Online Poker Bots Becoming Problematic? 613
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?"
not quite so hard... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
I'm waiting for Robot Poker on ESPN (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Undermine the gambling industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is This So Wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
As to bots, they are not going to cause a Casino to loose money in any other way in that they might simply stop allowing certain games to be played online. If the game is a game where a strong pattern rec software can 'beat the odds' then they will simply get rid of the game, have their own bots play, or adjust winnings such that they still win in terms of dollar amount in the end. The only people who are going to come out loosers are people who who want to play online without a bot.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see why they make it sound so hard to code something like this. There are books out there that teach you strategy for poker and what to do based on when other things happen. If you could turn that into a programmatic routine, it shouldn't be hard to have a bot that wins more often than not.
Especially with online blackjack. Bots could make a killing on that. Between card counting and the what-do-I-do-when rules.
Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Money on the internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would a Casino Care? (Score:1, Insightful)
No worries (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just no-limit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't the house still have the advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bots won't help you decide if someone is bluffing, but they will help you decide if it even matters whether or not they're bluffing.
Cheating (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is This So Wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
The overhead of cloning thousands of bots is very low. So a person can spawn off thousands of poker bots and play thousands of tables at one time. A human cannot do this.
Shouldn't be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
As to Blackjack, card counting will only work if the gambling site server emulates a pack or number of packs in a shoe that are not shuffled for many games. I haven't looked into that because card counting is such an open secret, the sites would be stupid to leave the loophole open. And they are not stupid.
There certainly are bots out there. That's a fact. But it's an altogether more complex thing to produce one than it seems at first sight.
Re:Is This So Wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be thinking about blackjack. Poker can only be played with one deck, which is always shuffled in a b&m casino.
In stud games, though, one needs to remember which cards have been shown and mucked, and a computer bot would be able to gain an advantage by having a perfect memory. Most good players, though, don't have much trouble remembering the important cards, though.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
Knowledge of bluffing is important, because coupled with a grasp of human psychology, it (potentially) gives more information about future game state than simple card probabilities will.
Re:Original twoplustwo article (Loic Dachary) (Score:3, Insightful)
The key point here is that this is a private business establishment, and the owner can establish limits on what goes on in that business. (with the exception of racial, gender, dicrimination, etc) Courts have historically sided with the business owners in establishing what requirements the owner sets forth for participation in their service. Ever see a "no shoes, no shirt, no service." Sign? How about "we reserve the right to refuse service?"
If you don't like it, go play somewhere else, but don't come up with a make believe "legal" opinion that you'll try to sell us. The casino owner has no legal obligation to ensure that you "alternative lifestyle" OS works with his site.
Re:"I equate gambling... (Score:4, Insightful)
I read "could this proliferation of poker-playing bots undermine the almost $1 billion online gambling industry?" and my first thought was "Fine by me, good riddance to them".
If it meant I never had to see another online casino pop-up ad then that would be a good thing.
Re:Funny (Score:1, Insightful)
For example: http://www.paradisepoker.com/pwc_review.html [paradisepoker.com]
Pro, amateur and play for fun poker players are a well organized and a well informed community and do not take poker sites with skewed algorithms or any other sort of slight of hand lightly.
Re:Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Your talking about American laws right? Those tough and strict gambling laws ensuring every gambling game is on the up and up?
Pardon me while I contact my Albanian, Chinese, and Nigerian contacts and we all have a good laugh at your expense.
Re:I hope Internet gambling goes down in flames (Score:5, Insightful)
What we really need ... (Score:1, Insightful)
If the gambling industry went belly up tomorrow, I for one would not be sorry in the least.
Yes, this is wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Behind every bot is a human (or an organization). The bots play with real money, so casino will get its piece.
There could be a danger for casinos on becoming dependent on a few big-players instead of many smaller ones, but so far the existence of star human players did not diminish the casinos' market too much. Why would a star bot be (substantially) more dangerous than a star human player?
