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i worked in anti-fraud for a large online gaming house for about six years from 2003 to 2009 so my information is not current. At that time, there were no bots

i worked in anti-fraud for a large online gaming house for about six years from 2003 to 2009 so my information is not current. At that time, there were no bots (whether in the wild or in academic, eg, University of Alberta) that could competitively play no-limit, likewise for tournaments (which account for a large portion of the total hands played in online poker Sites). Anyone know if this has changed?

skizm 10y ago
As someone who works in anti-fraud, would you be able to detect someone who was playing manually, but had a bot set up to tell them what to do (and then they would manually input the move)? Is that even illegal or against the rules?
- ggggtez 10y ago
  Of course it's against the rules. People have done this in casinos with black jack. Definitely not something the casino is going to allow, because they lose the money if the boot plays better than humans.
- lettergram 10y ago
  You should be able to tell. It's fairly straight forward outlier detection; if someone is doing 20% better than anyone you've seen before you monitor them. If they continue to do better constantly you manually look, then you can either make a choice manually or have a system auto remove them. They may even remove you just because you are costing them too much money (depending how the game is setup).
  - frgewut 10y ago
    It should be easy to artificially lower bot's advantage to 1-5%. It still would be profitable, but wouldn't stand out among other players.
- doug1001 10y ago
  great questions; here's where we drew the line (our Terms of Service (TOS) were fairly standard): it was within the TOS to use a "poker assistant"--an app that worked with the Site client (eg, PokerStars, or in my case, bwin.party)--provided that this app was populated with hand histories that you have personally generated against the opponents you are playing against. In other words, you cannot mine hand histories in bulk, feed them to your "assistant" and then let it tell you how to play. keep in mind also that the whales in online poker are not high stakes players but "grinders"--folks who quit their day job to play a very disciplined style on low-stakes limit tables comprised mostly of beginners, and which requires multi-tabling (maybe 6 - 10 tables at once) 8 hours/day. So against that background, a bot playing 10 tables simultaneously for 10 hours each day, from a distance doesn't look so odd.
ludamad 10y ago
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/05/man-is-greater-than-machine-players-win-732-713-against-ai-p-21508.htm http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/05/man-is-greater-than-ma... Person beats no-limit bot recently http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/06/suspected-bots-on-pokerstars-under-investigation-21860.htm http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/06/suspected-bots-on-poke... Omaha bots winning $1.5 million in the wild. I assume this (Omaha bot) is quite advanced past what you were dealing with?
- hanasu 10y ago
  In theory, an Omaha bot wouldn't have to be as advanced as a hold'em bot simply because the 'theory' of that game is not as strong as hold'em yet. Omaha still attracts a greater percentage of losing players as well.
jonahx 10y ago
strong limit bots (including 6max) have been around for a while, and are one of the reasons for the demise of online limit games. the technology exists for strong NL bots as well: http://www.pokersnowie.com/ http://www.pokersnowie.com/. there is a consensus among many expert player that pokersnowie is very strong. you can search twoplustwo or deucescracked for lots of disucssion. i am not sure if bots as strong as pokersnowie have infiltrated online games, or to what extent they have. my guess would be that they have.
TheCowboy 10y ago
Over the last year there was a situation where a player was using and sharing Nash "charts" for no limit on Pokerstars. Originally PS had allowed the software, but decided to change its police since it was more than just a preflop starting hand chart. I believe the charts were used in headsup SNGs, which makes sense since it eliminates a lot of variables in solving for game theory optimal plays, and a lot of the play is shortstacked. And if a human can look at a chart and click a button, then so can a piece of software. More here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/3rd-party-software-pokerstars-proposed-rule-changes-1538981/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/3rd-part... I've also talked to a few players who suspect there exist bots in headsup cash games that avoid playing regular winning players. So I don't know if there are any 100% true general no limit bots, but there's definitely some automated play going on.
- mod 10y ago
  I used to run a bot that would select my games for me. I developed it myself. I played HUSNGs exclusively, and the bot would just scan the lobbies looking for below-average players to sit. It would them automatically sit them if I was not already playing 3 games (my winrate decreased drastically at 4 tables). I had a 60% winrate during that time, which is very, very good in HUSNGs.
kriro 10y ago
I would be very surprised if there weren't any bots that "short stacked" in that time span. Not sophisticated bots coming up with amazing strategies but rather bots designed for automating a mundane task. [I played semi professionally towards the end of that timespan, NLH cash]
vintermann 10y ago
Yes, game playing AI has progressed immensely since 2009, as evidenced by AlphaGo. I haven't looked at poker playing specifically, but I'm convinced that if there's a high-stakes game played online that doesn't have known superhuman bots, that's merely because the people who have made those bots make a fortune on keeping it secret.
stevoski 10y ago
Limit Hold'em Heads-up is 'solved'. Over the long run, the AI will break even no matter who the opponent is (rake excluded, of course). IIRC this involved making precalculations for the entire sample space, which is massive, but tiny compared to no-limit full-ring.
- bluecalm 10y ago
  It wasn't solved. It was "practically solved" - not a very scientific term put by the authors of that project (http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/ http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/). This means that the approximate solution is exploitable for about 0.1bb/100 hands. This is very close to the real solution but "solved" is a bit misleading as that term means something different when referring to games.
rando444 10y ago
I dedicated all of my free time to building poker bots from 2007 to 2009. I was a part of the winholdem community, which a large group of us eventually got upset with the developer of the software and then rebuilt the software and called it openholdem. The only ones that were successful back then was this small group who had their bots dump information about all the opponents at the table into a large database and built up profiles of everyone they encountered, and then programmed the bots to use these player profiles to figure out how to play against them. Eventually this group stopped sharing their results with anyone not directly involved in their little project and went even more behind the scenes. I imagine these things would be hard to detect since the botting software is running on a completely separate computer and only sending mouse clicks to the computer that is playing poker.

