Pokerbots Making Online Players Sad 408
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."
Re:Poker (Score:5, Informative)
Poker is a skill game, that's why people can become pro's at it. That's why even semi-pro's like me can make a decent living off of it, especially now with the boom in popularity of the game.
Re:find a flaw (Score:3, Informative)
That's enough to win more than lose against average to good players (even greart players, over the long run) but pair a few winholdem bots in the same game cooperating and you can rake it in.
Re:find a flaw (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt that would happen. It's the online gambling equivalent of posting a misprice to fatwallet.com. Except that online merchants are big slow and stupid and most still haven't figured out how detect hordes of people taking advantage of a misprice. Most still aren't smart enough to page a human when there is an abnormal spike in the sales numbers for an item.
For a poker-bot, it is simple to prevent large scale exploitation of a flaw - give the bot a sanity check. If it loses more than $X, then it stops playing and pages a real human to check things out. There will probably be false positives due to the nature of gaussian distributions but experience ought to indicate what a good enough value for $X is to minimize those false positives and still make automated playing profitable.
Re:on-line poker is for marks (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:From Someone Who Makes His LIving Playing (Score:2, Informative)
A friend of mine was actually working on the same thing, for an artificial intelligence class. The program failed miserably, but he did get an A, so he at least got a start :)
hed.
Re:find a flaw (Score:3, Informative)
The "house" doesn't make money from statistics. It makes money from the rake, a small percentage of each pot which go to the establishment. Just like party poker.
WinHoldEm bots which are communicating with one another can rape even the best players over time.
Collusion of this sort doesn't give you a very huge advantage. You have a bit more information about the statistics of card distribution by knowing the other players' hole cards, but it's not a terribly big deal.
Re:Poker Cheaters (Score:3, Informative)
They work really badly anywhere except at (1) long-hand (2) fixed limit (3) low stakes (4) loose (5) passive tables where the winning strategy is clear and mostly consists of waiting for a good hand and then playing pot odds correctly. If anyone is so bored that they are willing to babysit a bot which makes less than $1 per hour, more power to them.
It is all about complete automation. Without it these bots are useless because it is simply not fun to play the long-hand fixed limit poker correctly. Take it from an avid hold'em player.
Re:From Someone Who Makes His LIving Playing (Score:3, Informative)
The house software controls the deal. They can write software where they press a button and the program finds the undealt cards they need for the house player to win a pot they want, or assuming its well written software tell them it can't be done this hand without looking like its cheating. If you have your pick of the undealt cards you can arrange to win most hands.
It boggles the mind anyone would think they could catch a minimally well written piece of software cheating for the people who control the server and all its software.
Re:find a flaw (Score:3, Informative)
This is clearly wrong. There isn't any such thing as "perfect poker (statistically.)" The best players tailor their game to other players around the table, both in live games and on sites like PartyPoker.com.
Statistical poker isn't that hard to play. Most books on the subject include handy tables to figure out how likely you are to make your hand based on the number of "outs" you have. Throw in a little hand groupings for preflop play and you're all set to play "statistically". You should be ready to have your ass handed to you, though, since every professional poker player in the world can beat a "statistical" player.
From a professional's point of view, the poker bots will ruin the game, though. Not because the pros can't beat the bots. The problem is the bots will drive out the truly bad players, which is where most of the money comes from. A pro playing bots all the time will make a small profit, but it's a lot of work for the amount of effort. I predict if this bot is good enough it will simply drive out the fish, and the sharks will move back into the local card clubs where they were making a comfortable living two or three years ago.
Re:Cheating? (Score:4, Informative)
Introduce the world to the print screen buffer (Score:2, Informative)
Re:From Someone Who Makes His LIving Playing (Score:3, Informative)
I can really see no possible way you could tell if the deal was altered as long as they decide to cheat selectively and with some randomness. I can see you not wanting to stack the deck at the beginning because you might be able to detect that but every so often hitting a button that says house wants to win this hand, and letting an algorithm pick any random undealt card that would make that so would be nearly impossible to detect.
The challenging AI algorithm in this business is figuring out the optimal strategy for setting the hook (i.e. you want the sucke...player to win a lot early so they get hooked, then slowly turn them in to losers, and mix in an occasional win to keep them from giving up as you slowly break them.
I would agree there probably isn't much motivation for big reputable sites to cheat assuming they are making a killing already. What mix do they use to make their money and how do you know how much they make and how. As for a third party audit of the software, that is useless unless they have the power to secretly watch the server from inside, constantly checksum the binaries, watch everything on every server etc. Sounds like a tactic to make the sucke...players feel good about it without actually insuring its up and up.
I just can't see anything that would stop a site that was in a financial crunch or if owners decide they want to make a killing and cash out from cheating.
Poker is one of the few worth while gambling games, if you are good at it, because you are playing against other people instead of a house with the odds stacked in its favor. It would seem to me if you do it online you give up that assurance and are back to a game where the house can set the percentage they take.
