds of winning mathematically, and then take action based on those odds. As if expert players rely on some other, more subtle sense of what to do.
All of this is largely silly. If by "playing by the odds," what you really mean is "assuming that your opponent's bets are 100% representative of their holdings, calculating your chances of improving to beat that hand, and slavishly following the course of action indicated by those chances," then of course you'll conclude that such a strategy has some problems. Namely, that your opponents' bets very seldom are completely representative of what they have, either because they are intentionally trying to mislead you, or because they are idiots, or both.
The thing is, almost no one "plays by the odds" using the above definition. Not inexperienced players, not intermediate players, not expert players, and not any bot worth mentioning either. A decent player uses all the information available to him -- your betting actions, his cards, the actions of other players, and every action he has ever seen you take -- to come to a decision about what course of action will make him the most money. Sometimes that means determining that you have the nut flush, he's drawing dead, and so he folds. Sometimes that means figuring you for overcards or middle pair, and so he puts in a raise with a worse hand because he thinks you will fold. Sometimes it's making a completely ludicrous check-raise river bluff that he believes will probably be called, because 50, 100, 200 hands from now you will be forced to pay off his next river check-raise -- and that one will be with a real hand. All of these decisions can be fundamentally reduced to a determination of how likely you are to hold a given hand, how likely you are to take a given action, how likely he is to make money. It's all "playing by the odds."
I see little reason in principle why computers cannot do the above analysis with a depth that surpasses most human players. Look, even casual poker players use "Poker Tracker," a program that is essentially a database of every hand you have ever played (provided by downloading the hand histories all the major online sites provide). It lets you see at a glance whether the player who just raised preflop raises one hand in 250, or raises 1/3 of his hands, whether he folds frequently to postflop aggression, etc. This kind of very simple analysis -- just a quick check whether the guy is loony or ridiculously tight or what have you -- is pretty trivially doable by a computer, just as it's pretty trivial to do yourself given a player history database. The threat of online poker bots is that they could in principle do all this at a level you probably can't -- they could quickly analyze the last 1,000 hands they've played against you, and instantly determine how likely your turn check-raise is to be a monster, a solid made hand, a semi-bluff, or a pure bluff.
That kind of analysis would be very, very difficult to counteract -- you would either have to resort to something approaching an "optimal" strategy against such a player, or attempt to adapt your playing style so rapidly and with so much alacrity that its attempts to exploit your play would backfire. Both are, like, hard.
I don't think any publicly-available bot does the kind of analysis I'm talking about here, but I have little doubt that such programs will appear eventually. When -- not if -- they do, inexperienced players are simply not going to play online poker unless they're very very dumb. (And if they are, their money will vanish pretty quickly anyway.) Right now, the beauty of online poker is that even the worst player believes he can win, and in the short run he's right -- any two cards can win this hand, or the next. And even in the moderately long term, it's not like there are tons of amazing players frequenting the
Some random links on the subject:
and a random company link (haven't read this one):
Why settle for the poker table, when the markets are much bigger? Playing the markets is probably more difficult, but you're the best coder around, aren't you? ;-)
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
How much do you want to bet this is how AI will develop self-awareness. ;P
Porn's not where it's at...it's gambling bots!
(Side note: If anyone is interested in playing some online poker and wants a bonus on their first deposit, drop a reply to this with your name and email address, and I'll send a referral out. We both get a bonus from this.)
Just rename the:
- 4 of hearts the whore of farts
- 2 of clubs with clue of tubs
- 6 of diamonds with the dicks of simon's
- 2 of hearts with the who of tarts
- 6 of clubs with clicks of subs
- 8 of diamonds with date of Iman's
- Ace of spades with space of aids/aides
- 5 of hearts with the hive of farts
- 8 of hearts with the hate of arts
- 10 of hearts with the hen of tarts
- 8 of spades with spate of aids/aides
I've been thinking of these for maybe 10 years, but I am sure millions of others may have, too.
Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe some of ms' developers are lysdexic or have Spooner's disease going on in their code. Upon seeing it, a less-afflicted hack probably said "To hell with this shit; I'm gonna work on something else..."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
And I said Jumping-Jesus-Christ-on-a-pogo-stick! Everybody knows that a bot lives in a computer on the Internet! Why the Hell do you think they call it a bot, anyway? Now, turgid, do you think a boy like that is going to know what the casinos are doing to the soil?
considering all of the "protect people from themselves" legislation coming out of the social conservative agenda (gays can't marry... why the f*ck not?), your attitude should turn you into a flaming liberal
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok online casinos are downloadable, or Flash/Java.
:)
:)
Poker rooms are always download (eg they run on windows, some run on mac)
Instead of scanning the screen, for the input it really makes sense to watch the traffic, everything that happens at the table is transferred to you.
Quite honestly I just started a sniffer (sniffit on my linux box, while running an online casino client in vmware on windows2k) and seeing the output makes me wonder how long it would take to figure out what's what, since a single blackjack hand played havoc with my eyes on my sniffer screen
I wonder how long it will take to have a Punkbuster for casinos
That should be <1
Funny, I'm at MIT too, and I made a bot a while ago. Don't forget that the real advantage of a bot is that it can play multiple tables at once. Each poker site lets you play 4 tables per account. You can have several accounts from the same IP playing at different tables on different computers at the same poker service.
So, playing 8 tables at once, I make about $10 / hour by hand on 0.5/1 . My bot never did that well.
What I actually realized, is that switching tables continously is a hard problem that I never got my bot to solve. It is so tedious that I found a bot basically useless, since if I'm there switching the tables consistantly, it isn't too much of a chore to just play the games myself.
Excuse my ignorance, but who polices the online casinos for fair and honest gameplay?
I enjoy gambling to a reasonable extent, however I have never even contemplated visiting an online casino. I can't fathom the idea of playing against a program most likely developed by an underhanded online venture.
Vegas casinos are regulated by a gaming commission that cuts down on the cheating (by the players AND the house) to an acceptable level. Whois to make sure that these online casinos don't have 'lucky' dealers that always seem to hit the blackjacks?
This seems to me like the old IRC bots. What about Poker bot Vs IRC bot battle in #sex channel?
Check populicio.us
You cannot play poker strictly by the odds except against very bad players. Once any decent opponent notices that you always fold weak hands they will win every hand where you have weak cards (thus winning any ante/pot built up). They will also fold when they notice you playing a strong hand against their weak hand (keeping the pots that you do win to a small level).
Also, with a large pot it can be a very good idea to chase a flush or straight if you are 1 draw away from the hand. The key is to examine the pot odds. Example: if I have a 1 in 10 chance to win a $200 pot then a $10 bet is low risk for that pot (if I bet 20 times I could expect 2 wins and thus $400 for my $200 in bets). If I have a 1 in 10 chance to win a $70 pot then a $10 bet is a high risk (2 wins this time only gives me $140 compared to my $200 in bets).
the poker bot is only going to be as good as the person who coded it.
poker bots can't change the outcome of the cards, nor can they deal with players betting erratically.
why remove the enjoyable aspect of the game? can't these people do ANYTHING with their lives instead of spending every waking moment trying to lie cheat and steal?
Could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?" Fact- gambling games are exercise in statistics Fact- EVERY game is worked out mathematically to GUARANTEE the house will profit. Fact- some individuals may win big but the money they win come from all the other people who lose NOT the house who scrapes off a percentage either way. In other words. If you had THE best BOTS all playing with OPTIMAL formulas and foresight some of them would win and some would lose but the HOUSE would still be the guaranteed a profit. So the answer to the above question is NO. Worse case is it might cut into their profit some , but it would certainly not stop them from making mega bucks.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
i know its possible.. you can do an online monte carlo simulation to figure E[x], if > 1 continue. i used to use screen scrapers in the days of net-pay or whatever it was called. anyways i turned over development to other people who were more profit motivated, i just wanted to see it was possible..
another route, the combinatorics to precompute every possibile hand you'll see is tractable -- since you only need yours own 2 cards + up to 5 on the table. 52*51*50*49*48*47 is around 14 billion -- easily contained with compact data structures in a 8 gig of ram G5.
of course many optimisations are possible. you can run an offline / online machine learning algorithm to learn optimal parameters. the data set is even available on line!! Every hand is available, with exact card ordering, including hidden cards!
whatever a human can do, a machine can do better. perhaps it will take 20 years to beat the best poker pro, but to beat the average jack on a $1 table, its been done.
besides the fact that all online poker places pay people to play, basically to keep interest up at weird times of day. so they have the bots. and with bots, they save salary, still make the rake, plus take a chunk of winnings with them. heck, they can even manipulte the random cards.
