another bot technology (automated Poker Inspector)

[Soleo]

Here people discuss various ways to run it for auto-play:

http://www.pokerinspector.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=366
http://www.pokerinspector.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=352
http://www.pokerinspector.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=332

As far as I know PI is allowed at most sites. Let it know to your poker room if you don't like to play against this.

[magic_man]

I don't understand what the big deal is about bots. Bots are written by humans, and have to play using human-made rules. What is the difference between playing against a bot and playing against Rocky McPlayTheSame who has a never-changing strategy? Unless someone has written a VERY sophisticated bot that can track my tendencies better than I can track its playing patterns, I'll play against it any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. Does anyone actually care? Is it because you are worried that the fish don't understand this, and they will all leave if they find out that bots are playing? Or do you actually not want to play against bots? Someone who cares, please enlighten me.

~MagicMan

[teddyFBI]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't understand what the big deal is about bots. Bots are written by humans, and have to play using human-made rules. What is the difference between playing against a bot and playing against Rocky McPlayTheSame who has a never-changing strategy? Unless someone has written a VERY sophisticated bot that can track my tendencies better than I can track its playing patterns, I'll play against it any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. Does anyone actually care? Is it because you are worried that the fish don't understand this, and they will all leave if they find out that bots are playing? Or do you actually not want to play against bots? Someone who cares, please enlighten me.

~MagicMan

[/ QUOTE ]

puleeze let's not have this debate again -- if you want the counterarguments, do a search of the archives. we have this debate every week.

[Alobar]

id enlighten you, but a) you arent smart enough to use the search function and b) you will prolly be bust in a couple months and wont be around here anyway....so meh

[Soleo]

This and several others are public bots available to everybody. Even if they make 0.15BB/100 someone will buy it and put to tables: one as himself, another as his wife, and a couple as his friends. Each playing 4 tables say 10 hours a day. And so will do 200-300 another buyers.
They will not be too good but games will die. This is main problem with bots so far, others are less important. If you want to find more then follow previous advice and use search function.

[wbrumfiel]

My biggest problem with bots isnt that I dont think I can beat them (not sure, never played one) but the fact that people can program these things to run basically 24 hours a day/7 days a week and if its a good bot it will in theory win money. Meanwhile, Im sitting here for 8 hours playing a bonus at Party which is fun but its also work.

Edit: Besides, if I wanted to play against a computer, Id buy one of those $20 poker video games at Best Buy

[magic_man]

Wow, no wonder I never read the internet forum. You guys are just a bunch of jerks. To be fair, I do get really annoyed when people don't use the search function, and I should have done that. I guess I just got irritated about another bot post and posted without thinking about it. Like I say, I rarely read the internet forum so I didn't realize there have been multiple debates, and I didn't search for it because I wasn't really searching for an answer. Thanks for being such a D-bag about it. Next time just kindly tell me to search the archives.

~MagicMan

[magic_man]

Thank you very much. This is a polite answer. I'll search next time before I post something that might be a repeat.


~MagicMan

[CountDuckula]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't understand what the big deal is about bots. Bots are written by humans, and have to play using human-made rules. What is the difference between playing against a bot and playing against Rocky McPlayTheSame who has a never-changing strategy? Unless someone has written a VERY sophisticated bot that can track my tendencies better than I can track its playing patterns, I'll play against it any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. Does anyone actually care? Is it because you are worried that the fish don't understand this, and they will all leave if they find out that bots are playing? Or do you actually not want to play against bots? Someone who cares, please enlighten me.

~MagicMan

[/ QUOTE ]

A bot never gets tired, never goes on tilt, never makes a mathematical mistake. No human, no matter how good they are, can avoid those things all the time. They can minimize them, but nobody is absolutely 100% perfect.

The people who use and develop bots are trying to make some "free money" with as little effort as possible. They don't care about the game itself, they just care about getting access to someone else's wallet. They are thieves, regardless of how successful they are. Whether or not I can beat a bot, I don't want to play one, because poker is intended to be played by human beings with human limitations, and I feel I have a right to know if my opponent isn't human.

-Mike

[magic_man]

[ QUOTE ]
The people who use and develop bots are trying to make some "free money" with as little effort as possible. They don't care about the game

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't agree. Someone who makes a bot still has to decide on the rules that they play poker by. They have to make EVERY possible poker decision ahead of time and program it into the bot. They clearly have to care about the game and have an expert knowledge of it.

[ QUOTE ]
A bot never gets tired, never goes on tilt, never makes a mathematical mistake

[/ QUOTE ]

Again, having to make every decision ahead of time makes this very unlikely.

