5 ms·

Multi-tabling poker player plays 120 tables at a time, verified human

124 points by LiveTheDream 16y ago

alexophile 16y ago
I think the important takeaway here is that there's someone in the world who's job it is to verify that high-performing entities are indeed human...
- ahi 16y ago
  I think Gibson named them the Turing Police.
- dedward 16y ago
  Interesting in and of itself. The only reason, though, that this is necessary is due to public perception. A bunch of bots battling it out at an online poker table isn't by itself a concern for the online poker site - they get paid either way - the concern arises because the customers, the public, won't play if they perceive that bots are being used. (Bots allow collusion and stealing from other players - not stealing from the house) Interesting article - I've seen enough good poker players to know that people can do exceptional things like this - I don't find the story that unbelievable. (What I find more unbelievable is that someone with that much skill didn't have bots going on somewhere....)
pak 16y ago
Now that's something to put on your resume/t-shirt: "I was verified to be human by PokerStars.net"
- jhamburger 16y ago
  I had this happen back in my pokerstars days, a captcha pops up with a limited amount of time to complete it. However I was playing "only" 16 tables at the time.
  - jules 16y ago
    Did you read the post? They went to the guys house...having completed a CAPTCHA is not that impressive on your resume.
    - jhamburger 16y ago
      Well I was still "verified as human by Pokerstars" so I'm qualified for the t-shirt
      - Roedou 16y ago
        I passed the CAPTCHA when I signed up. Do I get one as well?
mynameishere 16y ago
"The Goldman Sachs trader was observed issuing upwards of 60,000 false bids on 1000 different securities each, entirely within a 1 second timeframe, and was able to lift his hands from the console and hold a conversation with our SEC representative while working his many 'tables'..."
- jrockway 16y ago
  These artificial limitations do not exist in the real world. Let a computer do the hard stuff so that you have time to enjoy your 4.5 million dollar condo!
jiganti 16y ago
I've been on 2+2 for the better part of a decade and can tell you the online poker community has far more pressing concerns than 'bots' that hope to eek out a few dollars an hour playing a large amount of tables. [1] It's certainly an impressive feat to be able to play 120 tables at a time, but naturally the more tables you play the less attention you are able to give to what's going on. As online poker sites give you a time bank of around 30 seconds, if you are playing more than 20 or so tables you don't really have time to consider more than your hole cards, the board, and the effective chip stack (whichever person has the lower amount of chips, applicable in "no limit" games). To play 120 tables and make a profit is only possible at the absolute lowest levels, when you're making decisions in less than a few seconds, and only considering the cards in your own hand. Even then, I can't imagine doing this successfully. A common criticism in the poker community about people who play a lot of tables (anywhere from 6-12 tables is pretty standard for most professional online players, less than 6 shows a pretty remarkable discipline actually, excluding those who play heads up poker in which 2-4 tables is more common) is that these people don't have time to consider their decisions, and therefore won't improve. If they have a set decision they do in every type of situation, they won't get any better by failing to explore the value of each of their options. Further, the nature of online poker is such that the games have been getting increasingly tough each year, and failing to improve will likely turn you into a break even player. The problem is that almost every competitive online poker player signs up for what is called "rakeback" from sites like http://rakemonkey.com http://rakemonkey.com and http://raketherake.com http://raketherake.com. In short, these types of sites have deals with the poker sites that allow players to get a percentage (usually 27%-30%) of their rake back (the few dollars from each pot that the site takes as profit). So playing 16 tables at a time becomes very appealing to the guy trying to grind out a living playing the $1/$2 no limit games, as he can easily make $5,000 from rakeback alone. My theory is that as a player's poker career progresses (and he ages) he becomes more risk averse, and so rakeback becomes that much more appealing. By the time I turned 18 I was playing some of the larger stakes games online as the money meant little to me (purely out of ignorance to the value of a dollar) so I wasn't afraid to try to climb the limits as far as I could. As little as 18 months later I had dropped down limits after a number of high stakes shots ended badly, and afterwards while grinding the mid-stakes games, I loved my rakeback. [1] http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ultimatebet-scandal-sticky-251207/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ultim...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Tichy 16y ago
It sounds almost as if they were still trying to establish that he is not a bot when they were seeing him in the flesh :-)
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Well, I don't think a bot became sentient and decided to make some money on online poker. Usually there are people writing the bots, and the poker site has to make sure they aren't using them, not that the people aren't bots.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    I understood that, I just found sentences like "The player was able to verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play." amusing. As if him being unable to chat might have indicated failure of the Turing test.
    - LiveTheDream 16y ago
      The conversation test may have been to establish the the player wasn't blindly following instructions from a robot. Holding a conversation with the investigators would at least make it difficult to follow surreptitious advice.
    - dedward 16y ago
      Could be read that way. The point, though, was to prove the computers weren't playing automatically and that the human was the one actually making decisions - the computers were just helping with the manual non-strategic aspects of running that many games at once.
    - c23gooey 16y ago
      I understood that sentence to add to the incredulity of being able to play 120 tables at once and still hold a conversation
rogermugs 16y ago
thats nothing. one time in college I showered, shampooed, brushed my teeth, AND peed all at the same time. 4 simultaneous body functions > many poker tables (particularly in $ earned)
Luc 16y ago
"In the end, rs03rs03 averages 120 tables at once when at full speed, playing about 100,000 hands over the course of about 55,800 seconds. That's about 1.8 hands per second (slightly more actions, though, since some hands are multi-decision)." Can anyone speculate what strategy might allow him to play 1.8 hands per second on average?
- jiganti 16y ago
  First of all, he was playing tournaments with a buyin of $1 maximum- likely less. So he can get away with playing a very simple strategy. He was certainly not making standard raises, I imagine he was playing a "push-fold" strategy from the start, meaning he either went all-in or folded on his initial turn to act. His range for this strategy probably included TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA, AK, AQ and maybe a few more hands later on in the tournaments.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  Cascaded tables... A table with a pending action pops to the front, and others go immediately behind it. Various helper programs put the mouse in the right place, set the appropriate bet size, register for new tournaments, etc. Basically all he has to do is click Check, Bet/Raise, or Fold (using the keyboard or a controller), and everything else is taken care of. This is tangential to your question, but proper strategy in Double or Nothing tournaments is to play extremely tight. The top 5/10 players get just under double their buy-in back. Winning one hand can sometimes be enough to win the entire tournament, and I've even won one without playing a single hand. The point is that he's folding probably 90% of hands preflop.