Most on-line casinos make their money by taking a "rake" on each hand. They make plenty of money that way, that they really don't need to cheat, and are better off encouraging people to play against each other and bet big money, so they get a bigger rake.
What?
Deep Blue? hah, wait till they see... "Deep Bluff"
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time playing poker in the casino knows to be on the lookout for colluding partners at your table. (i.e. Two or more friends sitting at the same poker table that are able to exchange information about their hands between each other or even to use various combined betting styles to bluff or raise the pot to artificial levels). When done properly, having a colluding partner at a poker table is a significant advantage for you. On the Internet it would be very easy to have, say 3 or 4 seats of a 10-seat table controlled by you. Or hell, have 9 of 10. Just load additional casino accounts into web browers that go through different gateways. Or any number of dozens of other ways to make it appear to be coming from a different machine.
I'm a big tall mofo.
It's not like the bots have see-through card hacks. The bots cannot cheat (at least I hope they are not dumb enough to have clients that know about all the layers cards!).
As far sa I'm concernd a spread of bots would be just like a spread of really good players - and even if they became the majority, why should it matter if online poker playing turns into a contest for besk poke developer? In fact if there was a widespread bot released I can think of no greater fun than developing the counter-bot to trigger bugs in the software and make all the clueless bot users fork over money to me!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do not have a World Series of Poker Bracelet, but I have played a good amount of online Poker. Here are some observations.
1) Online Poker sites *do* try to prevent colluding. They actively monitor IP addresses (easy to get around, I know), but also who is playing with who. If you always end up at the same table with your buddies, they will find out and boot you and your pals.
2) Online Poker sites *do* try to prevent bots. They do this in a couple different ways, most of which are hackable of course. If you can write a bot to do OCR on the screen, it will never be detectable. Bot "play patterns" may still be detectable, but the client software will never be able to detect your bot.
3) The reason Online Poker sites care about collusion and cheating is NOT because they are losing money! At least not yet... They are worried about the online player community's confidence in the integrity of the online game. If players think others are cheating or using good bots, they simply will stop playing (eventually).
4) Creating a bot that can play No Limit is not very viable. No Limit games are MUCH harder to play properly than Limit. In No Limit games, being able to "read" the other players is much more important. Bluffing and reading bluffs is crucial. This is not nearly as important in Limit games.
5) Bots *can* easily make money in Limit games. The truth of the matter is that there is a ton of HORRIBLE players online. Players that re-raise with A6o, for example... Players that will call you down no matter what just because they have Ax and there was an Ace on the flop. If you play tight (think Dan Harrigton, minus his crazy WSOP bluffs), you can clean up. It's slow, but it works. Writing a bot that can play tight is not hard at all. I could easily code all the logic in a day. Of course, the hard part of the bot is the OCR (or decrypting/encrypting the network traffic if you want to hack it at that level).
For the VB kiddies there could even be a tic-tac-toe tournament ...
Online gambling is legal here in the UK, a member of the G8, and the fourth largest economy in the world
You seem a little insecure about your little island. It's okay...its cute even.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
After a point, this situation becomes a question of who can program the better bot. The proliferation of online gaming (not just online gambling) is a fertile ground for AI development.
Here we have a need - develop a money winning bot that is difficult to detect as such - driving bot artificial intelligence. This isn't just for the gameplay, but any chat that would go with the gameplay. I'd assume that winning silent players would be kicked out of the games after a time.