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
So the whole point is to get slightly higher odds than somebody else. Even a tiny advantage is the difference between winning and losing money, if that's your game. Many people play just for fun, and their losses are effectively payment for that. You see that all the time at 21, where simple card counting strategies can win you small sums of money but most people don't wish to expend the effort for that; they're playing just for fun.
Personally I kinda like the idea of bots playing each other. It's nerds playing each other at a totally different game. Humans still have heuristics that out-play the best chess programs, but only barely (a handful of people will just barely beat the top software, at best. The rest of us get creamed.)
Re:Is This So Wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's very true. That's why bluffing is very difficult against low level amateur players [1], and is generally discouraged in a low stakes game, unless you KNOW it's going to work.
You also never bluff to a loose player.
I imagine playing against a "dumb" bot would eliminate bluffing from the game almost entirely.
1. low level amateur players either think they have the better hand no matter what, if they're in the game, and will call the bluff. Or more often they will always call no matter what, because they already committed to the pot the first time they put money in it.
Other ways to cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I call bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bluffs are also intended to foil human intuitive statistical analysis. The fundamental problem is that the strength of a perfectly rational player's hand can be determined from his bets. So the player must introduce noise or bias into his betting strategy to maintain the advantage of hidden cards. Since computers are even better at statistical analysis than humans, bluffing becomes more important, not less. The problem is that a bluffing strategy is itself subject to statistical analysis. Probably ultimately, there is no constant bluffing strategy that consistently beats sufficiently randomization.
Re:I question your authority (Score:1, Insightful)
There's PLENTY of a human element to online poker play. There's a lot more you can read into a player than just their faces. The amount of time someone takes to bet, and the way in which they increment/decrement their bets can tell you a lot about what's in their hand, particularly if you've observed the player over the long haul and determined their relative "tightness"
The fact is, knowing perfect statistics doesn't help your game in Hold 'em. Knowing how/when to raise against the players you're at the table with are what matters most. Most of the time, you're not betting on getting the "winning hand", you're simply playing mind games with your opponents, getting them to fold before the river, or putting yourself in a position to put a player to a tough decision.
Most Hold 'em players know the basic stats you need to know. Knowing that you have a 30-something percent change (roughly) of pulling a flush on either the turn or the river when your suited pocket cards met 2 of the same suit on the flop, is enough to know how you're going to bet. Knowing that's exactly 34.789127%, version 38.2139871237% really doesn't make a lick of difference.
Casinos perform a public service (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Individual players don't care about the site's reputation, so they would be much more likely to want to cheat.
So what (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:No worries (Score:2, Insightful)
Card counting doesn't work when the casino shuffles after every hand. They don't do that in live casinos, because shuffling takes a while. They do shuffle after every hand in online blackjack, because it is instantanious.
Re:not quite so hard... (Score:3, Insightful)
Something to think about.
Re:Some notes on the discussion... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this goes right up there with it being trivial to write a perfect operating system or a cypher nobody can crack. Lots of people have tried, and it's never been done, to my knowledge. Remember there's more to it than just figuring out what the other players have and adjusting your strategy to it. Your bot will have tendencies, just like any human player. When other players figure out how to exploit those tendencies your bot will start to lose.
So far, if poker sites have bots they're not very good - I have more than 100k hands logged on Party Poker and I'm not having any more trouble beating it than ever (I win a little more than $1/hand).
Re:Good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true with poker. You're playing against other players, not against the house. Your odds to win are you make of it. The house can make it tougher to win by increasing the rake, but generally if you play better than other players, you will win money.
Be afraid of collusion, not bots. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is This So Wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
Counting cards can help in poker, just not as much, and not in all variants. Take for instance "stud" poker where all players have some cards (number varies according to the precise variant) dealt face up at the start of the game. If a player has, for instance, two aces face up, and is playing reasonably high bets, a normal inference might be that he has a third ace in his and also. But if I know that the other two aces are on the table elsewhere, it is more likely he has two-of-a-kind instead.
Poker Bots (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy to Stop (Score:3, Insightful)
Detectable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cheaters! (Score:2, Insightful)
If I were programming in this field (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Turing test authentication (Score:2, Insightful)