124 points by LiveTheDream 16y ago

I think the important takeaway here is that there's someone in the world who's job it is to verify that high-performing entities are indeed human...

ahi 16y ago
I think Gibson named them the Turing Police.
dedward 16y ago
Interesting in and of itself. The only reason, though, that this is necessary is due to public perception. A bunch of bots battling it out at an online poker table isn't by itself a concern for the online poker site - they get paid either way - the concern arises because the customers, the public, won't play if they perceive that bots are being used. (Bots allow collusion and stealing from other players - not stealing from the house) Interesting article - I've seen enough good poker players to know that people can do exceptional things like this - I don't find the story that unbelievable. (What I find more unbelievable is that someone with that much skill didn't have bots going on somewhere....)

pak 16y ago

Now that's something to put on your resume/t-shirt: "I was verified to be human by PokerStars.net"

jhamburger 16y ago
I had this happen back in my pokerstars days, a captcha pops up with a limited amount of time to complete it. However I was playing "only" 16 tables at the time.
- jules 16y ago
  Did you read the post? They went to the guys house...having completed a CAPTCHA is not that impressive on your resume.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    Well I was still "verified as human by Pokerstars" so I'm qualified for the t-shirt
    - Roedou 16y ago
      I passed the CAPTCHA when I signed up. Do I get one as well?

mynameishere 16y ago

"The Goldman Sachs trader was observed issuing upwards of 60,000 false bids on 1000 different securities each, entirely within a 1 second timeframe, and was able to lift his hands from the console and hold a conversation with our SEC representative while working his many 'tables'..."

jrockway 16y ago
These artificial limitations do not exist in the real world. Let a computer do the hard stuff so that you have time to enjoy your 4.5 million dollar condo!