-Phantom
This whole idea is sort of irritating. I play a lot of online poker, and yes it is possible to write a poker bot to do some basic strategy. In limit hold 'em this may be particularly true, but in no limit? You have to deal with a real valued scale of bets every time... this is by no means an easy problem to deal with. Writing a player that irritates people heads up is relatively easy - lots of aggression. However, writing a full featured poker bot to play no limit hold em and fleece tables? I don't think so. However, putting aside all the computational problems with this - they act like this will KILL ONLINE POKER. It won't. Consider this scenario. Your poker playing program only needs to 1) show your hole cards 2) show the board. Encrypt the transfer to and from the application. If you change the keys enough, this will will force the user to type in his hole cards and the board cards as they come out. Also encrypt the traffic such that the only commands accepted by the server are those that come from their downloaded applications only. This may require more sophisticated authentication in the program but it makes sure that if anyone wants to use a bot they have to 1) type in hole cards and board cards manually 2) click the buttons in the actual application, or emulate a mouse enough to do the clicking for you. This forces a human to be involved, and would make it pretty obvious which players are bots. You can also monitor suspicious play and send a human observer around to interact with players in chat and see what they have to say, this is an annoying solution but still it would solve the problem. Anyway, these are simple off the top of my head solutions to the bot problem. I am sure there are more. This is just a hyped up story, and nothing to be worried about.
If they really want to stop bots then they could just have each player solve a captcha every once in a while. Somewhat annoying, but you could always have non-captcha rooms and captcha rooms so you could decide how much annoyance you would trade away for the security of knowing you're not playing against bots.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
This reads like a fluff piece for the "Vex Bot." Many of the claims such as "it's better than other bots because it adds a layer of AI" are ridiculous. The whole thing reads just like an ad for some encryption snake oil. It makes vague claims of superiority, it says it's better because it's "scientifically" designed, and of course the meaningless claim that it plays on a "master level." All of this makes me think that the bot is more hype than reality. If the bot really behaves like described, i.e. raising frequently and attempting to "infuriate" other players, I think a good player will quickly realize the bot's strategy and compensate.
Here is an excerpt of my e-mail exchange with Mike Brunker (the author of the MSNBC article) prior to our phone interview. It might provide some interesting information on the topic.
- Darse.
[begin excerpt]
(1) It is not easy to write a good poker-playing program.
It took us (the Computer Poker Research Group at the U of A, http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/poker/) a few years to develop a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously. It has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now, but it is the only known program that can make that claim.
We operate a free poker server where people can play against our bots. Hobbyist programmers can also have their programs connect to the server and play in those games, and more than a hundred programs have participated over the past few years. None of them has come close to being a winning player, so it is clearly not a trivial task.
(2) Is it *possible* to write a very strong poker program?
Absolutely.
Poker is a challenging and rewarding field for research in Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are many aspects of the game that make it more difficult and more interesting than games like chess and checkers.
It isn't simply a matter of computing probabilities and other numbers. A good program has to *think* about the game in the right way. Master-level poker requires an understanding of how each opponent plays the game -- you must observe and adapt as you play, and that turns out to be a rather difficult learning problem.
Nevertheless, these problems will be solved eventually, and the technology will become available for others to use. It took more than 20 years for chess programs to finally become a serious threat to the best players. It won't take that long before we see elite poker-playing programs, but it still might be a number of years before they participate in online games.
Of course, a practical program doesn't have to be as good as the best players -- it only needs to beat a game with average players in order to win money.
(3) Are bots playing in online games now?
I expect there are a few now, yes. Perhaps more than a few. But are they a threat? Probably not. Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs.
If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make? It will be like any other solid player -- playing a conservative style (only good cards and good situations), and slowly extracting a tax from the weak players.
Look at it this way. Most people who play online poker lose money. That's an unavoidable mathematical fact. Considering the house cut (the rake), perhaps 30% of players can stay in the black, maybe less. Many of the losing players will lose slowly, so the cost is a fair trade-off for the entertainment value they receive. Some will lose much more rapidly, and they really shouldn't be playing at all (unless they happen to be independently wealthy).
Of the players on the winning side, most will only eek out a small win rate. A winning poker bot would just be another solid player at the table. Probably less than 10% of all players have enough knowledge and skill to win a significant amount of money, and I doubt there will be any poker programs in that category for quite some time.
Will the existence of good bots radically change online poker? I doubt it. Look at casinos (real and online) that offer the traditional gambling games like craps and roulette. Those games cannot be beaten -- there is no skill that can be applied to avoid losing in the long run. But that fact doesn't seem to harm the popularity of their business.
