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Pokerbots Making Online Players Sad
Anonymous Coward wrote to mention a Wired article about the rise of Pokerbots in online gaming venues. From the article: "Smart, skilled players are rewarded in the long run, especially online, where there are plenty of beginners who would never have the nerve to sit down at a real table. But WinHoldEm isn't just smart, it's a machine. Set it to run on autopilot and it wins real money while you sleep. Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table. For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business."
My initial thought is that anyone who would run a pokerbot is evil. Then my attention turns to Las Vegas and the enormous rooms of metalic robots who are all fixed to win and win big, suck the life, time (24/7 baby), and money, out of would-be regular people. Then I don't feel as bad. I still don't like cheaters, tho. The answer? Play free online poker. Save your money for BYOB -- real games with your friends. We play Texas Holdem from time to time at the cottage and it's a hoot. Games should be fun -- not business, IMHO.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Well, I'm sorry but I don't lose any sleep over people who lose money gambling, or who feel it is unfair. It's gambling! Who do you think pays for all those lights in Vegas? The losers!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Generally a torpedo down the exhaust port works.
If that fails try throwing an old man shooting lightning from his fingers into a conveniently placed pit to the energy core.
No more unassisted human players, but networks of bots competing against each other, ultimately controlled by individuals, and creating a larger and more interesting game... Bots are just another tool, after all.
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If they're allowed to play, there's no problem. Humans should deal (heh), or retreat to humans-only venues.
If they're not allowed to play (why not?), but still do, there are two problems. The social one of people running them (I'm assuming the bots don't decide to play by themselves) which probably can't be solved - some people are inherently dishonest. Then there's the technical problem - how do you let humans play while shutting out bots? There really isn't a feasible solution, especially if humans decide to play physically but let a bot decide their moves for them. But of course some will still try to implement a partial solution. Discuss.
This is a pretty apt comment. I think professional poker players would love to play against a bot. It gives them a considerable advantage, because if they studied the bot they can predict what it will do.
There are, basically, two possibilities. Either the bot plays purely statistically. If that is the case, it may win against dumb players, but can break even at best against good players. Or, the bot tries to model its opponents and tries to take those models into account when playing. If that is the case, as soon as a good player recognises that a bot is playing, he can ensure that the bot will have the wrong model of him, and then exploit that.
And, of course, as the parent says, it is possible that the bot contains an exploitable flaw. The bot creator goes to sleep, someone on the net recognises the flaw and posts about it in a newsgroup, and by the time the bot creator awakes he is broke. I would not sleep soundly with a bot playing with my money.
I can tell you that the bots are not a big deal yet. First of all, I'll be amazed when they ever come up with the technology to play no limit hold 'em. That would be a miracle program. Poker is much more than just betting and raising, and the occasional bluff. Just as important are reading your opponent, making bets that damage others pot odds, and playing your position in relation to the blinds. Plus, there's just a certain amount of feel needed in the game. Even Doyle Brunson claims ESP is important in Super System.
Limit ring games are a different ballgame, and a bot does have some chance of success. However, that chance is at best only at the low level games, where a program could actually outplay the players. Any mid to high stakes game has players who will quickly figure out the way a bot plays, and milk it for all it's worth.
As it is now, winholdem is a pretty bad program. I don't know of anyone who has made a profit with it, and I do know a couple of people who have at least taken a look at it. If you're worried about something in online poker, be much more worried about collusion, with multiple people at the same table sharing their hands with each other. But, even that doesn't give a huge advantage against a good player, unless there are upwards of six or seven people in a room sharing information against the rest. Poker is, and always will be a skill game, and none of these cheating methods can change that.
hed.
I'd think that the same sort of approach could be taken as has been done in the past with macro's in mmorpg's. Track behaviour, and if there is suspicion, have an admin personal message the player, asking them a question a bot wouldn't have difficulty answering. Also,
I know a few people who play high stakes online games(2k+ buyin tables), are people trusting the bots at high stakes?
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Of course, won't be long until really good poker players start cheating by pretending to be bots...
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Of course they play statistically and, surprise, computers are better at playing accurately based on statistics than even the best human players. WinHoldEm doesn't try to profile or model players. It just plays perfect poker (statistically.) And against most players, that is a sure win over time. Even against great players, it doesn't lose over time (think Las Vegas house.)
The point you're missing is that several accounts, all playing WinHoldEm bots which are communicating with one another can rape even the best players over time. It's cheating at poker, and the gambling sites can't seem to control it yet.
everything in moderation
Why would they waste their time cheating?? The rake alone is massive profits.
And besides, if they EVER get caught cheating (former employee rats them out or something) then people will simply stop playing there and now they've lost what was their big money maker...the rake.
A B&M casino could cheat you just as well.
all playing WinHoldEm bots which are communicating with one another
This is the important thing, collaboration. In all scenarios, casinos, both real and online, factor in the odds or frequency of the player winning. For every percentage over 49% in favor of the player, the casino adjusts accordingly. It just doesn't make any sense for the casino to win less than 51% of the time. int he case of these poker sites, they take a certain percentage of the 'take' in any hand. In blackjack, the odds are in favor of the dealer about 51% of the time. Casinos have unlimited money and can continue to play, knowing in the long run statistically they'll win.