[ QUOTE ]
I feel I have a right to know if my opponent isn't human.

[/ QUOTE ]

What if I write down all my rules on a sheet of paper, and sit and click the buttons according to my rules? Would you like it the game then, or would you consider me a bot?

~MagicMan

[magic_man]

Searching the archives for bot threads is much more tedious than it sounds. I did find the following thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=1840142&page=&view=&s b=5&o=

But it still doesn't clear up my questions. The general consensus is that "bots destroy the integrity of the game." Again, though, I don't see how. Do you [who are opposed to bots] mean that it seems to destroy the integrity, and that therefore the fish will think other things are rigged? If this is not what you mean, then the argument is cyclical:
1) We must protect the integrity of the game by disallowing bots.
2) Bots are bad because they destroy the integrity of the game.
3) Goto 1).

This doesn't make any sense. WHY do bots destroy the integrity? If you think it's just because of irrational fish fear, then just write: "Because people are stupid enough to be afraid of bots" and I'll stop replying.

~MagicMan

[Soleo]

MM, now you win money from fish and that's enough to cover rake and give you some profit. As soon as you will face 10 reasonably tight bots per each human-fish (which will also be hard to find) you will become unable to beat the rake.

[magic_man]

[ QUOTE ]
As soon as you will face 10 reasonably tight bots per each human-fish (which will also be hard to find) you will become unable to beat the rake.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'll assume you mean in general, and that this is not a specific dig at me. If so, this is the same as saying "games with reasonably tight players cannot be beaten," which is simply not true. My whole point here is that playing a bot is no different than playing a human who plays by the rules followed by the bot.

~MagicMan

[Soleo]

[ QUOTE ]
I'll assume you mean in general, and that this is not a specific dig at me. If so, this is the same as saying "games with reasonably tight players cannot be beaten," which is simply not true.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes, I didn't mean specifically you.
Let's say it another way - do you like to have low-limit online game where reasonable win rate is 5-10 times less than it's possible now and it's not easy to achieve?
However PokerInspector bot is also PokerTracker-based so it will adapt to you. I've read that 3 posts and I saw that it's still much worse than average player but everything may change, developer is working hard, and also it is not single public bot available. There is era of PokerAcademy pluggable bots playing online coming - and they are much more powerful in adapting.
So I think you will change your mind in 1-2 years or less if you play low-limits but it will be too late. So better try to stop it now and give your poker room an alert to detect it and seize the money of users to create the fear for new buyers.

[contentless]

The population of fish is a limited one. If you can suck the entire population of fish dry, then it's a testament to your stamina and your dedication. If an army of bots does it, and then leaves poker (as it can no longer beat the experts), then it will have essentially destroyed internet poker. Think about how many people would play poker at a casino if matched against a poker playing machine.

[magic_man]

[ QUOTE ]
The population of fish is a limited one. If you can suck the entire population of fish dry, then it's a testament to your stamina and your dedication. If an army of bots does it, and then leaves poker (as it can no longer beat the experts), then it will have essentially destroyed internet poker. Think about how many people would play poker at a casino if matched against a poker playing machine.

[/ QUOTE ]

I guess my burning question here is: What can a bot do that a human can't? With software like pokertracker, we can keep track of player tendencies probably as well as a bot, so that's not it. Your reply is the answer - bots can play many more tables for indefinite amounts of time. That being said, what do you think is a maximum amount of time playable by a human? Would you be ok with bots if poker rooms limited them to 8 hours on one table at a time? Then they would truly be no different than their human programmers.

~MagicMan

[Soleo]

I'd say population of fish is growing with online poker. But what if bots will become more prevalent and fish realize that they are playing against computer programs? Press is already there - they like sensations and many publications about bots are out in this year. Players who play for fun will leave if bots will prevail people. They don't even need to lose to leave. And then their population will be dead forever. See - no one still like the rooms where house bots were playing in the beginning of online poker. Same will be with online poker as a whole.
This problem I think is even worse that playing against the table where 1 fish is still present together with bots.

[ZeeJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't understand what the big deal is about bots.

[/ QUOTE ]

The bottom line is that your ev is higher playing against a random recreational player than it is playing against a random bot.

[bigalt]

until you write a counter-bot that figures out the bots algorithms and exploits them!

[LondonBroil]

I counterspell your counterspell!

Yeah, I used to play it, sue me.