Instead of fearing bots, people should use them to help learn more about the game. Our research program is com
char*p="char*p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}"
Regarding the "screen scanning"... Don't many of the popular sites use Windows clients external to any browser? You could spy these apps at the Windows Event level.
And for Hold' Em, espcially low-limit, where most of the monotony lies in folding a bunch of trash hands, if all your bot did was fold until something "good" came up, at which time it sent you and audible alert, you could cover many tables at once.
It fails to extend itself beyond the initial hypothesis. This is a classic equilibrium problem. The thesis assumes that bots will go everywhere, usually win, and real players will stop playing.
Except that this can not be true.
First, one must notice that online poker is played in various rooms, with various betting levels. The better players, obviously, play in higher-stakes rooms, as they can win more money.
So, lets start putting bots into the equation. Lets say the bot is "very good", and can win 80% of its hands at a 5-person table. So the bot goes in, and has a serious advantage.
Until another bot shows up. Now each bot gets 40% of the wins - and....
It no longer makes any sense for bots to play poker, as they're losing more money than they're winning. Remember, even bots still have to put money up front.
So you'll get an equilibrium, where you might have a few bots running around high-stakes rooms, but by and large, it won't be profitable to actually run bots since you'll lose more money to other bots than you'll be able to steal from players.
paintball
I think that the casinos are leaking plutonium into the soil. See, it's the only secret way we have of disposing of nukular waste without the terriorist getting their evil little hands on it to make a toxic robotic space monkey death ray president assassinator.
Stick Men
"but I believe the vast majority of players will still drive to the casino to fully immerse themselves in the poker pit"
You can dismiss online poker playing as a weak imitation of the real thing, but it is going to surpass 1 billion dollars of revenue in 2004.
And don't compare that to casino revenues, casinos get most of their money from slots. You'd have to compare it to just the poker rooms at the casino.
I could list lots of advantages that online poker has over the real thing, but I think a billion dollars speaks for itself.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Wouldn't it just be a pitty if the X-billion dollar online gambling industry just went away and left us to our porn? 8-)
/sigh
Seriously, don't we want to get rid of online gambling? All it really does is separate stupid and/or poor people from their money and raise the noise floor on the internet.
Besides I bet these poker bots identify "the cards on the screen" by looking at the graphic names. It wouldn't be that hard to screw the bots by shuffling the names of the card images so that the names describe a good hand when the system has displayed a bad one. You know, create twenty of thirty permuted decks and shuffle the individual "cards" out of the deck between hands. So you could end with XXXXXace.jpg being a 2, while XXXYXace.jpg being a 5.
The bot goes "mmmmm, four aces" and bets the limit, the casino goes "mmmm, 3 5 7 8 K, king-high, thanks for the money."
I know it probably isn't *that* easy, but the whole thing is stupid. Besides who are you going to complain to? Hey Mr FTC! My cheat-bot ran up a $2000,000 USD debt because the file names of the graphics didn't match the cards in the hands. They cheated!
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Let's look at how poker bots would harm things.
They won't hurt the house directly... when you play online poker, you do not in any way play against the house... the house takes a cut (the "rake") from each hand played.
Collusion between players is the largest online problem.. but again, it doesn't directly harm the house. The harm is indirect; players think other players are cheating, and so they don't want to play.. and THEN you lose.. so in order to keep customers, the house must have the players believing the game is fair.
An good poker player already knows the odds.... the real art of the game is in bluffing and knowing the risk you are paying for each hand. The increased accuracy you get in pot odds calculation (which is all you are going to get from a computer) is not going to give a good player a significant advantage over other good players.
So no, this won't spell doom for online poker players... they could already keep nice charts of pot odds and track what other players do on their own at home... having a bot that does it doesn't help.
Think chess.
Well, they block traffic from people using the same IP address, so that at least makes it more difficult to sit in a room together and collude. I guess you could still talk on the phone or use an IM or something, but it is pretty easy to search for behavior patterns and "catch" you and confiscate your money.
For example, two players always play together at the same tables, re-raise and fold to one another, bingo. Pretty much anything you do that actually gives you an advantage is going to show up.
