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Online Poker Bots Becoming Problematic?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the robo-flushed dept.

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?"

6 of 613 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good? by Hassman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:"I equate gambling... by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Except that in this case, it's not the house that's losing, it's the other players.

    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.

  3. I hope Internet gambling goes down in flames by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Dont play poker online for money by SlashDread · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"

  5. Setting things straight by Miaowara_Tomokato · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Some notes on the discussion... by foxtrot · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm basically responding to a whole slew of comments here, so I re-parented it. This is from my perspective of a middle-of-the-road poker player.

    • It's noted in the article that you might be able to get away with writing your own client by claiming you run Linux and there isn't one-- this is a questionable argument, but more importantly, Linux geeks aren't left out of the online poker business. http://www.pokerroom.com's java clients run on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
    • Honestly, I think it would be _trivial_ to write a poker client that could kick the stuffing out of any human player. A simple Q-learner would be excellent for the project. The trouble is twofold: For one, you need an insane amount of space to keep track of the current game state-- not just what's happened in this hand, but in previous hands, because that matters; your play against a bunch of tight aggressive players needs to be different from what you can do against loose passive players. For two, since the state space is so monstrous, training would take a positively mind-boggling amount of time, which would be expensive, since you can't train a poker bot in a funny-money game; the game's too different.
    • On the other hand, you could build a poker bot that played a nice basic strategy. A decent poker player can beat this, but it would take money from the fish. So it's only something you need to worry about if you were going to be losing money at the poker tables anyhow.
    • The poker 'bot not responding to conversation is not a big deal: host it from Abu Dhabi and he just doesn't speak English.
    • Regarding a crooked house: Reputable online poker sites are vetted by third-parties, so whether or not you can trust the house to deal the cards randomly isn't a huge issue. And if the house does use bots as shills, it's effectively the same thing to a decent player as a normal person using a bot. Note that many gaming commissions do require a gaming house to identify shills upon request, but there's no guarantee that the online poker site you play at has such a rule. That said, there's _huge_ money in online poker for the house; there's no odds in it for them for someone to notice the house is rigged/has shill players which would drive off clientele to other sites.
    • More of a thought than a comment: In the higher levels of poker, Mike Caro notes that you're considered to be doing well if you can make one or two big bets an hour-- so if you're playing a $25-50 game, you're doing well if you average $50-$100 an hour. On the other hand, players are less experienced at a $2-4 or a $3-6 game. So where do you put your 'bot? If it's hugely good, do you put it at the 25-50 game? Or is it better off joining a bunch of $3-6 games (since there will be many more of these...) and netting more than one or two big bets an hour from the neophytes?


    (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.)