Re:find a flaw (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Automated (Score:5, Informative)
Don't Fear (Score:3, Informative)
(b) It's a little frustrating to see the endless stream of people spouting off about how online poker sites are surely rigged when they know absolutely nothing about it. I've been playing online poker for a year and have turned $20 into a small fortune. I beat the game for more than I make as a developer on the good months now, and I've successfully withdrawn a little less than half my profits. Poker sites take a rake from each pot that's played. Some of the larger sites have 80k concurrent users at peak times. Start taking a little piece of every pot with that many people online and you're earning a small fortune every freaking minute. They have very little overhead, computers, bandwidth, support, the rest is pure profit, and there's plenty for them. Why the hell would they risk this by cheating their players? If it was impossible to beat online poker, how do many of us do so consistently?
Truth be told I suspect these comments are coming from people who've never played online, or are influenced by the same stereotypes of poker being a game for cheats and hustlers. Bad players who try online poker and can't seem to win tend to enjoy spouting off that the sites are rigged, when in reality weird things happen in poker everywhere. Knowing how to bankroll yourself for what limits to sustain the unavoidable statistical downswings is the key.
Don't worry about the foolishness spouted in this tread. Win holdem is no threat, nor are any other bots at this point in time. And any of the major poker sites are plenty reputable, I was wary at first too but I've seen their business practices for a solid 12 months now. Online poker is booming right now and there's plenty fun to be had and money for the taking if you're half intelligent and can learn the required discipline.
Re:From Someone Who Makes His LIving Playing (Score:5, Informative)
The FTOP states that you profit every time you play a hand exactly as you would if you could see all the cards, and you profit every time an opponent makes the wrong play assuming he could see all the cards. Making a "mistake" in this context means giving your opponent favorable odds to chase a draw, calling when you don't have favorable odds, failing to value bet a winning hand, calling with a losing hand, etc.. Sklansky uses Game Theory to propose ways in which you bet, bluff, call, and fold with the correct frequency to give your opponent the most opportunities to make mistakes and make as few mistakes as possible yourself.
Actually applying what Sklansky writes takes a lot of knowledge of the game. You have to be able to recognize betting patterns, calculate pot odds on the fly, accurately estimate your implied odds, put your opponents on ranges of hands, and many other things. All in real-time.
Some of those are things computers are good at. Many of them are not.
Re:Poker (Score:4, Informative)
That misses the point entirely. There are 2 separate, distinct issues that the pokerbot addresses that are unique to online play:
1) Any player could be using this program to evaluate the current live hand in an off-line fashion. Attempting to weed them out by chatting is useless. As far as using a bot is cheating, this would be cheating (and many players "seeking to understand the game better" would deem it as excusable!)
2) Outright collusion. This can be done by two humans using the same on-line poker forum. No bots are neccessary. That bots also do it is irrelevant. The reason the bots can collude is because the program author thought that people need to be aware of the issue!
Re:From Someone Who Makes His LIving Playing (Score:3, Informative)
I'm amazed (but probably shouldn't be) that so many posts say so much shit without any evidence of research...especially considering the amount of Google worship on
The real value of teaming is not in the knowledge of the cards in play, it is in the freedom to chase a bad hand when a partner's hand can cover. It's easier to hang around trying to fill an inside straight when your partner has a pair of aces.
Look at the bright side - it might finally be possible to make some REAL money by defeating the Turing Test. You could code a bot who explained playing 20 hours a day by pretending to be a crankhead.
billy - how about a nice game of chess?
Re:find a flaw (Score:2, Informative)
Re:on-line poker is for marks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:find a flaw (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poker Cheaters (Score:1, Informative)
Re:if you can make so much money (Score:3, Informative)
It's invariably the case that even when these systems really do work (a few of them, particularly the real estate redevelopment models, actually do work,) selling them to millions of people is significantly more profitable than actually running them.
It's called franchising. Pizza Hut doesn't own all its stores; neither do McDonalds, Wendys, and so on. Why? The stores are immensely profitable.
The answer is simple: reaping margin on people investing their own money is far more profitable than doing it all yourself, because the growth rate is far larger, and you step back from all of the personal risk. If they're profitable, they break you off a proper chunk. If they fail, well, it's just not your problem.
Be honest: would you rather own five fast food resteraunts, or reap a percentage on two hundred? The franchise model is so successful that better granchises, like fast food, often have smaller companies subfranchising. Next time you go to a Burger King or whatever, take a look at the drive through window, where they have the complaint phone number. Surprisingly often, it'll list a smaller company you've never heard of, but which owns a few hundred local fast food places from a variety of name brands. In Pittsburgh, most of the fast food in the college district, regardless of who the sign reads as, is owned by either of two companies (to the tune of some 100 or so storefronts covering a good two dozen brands.)
In short, selling a scalable business model is usually more profitable than using it.