I'm sure it can be done, but your risk might be larger than your edge, and if you're greedy, you're gonna get caught.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I think it would be pretty easy to detect that two players always play at the same table together and never play against one another, or re-raise one another to force out other players when one has a weak hand. Any collusion behavior that actually gives you an edge is going to be pretty easy to detect statistically.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
So then the only gamble is if you're the only player with a bot at the table or not.
Does anybody know about servers that only allow bots to play against each other? As long as there is no collusion, multiple robots working together, I think this could be an excited forum.
The world series of poker (bots)
"If you suck at playing poker and write a bot to do it for you, your bot will likely suck as badly as you do..."
Really? I suppose those writing auto target cheats for FPS games are the best shots around and the twits killing me (cheating) in Tangleword with simple programs would otherwise be able to best my 2500 rank.
Writing a successful program to play or assist in the play of a game may or may not have a darned thing to do with the coder's skill with the game.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
I wasn't even aware there were grandmasters of backgammon, so excuse the ignorance to follow. It seems to me backgammon and poker are utterly different problems, though, because backgammon lets you see the entire board state. To decide the next move you don't for the most part have to analyze your opponent -- you look at the board, and at what you rolled, and pick the best move.
In poker, on the other hand, you have a very simple probability calculation to determine the meaning of the board state -- and then a wildly difficult calculation to interpret the betting pattern of your opponents and figure out what moves will influence them to your advantage and what moves will win the pot. Comparing backgammon to that, if it lacks the dimension of interpreting the opponent's behavior over time, doesn't seem accurate -- and from my naive view, poker sounds a hell of a lot harder.
If I'm forgetting something about the game, though, please enlighten me.
Considering that even if they block bots, a human player could always run it as a seperate program, feed it info, and it returns the best possible move.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
First I think it's fascinating, the whole notion of trying to create an effective bot. I generally agree with most of the comments here. Bots wouldn't put an end to the industry; for every angle they may be able to exploit, there's at least one angle to exploit and/or discover them.
I've been playing a bit of online poker and there are times when I felt I was at a table of "non-humans" the way they played so mechanically and didn't talk.
However, if I were the developer of a poker system, one of the first things I'd do would be to regularly inventory the list of running processes on the machine - this would be one way of eventually identifying bots. To thwart this, you'd need a much more elaborate multi-machine system.
I think it's a lot easier to design systems to thwart bots than it is to create an effective one.
As I see it, the entire online gambling industry, even at its most reputable level, is still extremely dubious and unstable. You never know if you hit the big jackpot, whether or not the company will pay you or come up with some excuse to not do so, and since online gambling is a questionably legal activity in the first place, I think anyone who takes it too seriously is foolish. Then again, fools have always been drawn by the appeal of easy money.
I believe most tech people really aren't that interested in gambling. Once you know the odds, if you're smart, you know better than to gamble. OTOH, there is definitely an appeal to creating a bot/design that can manipulate the system.
I did not prove what you were saying. You said it was a bad idea to chase a draw or flush. I said there are circumstances in which it is a very good idea. There are also bad cases such as the one you pointed out.
Anyway, you completely ignored the first part of my post. To repeat: you cannot play strictly by the odds and win at poker. You need to consider other player's betting patterns and behavior in order to win at poker.
If I know you always fold when the pot odds are against you I will clean you out. I know you only call/raise strong hands so I won't try to bluff with my weak hand. When you check on the flop that is an instant tell that your "good" start failed to improve.
If you still disagree please explain how you will win money by strictly playing the odds.
Every poker site I've played on (and it's quite a few now) has used a Windows-only executable. No Java (with the exception of PokerRoom), no Flash, period. Every one of them also makes heavy use of encryption. There is no way of knowing an opponent's cards and know way to glean that knowledge by trapping API calls, TCP/IP packets, or anything else.
Please do not make guesses.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
One could aquire a huge advantage if he/she knew that all opponents were using such a bot... If you just calculated what the other players were inclined to do you would know exactly when to bluff!
