5 ms·
This cat and mouse game is very interesting. I wrote a bot years ago that was easy to implement, since you could hook into the poker clients and listen for the
by bl4k 16y ago
This cat and mouse game is very interesting. I wrote a bot years ago that was easy to implement, since you could hook into the poker clients and listen for the window handler events. The more recent versions actually implement the console as graphics and the buttons as custom controls so that you can no longer do this. The modern bots use OCR to read the table play, so the sites responded again by changing it up.
Having a single bot in a tournament is not bad per se, since they are easy to identify (they do not respond to player rage, they shove or call on hands that may be +EV isolated, but in tournament play are not, and they are the player who come final table sit all quiet and do not respond to deals) - the prob arises when bot networks join a single tournament and collude - especially on the double or nothing tournaments (where if you finish in the top half you get double your money, or nothing)
Stars and FTP are very agressive with combating the problem. I receive refunds all the time because of previous games that have been investigated, so it is great that other players can rely on their work (and it is good to login and find that you have extra money because they are doing their job). These sites are making a lot of money on rake but they are definitely re-investing it to protect the players. They have hired some of the best security guys in the world to work for them (I know one of them, he should do an AMA because it would be super interesting).
- eclark 16y agoThe profitable bots are a lot more than just shove bots. They take into account: Hand ranges, Nash Equilibrium (This is really cool stuff imo),EV of flop/turn/river, return from promotions, rake,reaction time of user, position, table image The last I saw the custom bots being run were buying up hand histories by the millions and using pre-flop agression and all the other factors to preform clustering. Then they clusters were used to choose a strategy. Stars and FTP are both pretty good about finding bots. But poker bot writers are learning from game bot makers. They are pretty well protected on the client end. So as long as the bots have some variance they are really hard to spot. And a lot of the variance comes from choosing how to play the person who is betting. Though it looks like some bot writers have not been putting enough variance into their bots. For a long time the big push was to find ways to make the input look like it came from a human. Moving the cursor to the exact middle of the button you want to push every time in <100ms is a dead give away. I don't really know if this was ever something that FTP and stars used though.
- jhamburger 16y agoGoing further, it would be trivial to randomize delays and user input, but the more difficult thing would be to make it random in a human way. Human input is obviously not random but fits into detectable patterns with certain levels of variance. I'm sure the people running the sites could use all sorts of stats in their bot detection algorithm such as when the time gets past midnight in the local time zone human users starts to get sleepy and the avg response time goes down by 50ms or whatever...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- BrandonM 16y ago> Moving the cursor to the exact middle of the button you want to push every time in <100ms is a dead give away. This seems intuitive, but it is actually false. The majority of "grinders" (mid-stakes players who multi-table 9-24 tables at a time for a living) use programs like autohotkey that actually do exactly this, allowing players to play with the keyboard and even console (e.g. PS3) controllers. The most popular poker sites explicitly allow those helper programs.
- LiveTheDream 16y agoClicking the button in the exact same spot is not a good way to detect a robot though. Many multi-tabling players use hotkeys to trigger their actions, which is much nicer than a mouse and is almost essential once you get up to 12+ tables.
- LiveTheDream 16y agoAlso the hotkey software is explicitly allowed by poker sites, as long as no automatic moves are taken (e.g. auto-folding).
- eclark 16y agoAutoIt and others don't actually click the button though. So they are not the same behavior. Poker sites can tell if the keyboard interrupt came from which usb id so that isn't really an option. Moving the mouse is much more likely not to have a way to see if the hardware caused it. Hence why it is used more often.
- mian2zi3 16y agoI built a bot that used screen scraping, OCR and play reconstruction from the beginning. I had pretty generic logic to handle all the major sites. When a site changed up their display, I just generalized my approach to handle it. I don't really see how they could counter this in general. My bot was never detected. I timed my bot based on statistics I gathered from other human players, including play schedule, breaks, click response time, etc. I know a guy who worked for an international gambling syndicate, primarily betting on horse races. According to him, they tried to get into online poker bots, but kept getting caught. It sounded like they were using groups of bots and collusion, which I think is how they were detected.
- jberryman 16y agoDid you make money?
- mian2zi3 16y agoNo. I don't really play poker. I was responsible for the software. My poker guy didn't step up to do the strategy. I thought about learning poker seriously myself, but eventually decided getting a PhD in math was a better use of time, so I went that route.