What scares Casinos is collusion. To any one player in blackjack, he has a 49% chance. However, multiple players sharing information changes those odds, in favor of the group over the casino . (this only applies to 'house' games, like blackjack) If you read Ben Mezrich's 'Bringing down the house', a group of students at MIT figured this out. They were able to play statistically and when they found a table whose odds leaned into the players, they called in a big fish who would bet more, knowing that the odds had swung.
The same collusion applies to Poker, except against other players, not the house. If I am dealt two Aces, and I collude with another player who indicates that he got one ace, I can tell two things... One, that no one else can match my aces, since there's a single ace somewhere else, and second, the other player can drop out, minimizing the loss of the teams.
The great thing about card games is that there's a finite number of cards dealt, and therefore statistical rules apply... the chances of drawing an Ace from a deck of cards increase for every non-Ace you draw. Since robots can keep track of every card dealt, they have an excellent chance to quickly calculate poker and blackjack situations. Collusion allows even more input to be gathered and for computers to make even more informed decisions
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
statistically speaking... about 90% of them are chumps, yes. The other 10% win.
Do you really believe that the operators of these on-line "casinos" are above playing poker against you while they can watch your hands, or when they can tell the computer what to deal next?
Yes. Personally I have about a million hands logged in a postgres database. Any statistical analysis I've ever done regarding: 'how often should this scenario happen, versus how often DID it happen' has shown that it was on the level.
I personally generate thousands of dollars in rake each month, by playing winning poker. They could rip me off one-time for a few grand... or have all that money, every month, for as long as they exist and spread a fair game. There's no reason to kill the golden egg.
Another form of cheating that I know is going on (because I know someone who admits to doing it) is to play multiple hands in the same game against another player and share information about your hands.
Unfortunately, colluders exist. Fortunately, they're relatively easy to detect, and the information isn't "extremely valuable", it's "usually worthless" and generally "statistically insignificant". Sometimes these douchebags try to trap guys for extra bets, or run squeeze plays on them... though these are extremely exploitable strategies that will only work against the worst players. (and are easily detected by a review of the hands by the casino, should a player file a complaint)
In conclusion: stop talkin about things you don't understand, kiddo. I have no doubt that you lose at online poker, but the problem isn't that you're getting cheated.
$5 table and only $30 after letting it run all night? $.50/$1 tables of Texas Hold'em generally have a pot average between $5 and $10 and cost $.75 for small blind/big blind.
I'm more worried about collusion at a table and there's no way to stop this, whether they're using this bot, Teamspeak, or sitting next to each other.
The bot does do the hardest thing for a real person to do which is to sit and not play. Fold junk hands for an hour, and you're willing to bet on anything that's playable.
"You see, pokerbots have a preset win limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own dollars at them, until they reached their limit and shut down." Zapp Brannigan
First of all I have to say I entierly support the people writing/running the online poker bots. They have found a clever way of winning and I find the intellectual competition between various bot writers far more stimulating than people just playing poker (I also think all those rules in F1 racing to reduce the benefits from creative engineering are horrible especially as this undermines the supposed purpose of racing as fueling research).
While some people might argue that using poker bots is wrong because it is a violation of some user agreement with the casino consitancy requires us to give no more credance to the casino liscensce agreement than any other clickwrap. Even if the Casino has a EULA type agreement preventing bots how is this really any different than a hypothetical clause in the MS EULA requiring that you won't dual boot linux or use OSS in general? In both cases the company is demanding you not use your own computers in the way you choose so as to protect their profits. We should treat both cases exactly the same.
Of course this isn't to say that the online casinos shouldn't do what they can to detect and evict bots (though seizing their money goes too far...you can ban whoever you like from your sight but stealing their money is a whole other matter). This brings me to the title of this post. No, I don't think that this poker bot or even poker playing in general will create significant advances in AI.
However, the battle between the automated bots and those trying to detect (or even take advantage of) the bots does offer real promise. Online casinos are only the tip of the iceberg, I fully expect the war between bots and anti-bots to only get more ferocious and spread from casinos and MMPOGs to more and more online activities. Finally their will be competitive pressure to develop incrimentally more and more sophisticated AIs dealing with more and more types of situations.
Unfortunatly, the academic community is particularly ill-suited toward developing integrated human like AI. We know from brain research and evolution that incrementally equipping and improving a system gradually with pragmatic hacks and adding specialized functional subunits can create human-like intelligence (it made us). Moreover, the continued difficulties faced by AI research suggests that no simple elegant algorithm will serve. If you want a computer to do all the things a person does you you need to program that computer with all hundreds of specialized sub-functions our brains posses. In short no clever idea will allow us to circumvent the fact that human like AI will take a massive number of lines of code.
Unfortunatly, while the academic community is very apt at creating algorithms for well specified functions, e.g., computer vision, it is very poor at creating massive integrated applications. While the core concepts and algorithms for the OS, database and the like have often come from academia it isn't a coincedence that the complex fully featured non-reasearch versions are either commercial or open-source. Quite simply academia rewards novelty and creativity not dilligence and the quality of the final product. As a CS prof you are far better off (and have more fun) testing your own pet idea or at best creating a demonstration app with a few other research group members than incrimentally contributing small features to a massive code base.
Only the commercial software companies and open source communities have the sort of reward structures suitable to creating usefull AI. In these communities it is overall product usefullness that is rewarded and many people are happy to make incrimental improvements even if they won't make for a good paper. I just hope these bot wars provide the begining baby steps necessery to get some of these projects rolling.
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