In most low-limit online poker games, people will go with you all the way even if they have crap. It's always going to be a showdown, so it's very hard to bluff people out of their money without having at least something that could reasonably win. So playing a fairly tight strategy works well. Especially since people rotate tables a lot (pop on to play 10 minutes during lunch break or something), so don't notice you're playing tight.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It is played against other opponents. The house takes a certain percentage of every pot, called the "rake". There is no incentive to run a dishonest poker site, because you will be taking 2-4% of every pot regardless.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I have never ever played one that could beat my sister and I've been looking for decades. I don't claim to a great poker player and I don't expect something world class like Chess, Backgammon or Scrabble programs but just something that plays decently like some of the Bridge programs nowadays. With poker mathematics being better understood these days one would think there would be something out there that plays at this level. BTW this isn't meant as a troll - I really would love to have a decent program to practice against and if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it if they'd share it...
Just require a chat channel along with the poker game. If the chat isn't sufficiently "human" sounding, kick out the (presumed) bot.
Could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?
more over, would it be a bad thing? i really don't see these sites as benifiting humanity.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
"first, the scenerio can happen in real poker games."
Yes, and it is still collusion. I think it would be easier to catch this sort of thing online because the house has easy access to the statistics, which they wouldn't have in a brick&mortar casino.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Actually no... just as at real world tables, the house takes a fixed AMOUNT from each pot. This means that if the poker bot skins everyone, fewer hands will be played than if the humans pass the money around. It's in the best interests of both itself and the human players that they get SLOWLY bled of all their money.
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
That said, I want one of these bots for training purposes, and I don't have any more problem with playing against them (for real) per se -- as long as I know what I'm up against. I don't even have a problem with house-owned bots. It's a problem when they dominate the table though, especially if they're all working for the house. Too easy to gang up on you, even if they aren't cheating by trading information.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
If the bot is truly a good player, it will fall to bluffs now and again, and it will still be worth trying. You're right you don't bluff at limit or against clueless players unless you know their hand busted, but the bot can't be both clueless and good. If it looks for tendencies and tells, it can be fooled.
In a meatspace tournament, imagine you scratch your nose after betting a good hand but don't with a marginal hand. You do this consistently through the lower limits until you think a couple people have caught on, then when you're all in with aces -- DON'T SCRATCH YOUR NOSE.
I'd bet someone calls you.
The computer is going to pick up things much more esoteric than nose-scratching, but if you KNOW you're giving off a signal, you can also choose an opportune time to send a false one.
At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the bot does the same to you. I'd imagine any bot has to inherit some personality traits from the creator, since poker is not a "solved" game. If the author does it and finds it works, he's probably going to tell the bot to try it now and again too.
The big worry would be bots that remember players better than players do, but this could be changed by cashing out and signing up again every now and then. Much easier than changing your appearance every time you play, at least.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Used to play against bots 6 years ago on irc. At a full table low limit
they could get the play money from the poor quality of players. They
mostly played just the premium hands. There was one that insulted
the other players play in chat, it probably made more money by getting people angry and putting them on tilt, than by any strategy.
But in a 3 or 4 handed game, the bots would lose. Short handed games
require more skill, and adapting to others play. That said, one on one games
may be easy for bots to beat-more game theory probabilities.
I used to see a player on pokerstars recently, I thought might be a bot. He was always there, didn't chat, just waiting for a one on one game to start. He played one on one strong and fast, but after a few more people entered the
game he would slow down and start to lose.
I am not worried about the bots yet. I am concerned about the poor quality
of shuffles. You definitely do not get 52! combinations. They obviously
are getting the seed for the randomness off the clock, and when you play quick
short handed games you often see similar cards come up a lot. Not to mention
the suspicion that many good players have that the deal is biased to favor
poorer players (it keeps the money in play longer, and moving across the rake more).
But cheating at cards has always been an issue, in the real world as well,
just like cheating at elections.
Will there ever be a widely spread bot able to beat most players currently playing in online poker rooms ? I think so.
Data, TNG, nuff said.
As someone who is actually working on a project like this, it leaves the intractable problem of not having to deal with a fragile coordinate system that must be pointed to for each site.
...
You really don't have to do a bitwise comparison
if you have an API with an image that provides an
equals() method.
Knowing the mini-area in the upper left hand corner of the card to determine the rank and the suit is exactly what you need to do, however you need to keep track of the location in the image to actually find the card at. If the site changes
the location, you are back at the problem of image recognition using a card in the deck as a key and a bitmap to search into
As far as I know it is NOT legal for a US citizen to place online wagers. If sport books are criminal for telephone fraud, how could gambling be legal on the intraweb?
