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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?"
Poker bots are problematic for other players, not he casino. You don't play against the house when you play poker, you play against other players. The house then take a 'rake' of the pot, that is a % of the pot.
So, yes bots are problematic in poker because if I play, I want to play against another human, not some computer simulation that can calculate the odds down to the decimal. Granted some humans exist like that, but not many.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Online poker works by taking in a 'rake' from each pot, usually around 10% or so. Therefore if a pokerbot can clean out the 9 other people at the table, the casino will still earn the same profit as if those 9 people had just passed around money amoung themselves.
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.
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.
Since bluffing is meant to fool human heuristics that judge the strenght of other players' hands based on those players' bets, why would a bot that works on probabilities NEED to consider bluffs?
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"
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.
The place where a bot could help in knowing if someone might be bluffing is that it could be used to instantly go over every hand you have played at the table. That data could be used to show your general tendencies while playing at the table, then give some sort of estimation of whether or not you're bluffing.
Knowing how many hands you went the distance on, your winning percentage, and your betting habits during each betting round are the things that a really good player knows about every other player at the table. Those are the things you see people thinking about while deciding to make a call on a bluff/non-bluff. Those are also the exact things a program could help track.
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.
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.
(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.)