skizm 10y ago

As someone who works in anti-fraud, would you be able to detect someone who was playing manually, but had a bot set up to tell them what to do (and then they would manually input the move)? Is that even illegal or against the rules?

ggggtez 10y ago
Of course it's against the rules. People have done this in casinos with black jack. Definitely not something the casino is going to allow, because they lose the money if the boot plays better than humans.
lettergram 10y ago
You should be able to tell. It's fairly straight forward outlier detection; if someone is doing 20% better than anyone you've seen before you monitor them. If they continue to do better constantly you manually look, then you can either make a choice manually or have a system auto remove them. They may even remove you just because you are costing them too much money (depending how the game is setup).
- frgewut 10y ago
  It should be easy to artificially lower bot's advantage to 1-5%. It still would be profitable, but wouldn't stand out among other players.
doug1001 10y ago
great questions; here's where we drew the line (our Terms of Service (TOS) were fairly standard): it was within the TOS to use a "poker assistant"--an app that worked with the Site client (eg, PokerStars, or in my case, bwin.party)--provided that this app was populated with hand histories that you have personally generated against the opponents you are playing against. In other words, you cannot mine hand histories in bulk, feed them to your "assistant" and then let it tell you how to play. keep in mind also that the whales in online poker are not high stakes players but "grinders"--folks who quit their day job to play a very disciplined style on low-stakes limit tables comprised mostly of beginners, and which requires multi-tabling (maybe 6 - 10 tables at once) 8 hours/day. So against that background, a bot playing 10 tables simultaneously for 10 hours each day, from a distance doesn't look so odd.

ludamad 10y ago

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/05/man-is-greater-than-machine-players-win-732-713-against-ai-p-21508.htm http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/05/man-is-greater-than-ma... Person beats no-limit bot recently http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/06/suspected-bots-on-pokerstars-under-investigation-21860.htm http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/06/suspected-bots-on-poke... Omaha bots winning $1.5 million in the wild. I assume this (Omaha bot) is quite advanced past what you were dealing with?

hanasu 10y ago
In theory, an Omaha bot wouldn't have to be as advanced as a hold'em bot simply because the 'theory' of that game is not as strong as hold'em yet. Omaha still attracts a greater percentage of losing players as well.

jonahx 10y ago

strong limit bots (including 6max) have been around for a while, and are one of the reasons for the demise of online limit games. the technology exists for strong NL bots as well: http://www.pokersnowie.com/ http://www.pokersnowie.com/. there is a consensus among many expert player that pokersnowie is very strong. you can search twoplustwo or deucescracked for lots of disucssion. i am not sure if bots as strong as pokersnowie have infiltrated online games, or to what extent they have. my guess would be that they have.

TheCowboy 10y ago

Over the last year there was a situation where a player was using and sharing Nash "charts" for no limit on Pokerstars. Originally PS had allowed the software, but decided to change its police since it was more than just a preflop starting hand chart. I believe the charts were used in headsup SNGs, which makes sense since it eliminates a lot of variables in solving for game theory optimal plays, and a lot of the play is shortstacked. And if a human can look at a chart and click a button, then so can a piece of software. More here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/3rd-party-software-pokerstars-proposed-rule-changes-1538981/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/3rd-part... I've also talked to a few players who suspect there exist bots in headsup cash games that avoid playing regular winning players. So I don't know if there are any 100% true general no limit bots, but there's definitely some automated play going on.

mod 10y ago
I used to run a bot that would select my games for me. I developed it myself. I played HUSNGs exclusively, and the bot would just scan the lobbies looking for below-average players to sit. It would them automatically sit them if I was not already playing 3 games (my winrate decreased drastically at 4 tables). I had a 60% winrate during that time, which is very, very good in HUSNGs.

kriro 10y ago

I would be very surprised if there weren't any bots that "short stacked" in that time span. Not sophisticated bots coming up with amazing strategies but rather bots designed for automating a mundane task. [I played semi professionally towards the end of that timespan, NLH cash]

vintermann 10y ago

Yes, game playing AI has progressed immensely since 2009, as evidenced by AlphaGo. I haven't looked at poker playing specifically, but I'm convinced that if there's a high-stakes game played online that doesn't have known superhuman bots, that's merely because the people who have made those bots make a fortune on keeping it secret.

stevoski 10y ago

Limit Hold'em Heads-up is 'solved'. Over the long run, the AI will break even no matter who the opponent is (rake excluded, of course). IIRC this involved making precalculations for the entire sample space, which is massive, but tiny compared to no-limit full-ring.

bluecalm 10y ago
It wasn't solved. It was "practically solved" - not a very scientific term put by the authors of that project (http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/ http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/). This means that the approximate solution is exploitable for about 0.1bb/100 hands. This is very close to the real solution but "solved" is a bit misleading as that term means something different when referring to games.

rando444 10y ago

I dedicated all of my free time to building poker bots from 2007 to 2009. I was a part of the winholdem community, which a large group of us eventually got upset with the developer of the software and then rebuilt the software and called it openholdem. The only ones that were successful back then was this small group who had their bots dump information about all the opponents at the table into a large database and built up profiles of everyone they encountered, and then programmed the bots to use these player profiles to figure out how to play against them. Eventually this group stopped sharing their results with anyone not directly involved in their little project and went even more behind the scenes. I imagine these things would be hard to detect since the botting software is running on a completely separate computer and only sending mouse clicks to the computer that is playing poker.