Unsettling Bot News

[brianmarc]

Nope. winholdem already has a fix for the identification problem (view/hide tille bar)

[lint]

I don't think they block holdemkiller. And it's possibly a bigger factor because it's free.

[Ed Miller]

It is very difficult to create a bot that plays "optimum strategy." Unfortunately, it doesn't have to play optimally to create havoc in the low limits.

The problem with bots is not that they play better than the best people can (they don't, and they won't for a very long time)... the problem is that they can play tirelessly in countless games simultaneously. Even if a bot can pull only $5 per table per hour out of a $3-$6 game, one person with that software can play countless $3-$6 games simultaneously, 24/7, and pull thousands per day out of the games.

If enough people run this racket, the suckers will go broke far faster than they do now, and they will stop playing. Only the better players (those that can beat the bots) will be able to play for any sustained period of time.

Furthermore, I have NO DOUBT that the bots are coming. They may be mostly rumor and speculation now, but eventually they won't be. And yes, they will ruin low limit poker. And there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it, as far as I can tell.

[Randy Burgess]

I had read in that NYT Science Section article on poker & AI that poki in particular was very strong ... still beatable by the best humans, though.

Maybe the online poker sites will develop algorithms to detect bot-enhanced play and disqualify it, ha ha.

But if bots do come to infest online play, I'm not entirely persuaded that's a bad thing. Not to get overly philosophical, but the world is going to hell in a handbasket partly because we have too damn much virtual reality and are prone to overook other planes. At any rate I can't get all worked up about it, even though I'd be one of those affected.

[J_V]

The sites will be able to stop the bots. However, it will greatly inconvenience people. They could have a random pop up word come up and the players would have to type it to prevent being logged off or something.

[MicroBob]

[ QUOTE ]
Another side note... a player at Pacific Poker told me that the hands are rigged to induce action (such as whenever AA is out KK is or flush flops always pair the board on a later street so the flushes lose to boats etc.) This is probably just some guy that got drawn out on once to often but, hey whaddaya think about it??

[/ QUOTE ]

do you just believe anything that anyone happens to tell you??


i didn't see this response the first time around.

this question is so silly that i wonder about its legitimacy.

however, i suspect it is real and that the poster really is asking for opinions on what some guy at Pacific (of all sites) told him.

FYI - it is popularly rumoured that the sites set up 'action flops' to produce bigger pots and bring home more rake.
somebody comes on these forums once a week or so claiming this is OBVIOUSLY happening.


it is also commonly believed by most on this site that these people are pathetic losers making excuses for their own poker inadequacies. those that make these claims typically use adecdotal evidence about how they saw 'way more high-card flops then they ever see in a B&M poker-room'. etc etc.


in short - some people just aren't terribly smart and refuse to identify themselves as the reason why they keep losing at poker.


also - if pacific really wanted to increase their take....why don't they just take steps to speed up their tables AND/OR allow multi-table play on their site?


the overall premise of action-flops is just goofy.


[ QUOTE ]
True, I must confess that I chose the subject title "Unsettling Bot NEWS" knowing full well that this wasn't news.

[/ QUOTE ]


i should have also stated that some guy who went to the WSOP telling you about these evil-bots not only doesn't qualify as 'news' but also doesn't qualify as 'unsettling'.


i am more 'unsettled' by the number of people who actually think there are rigged games, action-flops, and killer-bots on all of their tables.

i also find it 'unsettling' that one would think some 'pro' at the WSOP or some guy on pacific talking about action-flops would be deserving of any credibilitiy at all.

[Kevroc]

Thanks Bob, these were the type of comments I was hoping to get. A touch hostile but, the ones I wanted anyways. There's no such thing as a stupid question, we approach these forums for reassurance as much as we do for answers to questions about difficult poker situations. You got my Irish up for a second there but, ultimately I walk away feeling better about the whole thing.

Also, ya gotta trust that I am no fool and do not take the so-called pro's comments and the Pacific guy's comments to heart. This thread provoked alot of conversation and thats what it was intended to do. I say bring on the bots! We can take em!

I can see it now...

Party 2/4 9 handed UTG is LAG, MP and MP2 are BOT.. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[adanthar]

[the following is greatly simplified programming-wise, not least because I don't know *how to* do any of this myself]

Most multiplayer online games have all had similar problems with bots and 'duping' (duplicating virtual items/gold) and have come up with solutions (not perfect solutions, but pretty good ones) after some growing pains. All of these are applicable to poker.

The thing about bots is that they, much like any other similar application, need access to the memory space where the card graphics are shown on the screen. Encryption won't work for various reasons (the client must show a card on the screen, and if you can see that, a bot can be written to see it as well), *but*, in theory, a poker client application can always be written to see any other application attempting to access that memory space.

Here's the kicker: every time a poker site requires users to download a new patch, every user of every bot is essentially risking that the update contains a new, superior bot detection feature (which would make Party alone millions, since they don't have to pay any accounts they freeze for bot usage.) The eventual result will be something along the lines of the DirectTV hacker cases- ten thousand people with smart cards that got zapped remotely, then sued for $7500 apiece. Except that, instead of being sued, all these people already have a ton of money on Party's own virtual servers. Oops.

So, basically, bots will proliferate for a while, until a patch wipes 95% of the account holders out within a couple of hours. Have fun suing a corporation operating out of a Canadian Indian reservation, folks; I hear the jurisdiction issues are a bitch.

[soah]

[ QUOTE ]
The sites will be able to stop the bots. However, it will greatly inconvenience people. They could have a random pop up word come up and the players would have to type it to prevent being logged off or something.

[/ QUOTE ]

This would accomplish nothing. You can download software for free that is capable of cracking letters/numbers in image format. I played an online game (free) which had that security feature, and I more frequenty heard a PLAYER complaining of being unable to read the image than I heard of a program having trouble -- and I had plenty of connections with the "cheaters" of the game. =) Successfully getting away with cheating in that game was a constant evolution to avoid the latest countermeasures. Unfortunately (for us, at least!), the threat of account deletion was constant. Unfortunately for the general public, innoncent bystanders were frequently hit as well, especially as the cheating improved and became harder to detect.

As was mentioned in a pot above, freezing accounts of bots that are detected would be a deterrent, but I think the sites will always be one step behind, and mistakenly labeling a few innoncent players as cheaters could generate a lot of bad PR.

[adanthar]

Being one step behind is not a problem with a situation like this. You only need to tie once to break every bot player on your site logged in that day within an hour. Moreover, the site has as much monetary incentive to take effective countermeasures as the bot user does to write (or use) a bot; they save themselves thousands for every account they close.

Mistakes aren't really an issue once you get into countermeasures involving more than just 'detecting the word 'winholdem' on the computer screen.' Once the program starts actively detecting memory sniffers, or looks for specific files and time stamps on a hard drive coupled with particular betting patterns, things get a lot more interesting. And like I said, they only need to catch up *once*.