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I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
by mattmaroon 1y ago
I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
- iEchoic 1y agoYou can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots. The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoI used to work for an online poker outfit. The boss wanted weak bots populating the tables so that we looked popular. Of course, he had a “crack team” of bot writers for playing on “other sites” to make money, too.
- sejje 1y agoThe poker world would love to hear your story. It would be the biggest news in some time.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoMight be another somewhat interesting perspective - not sure how filling in the details from my summary above could be big news. But sure, I’d write it up if it seems interesting enough to someone.
- sejje 1y agoBy and large it is not proven that bots exist in any large scale. The operator running his bots would be a betrayal and probably end the business of the poker site involved.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoThis was early in the online poker hype. I worked there for about a year, and they didn’t last long after I left the company. Forum posts from when they were still in business showed players suspected bot activity. The company wasn’t all that big, and I’m sure the lack of player trust did them in. Maybe it’s worth a couple hundred words.
- bee_rider 1y agoWow, is that really not some type of fraud? Fascinating.
- brightball 1y agoWhy wouldn’t you put the bots together at the same table if you could detect them?
- noitpmeder 1y agoBecause when, not if, but when, you have a false positive and put a player in a room full of bots you suddenly have a massive lawsuit on your hands
- reillychase 1y agoI'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.
- ogig 1y agoGiven how awful LLM are at chess, I'd say GPT sucks at poker. Making a profitable bot using state of the art poker software, like stockfish for chess? That's already done.
- yunwal 1y agoThe bot would realistically be GPT interacting with the web application and calling out to a poker engine for any calculations/decisions.
- noitpmeder 1y agoBut .. what .. why?? Sure you could use an AI agent to write that code, but it wouldn't actually being that AI agent in the hot loop constantly coordinating your UI interactions with the poker engine... Comments like these make me feel a bit safer from AI in my engineering job. People think it's a perfect no brainer fit for so many inane situations.
- deadbabe 1y agoDepends how good your bot is.
- JohnMakin 1y agoNot really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder. Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.
- bluecheese452 1y agoHeads up no limit holdem bots crush the best players in the world even 200bbs deep. So kind of like the same situation as chess. Not solved but not beatable.
- mattmaroon 1y agoI don’t believe it. There are just as many variables involved in writing a short story. Anyone who thinks machine learning can’t conquer poker is fooling themselves. I used to have bots collect every hand played on major poker sites in the early aughts so I’m sure there’s infinite training data. And if it can be done we know there’s sufficient financial incentive. So I (former long time professional poker player) feel reasonably confident online poker must be unwinnable by now.
- luxcem 1y agoYou don't even need training data, a bot that play itself à la AlphaZero will eventually collect more data than there are of actual games.
- nadermx 1y agoI dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.
- albatrossjr 1y agoSurprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.
- Waterluvian 1y agoAnd then there’s all the bots you aren’t spotting.
- albatrossjr 1y agoI'm sure there is some, but it's standard practice to keep at database of all your hands. I've sanity checked the winning regs (at my stakes) and they all make mistakes. I think it helps that in the US all the sites are geography based. It makes it harder and less financially viable to run a bot ring.
- recursive 1y agoI don't know what a reg is but I would assume the first thing you do after you get your bot working is to add some imperfect play so that you don't get banned by the most trivial heuristics.
- Waterluvian 1y agoYeah. Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. The hard part is making it look authentic and not emit any patterns or other signals that could be detected in the data.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoSo it's a cat and mouse game like most things, except the spread between the cat and the mouse is quite high but is still (somewhat) in favour of the mouse as the online poker world currently stands?
- danbrooks 1y agoI've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.
- morkalork 1y agoI heard it was poker-sites banning the (human) sharks
- bluecheese452 1y agoThe biggest by far was american laws and regulations. the us uiega law in 2006 and “black friday” ie the doj raiding full tilt and pokerstars in 2011. This decline was underway a full decade before bots really came on the scene.
- vmg12 1y agoThe problem is specifically with unregulated sites that don't verify the identities of players. The bots aren't so much the problem as the fact that they can collude and share hole cards. But fyi, bots aren't actually good at playing poker outside of specific scenarios vs bad players or in scenarios where the decision tree is not large (ie short stack tournaments where the decisions are pre computed, you can imagine how massive your edge can be when you have a pair of 9s and you know there are already 3 dead aces and your decision is only all in or fold)
- LostMyLogin 1y agoThe decline of poker started when I woke up on Black Friday to FT, PS, and UB all having the DOJ logo on them.
- mattmaroon 1y agoI had to open a Canadian bank account to get my money out!
- bluecheese452 1y agoYup, this was a much bigger deal than bots.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoYes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.
- monero-xmr 1y agoCash games in person are pretty bad too. Casinos need to make money and they only get it off rake, so they have lately turned a blind eye to collusion. The only safe poker (except among friends) is tournaments, in person, so they randomize the tables properly.
- vmg12 1y agoCollusion in live poker games in casinos is not a widespread problem. There is a problem with poker where people always think they are being cheated every time they lose. If you are playing in a casino in person it is very unlikely you are being cheated. If you are playing in a regulated website online that verifies the identities of the customers it is also unlikely you are being cheated. The vast majority of people that play poker absolutely suck and think they are being cheated because they lose money very quickly. Most bad poker players would literally be better off playing blackjack.
- sejje 1y agoBingo. Played thousands of hours in casinos. Saw some asshole show down cards to someone still in the hand, stuff like that, but never anything I thought was collusion. Plenty of other angles, though.
- darepublic 1y agoI used to play poker back in the 2000s. The online game was getting harder then and I can only imagine it's gotten worse? Also GTO solvers are a thing now? I don't know what stakes you are referring to but I feel like the overall quality of poker play has never been higher.
- 1y ago
- vmg12 1y agoOnline poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.
- bluecheese452 1y agoIt is for most variants of 2 player poker. Multiway still too difficult to solve.
- vmg12 1y agoWhat I meant by "poker isn't solved the same way chess is" is that if you take a solver and follow all the actions it tells you are "best" you will not make the most money. It isn't like stockfish where by using solver outputs you will automatically make more money than the best pros in the world. 99% of poker is understanding the unique ways your opponents are bad and adjusting your strategy to profit the most from them. Even the best pros in the world still make mistakes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- remify 1y agoPoker is "solved" for low level and high volume which is what a bot would be good at.
- charlieyu1 1y agoNot really. It is more about rake, and US regulations that make it hard for recreationals to play