[Girchuck]

The main thing a bot can do that an expert cannot is procreate really fast. The human expert cannot create 100 experts tomorrow even if he tried really hard, a money-winning bot can become 10000 bots in a very short time.
For a human player, there is a learning curve to playing winning poker that is at least several weeks long and only a minority of players attempt to learn. Once a bot is winning money, all bots of this type are instantly much better than average player.

[philnewall]

Don't worry, Poker Inspector is utter bollocks, to get it to win any sort of money you'd have to change the strategy completely. Also it can't account for the number of players who've entered the pot, and can't use pot odds to evaluate a draw by itself.

[Soleo]

They claim to have +0.15BB/100 after 100,000 hands. It's bad but not negative. Nice for lazy people who want to run several copies playing 4 tables each 24x7. This thing doesn't add nothing good to the tables so I'd suggest to let your room know to help them ban it.

[CountDuckula]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The people who use and develop bots are trying to make some "free money" with as little effort as possible. They don't care about the game

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't agree. Someone who makes a bot still has to decide on the rules that they play poker by. They have to make EVERY possible poker decision ahead of time and program it into the bot. They clearly have to care about the game and have an expert knowledge of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

If they write their, own, perhaps. But most of the bots are being distributed by other people who have done the hard work for them; all the end users need to do is a little tweaking, based on whatever books they happen to read, and then they can turn their bot loose and merrily go off without playing a hand on their own. The fact that they came up with the rules the bot plays by is irrelevant; it's cheating because they are not playing their own hands.


[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
A bot never gets tired, never goes on tilt, never makes a mathematical mistake

[/ QUOTE ]

Again, having to make every decision ahead of time makes this very unlikely.

[/ QUOTE ]

If someone is figuring out which rules apply to the cards they're holding on the spot, they're subject to human error. They may misread their cards, or they may be upset because someone who didn't play by their rules sucked out on them, or they may simply click on the wrong button because they were fatigued and/or not paying sufficiently close attention. What a bot does is remove the human element from the game.


[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I feel I have a right to know if my opponent isn't human.

[/ QUOTE ]

What if I write down all my rules on a sheet of paper, and sit and click the buttons according to my rules? Would you like it the game then, or would you consider me a bot?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, I wouldn't consider you a bot (though if you were really perfect at it, I'd suspect it and try to get the site to investigate you), but I seriously doubt you'll be able to come up with the right decision every single time. You might accidentally apply the wrong rule, or misplay a complicated flop because you weren't able to remember the exact sequence of bets, raises, and folds that led to where you are right now. A bot won't ever forget any of that. If you really can write down all of your rules, and find the applicable rule in time to make the right move on every single hand, well, more power to you. But writing a program to do it for you takes you out of the picture, and that is what makes it cheating.

It sounds more and more as if you're already a bot user, and trying to get some support to justify it in your own mind. You may be able to talk yourself into believing that using a bot as your proxy is just as legitimate as playing the hands yourself, but the bottom line is you're cheating and violating the terms and conditions of most, if not all, of the online sites.

-Mike

[Alobar]

ure right im sorry...I shouldnt have said you will be bust in a couple months....that was merely just a hunch on the true fact here, and what my original response should have been. Its too late to edit my old post, so i'll just put it here and we can all pretend I said it originally "you aren't very bright".

So again, please forgive my earlier statements, I hope we can move on from that and a freindship can develop.

[magic_man]

Many of your points are valid. FYI, I'm not a bot user and I wouldn't even know how to program one. I certainly wouldn't use any of the commercially available bots because I'd want to program my own. Even then I still wouldn't do it; I'm really just interested in the psychology behind all of this. It's interesting to me that you so vehemently call botting cheating, because I would never play with a cheater, and I would never ever cheat, but I would gladly play with a bot. Until they become much more sophisticated, I would rather play against a rock robot than a rock human. A human can decide to switch it up at any time, while a bot lacks this luxury. I would think that it would be fairly easier to read a bot than it would a human over the same number of hands played, and this gives a tremendous advantage. Once a human figures out he is being read, he will probably adjust. I see now that bots are probably bad because 1) they scare fish away and 2) they can clean out games faster than the good players, but I hardly consider programming a bot to be cheating. I might be convinced that using someone else's bot is cheating, although that's still in debate for me. Would it be cheating to have a preflop cheat-sheet with you at the table? This would be easy to play EXACTLY, and would still "take you out of the picture."

~MagicMan

[magic_man]

Fair enough, consider it forgotten.

~MagicMan

[SamJack]

Would you mind getting rid of the Links from your post?

