another bot technology (automated Poker Inspector)

[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]

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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

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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.

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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.


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

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

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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.


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

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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?

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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]

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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.

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Ok, fair enough.


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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.

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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.


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

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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).


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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.


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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."

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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