.gov doesn't waste its time with these smalltime degenerate poker playing scumbags but there is a money trail to follow. IRS???
Maybe the
1. Give away trial poker playing software
2. Report home - game, server, userid of bunny & cards
3. Profit
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Thank you for sheding some common sense on this nonsense.
That said, the author could have been outdated, referring to a specific region, or simply talking out of his ass. And I've no idea how this applies to online gambling.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Is this you? :-)
Stick Men
If you think there are no players of "the house" in on-line casinos, you are fooling yourself. I have done some network security consulting for one of those companies. I have signed NDA and I formally cannot talk about it, but I bet (pun not intended) they won't dare sue me because they would have to reveal their identity and subsequently lose (again, pun not intended) all of their customers who are even remotely intelligent.
When I showed up, my first observation was that those people wasn't exactly the "nerd" type. The "server room" looked more like a night club than anything else--lots of expensive computer equipment, quite an overkill actually, but in a complete mess, with girls walking around etc.--they have even asked me if I want to drink alkohol for God's sake, but when I told them "no, thank you, I need my brain to work" they kind of like gave me a break and stopped bothering me, except the guy who was working with me helping with the audit.
I have never seen so much of so badly written crap in Perl. Seriously. I could barely understand the logic of 400-line subs which were hardly uncommon. There were invocations of external code written in PHP, shell, some in Python and even compiled code written in C, all over the place. There were parts written in Java. An utter mess, I tell you. What I have found the most interesting was the "debugging module" written as a binary Apache module written in C with no source code available. When I asked about it that guy was kind of confused and said that this was not important and told me to skip it but I told him that the security of Apache modules is much more important than the security of the CGI scripts themselves, because modules are actually parts of the server.
I kept asking for the source and this guy said he has to ask his boss. He went to bring him and came back with three other guys. All of my later conversation was with two of them, while the guy I previously worked with and some other guy was only silently observing the conversation.
First one of those two guys told me not to worry about the debugging and to concentrate on the network security. I expleined that I cannot tell them whether anything is secure without any knowledge of Apache modules, because I effectively know nothing about the server as a whole whish might have for example buffer overflow problems etc. He asked me if I was absolutely sure, I confirmed it, and at this point he gave me the NDA to sign.
Finally, they showed me the mysterious mod_pokdebug.c and the first thing that surprised me was that the code was very clean, completely unlike the rest of the mess they had there. To my surprise the only purpose of the debugging module was to display cards in the deck and in the hands of players, with their betting history and quite a few interesting details. I was reading the code feeling kind of insecure with those four guys standing behind me in silence and looking at the screen over my shoulder.
When I started to get the picture, I turned around, look at them, and before I said anything, two of those new guys started laughing and explaining that they know how it must look like, but it is actually impossible to cheat, because it only works with the debug flag in player cookie and this is only present for users logged from their network and such a player cannot get any money because he has no real account.
And indeed, I checked it and it turned out to be true. When I read the source of that debugging module--it was truly refreshing after reading all of the spaghetti code before and I quickly made sure there were no buffer overflow vulnerabilities, string formatting bugs and the like--they logged me out from the privileged account and left me alone with only the guy who was previously guiding me to continue the audit of ordinary scripts.
The strange thing I found later was the server log showing that every day in the pr
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"It took us [...] a few years to develop a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously. It has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now, but it is the only known program that can make that claim. [...] I expect there are a few now, yes. Perhaps more than a few. But are they a threat? Probably not. Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs. If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make?"
Hmmm... I guess The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group is some kind of top secret project then, right?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Well... Yes. You see, actually that was the whole point. Someone from The University of Alberta claim to have developed "a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously" which "has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now" [emphasis added] and yet says there is no threat in other people writing such programs: "Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs. If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make?" That is why I have written that The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group must be some kind of top secret project, because they are sure that no one else in the world can duplicate their work.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
No matter how good the bots are they've got to lose some sometime. I wonder if the casinos aren't in on it and "cover" the bots themselves -- a "house" player, if you will.
(I did not RTFA, I'm meta-moderating and got interested in the thread; sorry.)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello