LA Times Article 6/12: "Poker 'Bots' Are Upping the Ante"

[grandgnu]

Only one man can save us:

[Rev. Good Will]

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So these are the scumbags. Big mistake giving out their names.

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I hear that, I say we schedule a zoo trip to their houses. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[lastcoyote]

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Email template if others want to send an email...

Adde


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To: Golden Palace Management ( admin@GoldenPalace.net )
Subject: Your association with www.wsopr.com

I can't believe you're sponsoring a group of cheating scum to improve their poker bots. These greedy bastards could ruin online poker for hundreds of thousands of poker enthusiasts like myself and also kill off poker rooms like yours. You should stick to buying cheese sandwiches for your cheap publicity. I and I'm sure many others will never play at your site unless you pull out of this stupid event.


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I would send this but they would probably start spamming the sh.it out of me. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[MrBlueNose]

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Any poker site with brains in the security dept

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I'm pretty worried too.



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No kidding, and this too:

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Other sites don't care whether users are human, he said, because the house takes the same percentage of the pot no matter who's playing. But Bhargava said PartyPoker has 100 employees looking for robots, collusion among players and other scams

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What a bunch of BS. They are probably one of the worst among the bigger sites in this aspect.

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Actually I was impressed by their customer service yesterday. I e-mailed them to let them know I think I spotted a bot playing, and provided hand history numbers etc. 10 minutes later the phone rang, and it was someone from Party Poker to verify the information, and let me know that they had looked into the account and there may be something suspicious, so will monitor it and will let me know once they've decided.

Although perhaps I shoulda kept my mouth shut. The bot had an easily exploitable bug that won me some large pots [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[sexdrugsmoney]

I've always been suspicious of Casinos running "BlackJack Tournaments" ... I've always felt it's a relatively cheap ruse to spot card-counters and have their names and faces on Casino file.

GoldenPalace are a strange bunch, on the one hand they buy strange crap off eBay, on the other hand I've heard of cashout problems and even a rumour that they may go belly up sometime soon.

The only angle I can see from this is that GP run a tourney which gives them access to the way these bots work, they can then program their site to counter the bot and even sell that info for a high price to other online vendors for an inflated price.

Ofcourse, this is just a random thought.

[Adde]

There's a long thread at Winholdem forum, where, among other things, the project manager for the event admits that all contestants have made money online with their bots. Also, funny when he calls them stealth cheaters and gets angry replies.

Adde

[OrangeKing]

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What gets me is that the guy building the bot can't even beat the .02/.04 game. Wow.

Suppose some programmer knows nothing about chess but wants to build a chess program. So he hires a grandmaster to advise him and he gets to work. Very soon, the programmer will learn enough about chess to beat complete beginners, won't he? How can this guy spend five nights a week preparing his program for a competition and still be unable to beat .02/.04?

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Great point... there are some very fishy parts to this article.

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Most of the information about Kasparov/Deep Blue/Chess was incorrect - it wasn't Kasparov's first professional loss, and a world champion hasn't lost a match to a computer program since then - though I have a feeling that "Hydra" will change this pretty soon. But the best computers still get crushed by human players in correspondence chess - they don't make use of having 4 days to think about a move quite as well as humans. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] So they're still far from perfect and have a lot of room for improvement, though they're absolutely unbeatable monsters for even 99% of tournament players.

[Bradyams]

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What gets me is that the guy building the bot can't even beat the .02/.04 game. Wow.

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I found that interesting too. If you can't beat the .02/.04 game then you probably have horrible pre-flop selection. Is he going to tell his bots to play T5s from UTG because it's soooted?

[adanthar]

If I were a poker pro or a smart programmer who knew that he was playing against mass market bots at 5/10 NL Of The Future (TM), I would do the following:

Step 1: Buy the program
Step 2: Decompile it and try to analyze the source code
Step 3: Find its pattern recognition routine
Step 4: Join the table where the known bot is
Step 5: Play according to a set pattern for 50 hands
Step 6: Dramatically switch your pattern when you get aces
Step 7: Profit

It takes all the difficulty of changing your image against live opponents and reduces it to five seconds. Bravo.

Also,

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That's why in poker there's no such thing as an absolutely correct play, except in retrospect. If someone, or something, bets heavily with a lousy hand and everyone else folds, that was the right bet.

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Oh God I hope the programmers hard at work here follow this mantra.

[Sponger15SB]

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What gets me is that the guy building the bot can't even beat the .02/.04 game. Wow.

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I found that interesting too. If you can't beat the .02/.04 game then you probably have horrible pre-flop selection. Is he going to tell his bots to play T5s from UTG because it's soooted?

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It wouldn't suprise me if T5s was playable from UTG in a .02-.04 game [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]