SamJack

[CountDuckula]

[ QUOTE ]
Many of your points are valid. FYI, I'm not a bot user and I wouldn't even know how to program one. I certainly wouldn't use any of the commercially available bots because I'd want to program my own. Even then I still wouldn't do it; I'm really just interested in the psychology behind all of this.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok, fair enough.


[ QUOTE ]
It's interesting to me that you so vehemently call botting cheating, because I would never play with a cheater, and I would never ever cheat, but I would gladly play with a bot.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, part of my reaction comes from my chess background; I no longer play online because too many people think it's k00l to have a computer play for them and beat players who are actually equal to or even much better than they are. If I want to play a computer, I'll buy the software myself, thank you (and, in fact, I use Fritz 8 to analyze and improve my own play). I want to play humans and match wits with them.

Would it be fair to race a car against a human on foot? The car has capabilities that far outstrip the human. The same is true of bots; as I said before, they never get tired, they never make simple human errors, they never take bathroom breaks, they don't leave to get something to eat, they don't get upset because someone sucked out on them. They just keep grinding away, hour after hour, making their preprogrammed decisions.


[ QUOTE ]
Until they become much more sophisticated, I would rather play against a rock robot than a rock human.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok. So how do you suppose they'll get more sophisticated? The answer is obvious, by field testing and continuous improvement, same as any software (I'm a software engineer, myself).


[ QUOTE ]
A human can decide to switch it up at any time, while a bot lacks this luxury. I would think that it would be fairly easier to read a bot than it would a human over the same number of hands played, and this gives a tremendous advantage. Once a human figures out he is being read, he will probably adjust.

[/ QUOTE ]

Eventually, they'll learn to make such adjustments. In fact, they'd be better at it than humans; they could be designed to make one play in a given situation 73% of the time, and another play 27% of the time, screwing up other players' reads (I try to do things like that myself, though I still need practice). The only way to prevent that is to come down hard on bot users now (which seems to be what the sites are doing). I'm not so much concerned with how they play now, as I am with how they'll play after thousands of hours of field testing and improvement. 20 years ago, many experts thought that no computer would ever be able to beat a human grandmaster. Deep Blue proved them wrong.


[ QUOTE ]
I see now that bots are probably bad because 1) they scare fish away and 2) they can clean out games faster than the good players, but I hardly consider programming a bot to be cheating. I might be convinced that using someone else's bot is cheating, although that's still in debate for me.

[/ QUOTE ]

The number of tables a bot can play is limited only by the available computing power. No human will ever be able to play 100 or 1000 tables simultaneously, but several bots running on a LAN on multiple sites could do that with little effort.


[ QUOTE ]
Would it be cheating to have a preflop cheat-sheet with you at the table? This would be easy to play EXACTLY, and would still "take you out of the picture."

[/ QUOTE ]

No, it's not cheating, but preflop play is only part of the picture. Lots of people use charts to decide what to play in what positions (and eventually, they have them mostly memorized). Playing badly preflop is one leak, but it's easy to plug it once you realize that. After that, what really makes one player better than another is how well they handle the flop and beyond. Here, the number of decisions and judgment calls multiplies; there's no easy way to make a comprehensive cheat sheet to cover all the variables and to be able to use it effectively. By the time you've looked up what you want to do, you'll have timed out. But a bot can make these sorts of lookups in less than a second, and make its decision in plenty of time. There are limits to what a human being can do with cheat sheets, but these are removed with bots, because they're built right in.

Really, try it for a while. Try to come up with a comprehensive cheat sheet that will allow you to make decisions without having to think about them. I'm certain you will find that either it's too complex for you to retrieve the information in time, or it's too simple to cover enough situations. Work at it long enough, though, and you can include such a cheat sheet into a bot's programming, and make using it feasible.

-Mike

[magic_man]

Fair enough, I think I'm convinced. You have made excellent arguments here, so I'll join the crusade against bots.

Where did you play chess online? I was Magic_Man on ICC, but haven't played in a while. I may pick it up again soon.

Thanks for your comments.

~MagicMan

[Reef]

how do we know that these "forums" in the links are not just 1 spammer chatting with himself, trying to build up the program?

anyway, this has been discussed many times before. I'm out of here.

[Soleo]

Why? I posted them there to notify you and all other 2+2ers and to ask people to alert Party Poker (or room where you play if it supports PI). Anyway I can't edit the post after 10 mins. This bot is same [censored] as Winholdem so I want to make as much noise as possible here. Only PokerInspector author whos product is used by that 3rd side bot writer may regret about that links. Hope you aren't him.