John Paul
02-27-2005, 02:21 PM
Hello,
I don't play NL SnG's (yet) but I have been interested in the whole bot story. I have read a lot of what people have posted about the pro's and con's of the bot situation, but please forgive me if I am making a point someone already made.
At first I was basically of the opinion that poker was a people game, so no bots allowed. After thinking about it for a while I have come around to some extent in that I think it could be OK. Currently on the party limit ring games you have some tables with disconnect protect and some without and these are marked. I would be fine if there was a similar thing where some tables were all human, some mixed and maybe even some all bot, and they were marked accordingly. Who knows, maybe playing the bots would become a big ego thing and they would get a lot of action.
The problem with much of the discussion, including what I just wrote above, is that it is looking at poker bots the way folks view chess computers. Chess computers get carried from match to match, and don't have a huge impact for most chess players. I don't think this is a good analogy. There just is not a lot of money in chess the way there is in poker. I think it is more likely that someone will develop a decent bot, and then a whole buisness will spring up trying to get the bot into as many games as possible. It is relatively easy to set up computer and bank accounts around the globe, so the same bot could play in any number of games via dozens or hundreds of accounts.
The result would be that poker bots would be to online poker what spam is to email. It is one thing to go in knowing that you might end up playing a bot, it is another if 6 out of every 10 seats in SnGs are taken up by bots. Furthermore, if two of the same bot were sitting in a tournament, it could be easy for them to collude. The programers could devise a code that would pass information based on bet size or something. Rather than going all in, a bot could bet all in except for 12 chips, and this could indicate something to another clone of the same bot. What this meant could change every day or hour or something so it would be difficult to crack the code.
Perhaps my worries are unfounded and the poker sites will be able to block this - maybe they already have. However, I still get plenty of spam, so I am still concerned.
John Paul
I don't play NL SnG's (yet) but I have been interested in the whole bot story. I have read a lot of what people have posted about the pro's and con's of the bot situation, but please forgive me if I am making a point someone already made.
At first I was basically of the opinion that poker was a people game, so no bots allowed. After thinking about it for a while I have come around to some extent in that I think it could be OK. Currently on the party limit ring games you have some tables with disconnect protect and some without and these are marked. I would be fine if there was a similar thing where some tables were all human, some mixed and maybe even some all bot, and they were marked accordingly. Who knows, maybe playing the bots would become a big ego thing and they would get a lot of action.
The problem with much of the discussion, including what I just wrote above, is that it is looking at poker bots the way folks view chess computers. Chess computers get carried from match to match, and don't have a huge impact for most chess players. I don't think this is a good analogy. There just is not a lot of money in chess the way there is in poker. I think it is more likely that someone will develop a decent bot, and then a whole buisness will spring up trying to get the bot into as many games as possible. It is relatively easy to set up computer and bank accounts around the globe, so the same bot could play in any number of games via dozens or hundreds of accounts.
The result would be that poker bots would be to online poker what spam is to email. It is one thing to go in knowing that you might end up playing a bot, it is another if 6 out of every 10 seats in SnGs are taken up by bots. Furthermore, if two of the same bot were sitting in a tournament, it could be easy for them to collude. The programers could devise a code that would pass information based on bet size or something. Rather than going all in, a bot could bet all in except for 12 chips, and this could indicate something to another clone of the same bot. What this meant could change every day or hour or something so it would be difficult to crack the code.
Perhaps my worries are unfounded and the poker sites will be able to block this - maybe they already have. However, I still get plenty of spam, so I am still concerned.
John Paul