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Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer

84 points by matt1 17y ago

TweedHeads 17y ago
Everything casino related should be considered spam, unless there is absolutely no mention of a real casino website. They are masters of deception and even if the post is tech related it should be watched closely. I know them for I've been inside the beast.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  How you managed to amass 500+ karma points, I'll never know. I routinely see your comments voted down into oblivion. Kudos for persistence, I guess.
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    Oblivion used to be much deeper than -8. It must help.
JacobAldridge 17y ago
An interesting juxtaposition against the series being written at Coding the Wheel. Both are very clear about the difficulties involved - my suspicion is they push the "eating glass" type analogies primarily so that they don't appear to be encouraging further development. After all, the challenges involved appear to be what motivates them (and many Hackers) in the first place.
- matt1 17y ago
  Somehow I never read Coding the Wheel until tonight. My initial impression is that he made some things way more complicated than they had to be and other things way simpler than they needed to be. But who knows--there's definitely more than one way to do it.
petercooper 17y ago
Once you’ve agreed on a time period and a way to count the results, how can you be sure that the results weren’t a product of luck and variance instead of skill? That should only matter if your motivation for developing a poker bot was to develop a program that could demonstrate "skill" rather than one that could produce the highest profits (such as if you were a computer scientist). If you wanted to produce the highest profits, then your metric for comparing implementations would be net profit over the long run. It is okay to come up with some set of metrics to attempt to measure "skill" in the short term while developing your algorithm, perhaps, but that's when you're in "computer scientist" mode. Ultimately skill is irrelevant if your goal is to make a profit over time, and if it were not, I suspect you would not be working on such a project in the first place.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Net profit is a factor of many things that have nothing to do with the bot. How good of a system you have for getting new accounts/ip addresses, how well you can funnel money from one dummy account back to you, how well you avoid detection, etc. Still, you can easily determine the mathematical certainty for a given win rate and sample size.
  - matt1 17y ago
    Matt you hit the nail on the head. People like to think that if you can build a winning bot you can easily run it on a dozen computers and rake in millions of dollars. In reality, the logistics of running such an operation are prohibitively difficult--at least if you want to stay within the bounds of the law.
    - loglaunch 17y ago
      are you planning on writing the next in the series soon? pretty interesting.
      - matt1 17y ago
        Yeah, soon. Anything specific you want to hear about?
jack7890 17y ago
Matt, this is great stuff, I hope you continue this series of posts. This topic loosely breaks into two domains--the technical details of programming and running the bot and the theory that drives the bot's AI. Personally I think there's already been a lot written about the former, so I'm more interested in the latter. Would love to know how went about developing the bot's decision algorithm.
JeremyBanks 17y ago
Reminds me of http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-poker-bot http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working...
worldhello 17y ago
I noticed in the article that PokerStars ensured screenshots were being blocked? How is this possible?
- matt1 17y ago
  Great observation. I assume you mean because of the Screen Shot button on the bot software. I had to do that because when I tried taking screen shots of the few CAPTCHAs I saw, I wasn't able to paste it into MS Paint, so I built my own screen shot procedure. Not sure how they did it.

84 points by matt1 17y ago

Everything casino related should be considered spam, unless there is absolutely no mention of a real casino website. They are masters of deception and even if the post is tech related it should be watched closely. I know them for I've been inside the beast.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
How you managed to amass 500+ karma points, I'll never know. I routinely see your comments voted down into oblivion. Kudos for persistence, I guess.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  Oblivion used to be much deeper than -8. It must help.

JacobAldridge 17y ago

An interesting juxtaposition against the series being written at Coding the Wheel. Both are very clear about the difficulties involved - my suspicion is they push the "eating glass" type analogies primarily so that they don't appear to be encouraging further development. After all, the challenges involved appear to be what motivates them (and many Hackers) in the first place.

matt1 17y ago
Somehow I never read Coding the Wheel until tonight. My initial impression is that he made some things way more complicated than they had to be and other things way simpler than they needed to be. But who knows--there's definitely more than one way to do it.

petercooper 17y ago

Once you’ve agreed on a time period and a way to count the results, how can you be sure that the results weren’t a product of luck and variance instead of skill? That should only matter if your motivation for developing a poker bot was to develop a program that could demonstrate "skill" rather than one that could produce the highest profits (such as if you were a computer scientist). If you wanted to produce the highest profits, then your metric for comparing implementations would be net profit over the long run. It is okay to come up with some set of metrics to attempt to measure "skill" in the short term while developing your algorithm, perhaps, but that's when you're in "computer scientist" mode. Ultimately skill is irrelevant if your goal is to make a profit over time, and if it were not, I suspect you would not be working on such a project in the first place.

mattmaroon 17y ago
Net profit is a factor of many things that have nothing to do with the bot. How good of a system you have for getting new accounts/ip addresses, how well you can funnel money from one dummy account back to you, how well you avoid detection, etc. Still, you can easily determine the mathematical certainty for a given win rate and sample size.
- matt1 17y ago
  Matt you hit the nail on the head. People like to think that if you can build a winning bot you can easily run it on a dozen computers and rake in millions of dollars. In reality, the logistics of running such an operation are prohibitively difficult--at least if you want to stay within the bounds of the law.
  - loglaunch 17y ago
    are you planning on writing the next in the series soon? pretty interesting.
    - matt1 17y ago
      Yeah, soon. Anything specific you want to hear about?

jack7890 17y ago

Matt, this is great stuff, I hope you continue this series of posts. This topic loosely breaks into two domains--the technical details of programming and running the bot and the theory that drives the bot's AI. Personally I think there's already been a lot written about the former, so I'm more interested in the latter. Would love to know how went about developing the bot's decision algorithm.

JeremyBanks 17y ago

Reminds me of http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-poker-bot http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working...

worldhello 17y ago

I noticed in the article that PokerStars ensured screenshots were being blocked? How is this possible?

matt1 17y ago
Great observation. I assume you mean because of the Screen Shot button on the bot software. I had to do that because when I tried taking screen shots of the few CAPTCHAs I saw, I wasn't able to paste it into MS Paint, so I built my own screen shot procedure. Not sure how they did it.