jiganti 16y ago

I've been on 2+2 for the better part of a decade and can tell you the online poker community has far more pressing concerns than 'bots' that hope to eek out a few dollars an hour playing a large amount of tables. [1] It's certainly an impressive feat to be able to play 120 tables at a time, but naturally the more tables you play the less attention you are able to give to what's going on. As online poker sites give you a time bank of around 30 seconds, if you are playing more than 20 or so tables you don't really have time to consider more than your hole cards, the board, and the effective chip stack (whichever person has the lower amount of chips, applicable in "no limit" games). To play 120 tables and make a profit is only possible at the absolute lowest levels, when you're making decisions in less than a few seconds, and only considering the cards in your own hand. Even then, I can't imagine doing this successfully. A common criticism in the poker community about people who play a lot of tables (anywhere from 6-12 tables is pretty standard for most professional online players, less than 6 shows a pretty remarkable discipline actually, excluding those who play heads up poker in which 2-4 tables is more common) is that these people don't have time to consider their decisions, and therefore won't improve. If they have a set decision they do in every type of situation, they won't get any better by failing to explore the value of each of their options. Further, the nature of online poker is such that the games have been getting increasingly tough each year, and failing to improve will likely turn you into a break even player. The problem is that almost every competitive online poker player signs up for what is called "rakeback" from sites like http://rakemonkey.com http://rakemonkey.com and http://raketherake.com http://raketherake.com. In short, these types of sites have deals with the poker sites that allow players to get a percentage (usually 27%-30%) of their rake back (the few dollars from each pot that the site takes as profit). So playing 16 tables at a time becomes very appealing to the guy trying to grind out a living playing the $1/$2 no limit games, as he can easily make $5,000 from rakeback alone. My theory is that as a player's poker career progresses (and he ages) he becomes more risk averse, and so rakeback becomes that much more appealing. By the time I turned 18 I was playing some of the larger stakes games online as the money meant little to me (purely out of ignorance to the value of a dollar) so I wasn't afraid to try to climb the limits as far as I could. As little as 18 months later I had dropped down limits after a number of high stakes shots ended badly, and afterwards while grinding the mid-stakes games, I loved my rakeback. [1] http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ultimatebet-scandal-sticky-251207/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ultim...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Tichy 16y ago

It sounds almost as if they were still trying to establish that he is not a bot when they were seeing him in the flesh :-)

StavrosK 16y ago
Well, I don't think a bot became sentient and decided to make some money on online poker. Usually there are people writing the bots, and the poker site has to make sure they aren't using them, not that the people aren't bots.
- Tichy 16y ago
  I understood that, I just found sentences like "The player was able to verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play." amusing. As if him being unable to chat might have indicated failure of the Turing test.
  - LiveTheDream 16y ago
    The conversation test may have been to establish the the player wasn't blindly following instructions from a robot. Holding a conversation with the investigators would at least make it difficult to follow surreptitious advice.
  - dedward 16y ago
    Could be read that way. The point, though, was to prove the computers weren't playing automatically and that the human was the one actually making decisions - the computers were just helping with the manual non-strategic aspects of running that many games at once.
  - c23gooey 16y ago
    I understood that sentence to add to the incredulity of being able to play 120 tables at once and still hold a conversation

rogermugs 16y ago

thats nothing. one time in college I showered, shampooed, brushed my teeth, AND peed all at the same time. 4 simultaneous body functions > many poker tables (particularly in $ earned)

Luc 16y ago

"In the end, rs03rs03 averages 120 tables at once when at full speed, playing about 100,000 hands over the course of about 55,800 seconds. That's about 1.8 hands per second (slightly more actions, though, since some hands are multi-decision)." Can anyone speculate what strategy might allow him to play 1.8 hands per second on average?

jiganti 16y ago
First of all, he was playing tournaments with a buyin of $1 maximum- likely less. So he can get away with playing a very simple strategy. He was certainly not making standard raises, I imagine he was playing a "push-fold" strategy from the start, meaning he either went all-in or folded on his initial turn to act. His range for this strategy probably included TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA, AK, AQ and maybe a few more hands later on in the tournaments.
BrandonM 16y ago
Cascaded tables... A table with a pending action pops to the front, and others go immediately behind it. Various helper programs put the mouse in the right place, set the appropriate bet size, register for new tournaments, etc. Basically all he has to do is click Check, Bet/Raise, or Fold (using the keyboard or a controller), and everything else is taken care of. This is tangential to your question, but proper strategy in Double or Nothing tournaments is to play extremely tight. The top 5/10 players get just under double their buy-in back. Winning one hand can sometimes be enough to win the entire tournament, and I've even won one without playing a single hand. The point is that he's folding probably 90% of hands preflop.