4 ms·

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 ca

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?
    - lliiffee 17y ago
      Why was it so bad as to be comparable to eating glass?
      - matt1 17y ago
        What I meant was that building a bot is worse because you don't realize immediately that it's a bad idea, unlike eating glass. This topic is important and deserves a long discussion--its one of the main things I want to write about in the future.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Yeah, I've gone through much of the rest of the process before between bonus abusing casinos, running a rakeback site, and my own poker play. Once upon a time Party Poker offered a guaranteed 10% APR on all balances up to $10k, paid out monthly given a certain relatively small level of pay. I imagine their multiple account detection process back then was relatively crude compared to what Stars has now, but it caused me some pain. And I know Full Tilt is very good at it now.
  - matt1 17y ago
    Honestly I didn't even bother trying setting up multiple accounts. The money was a nice, but it really wasn't the primary goal. Plus, in order to maximize profits I would have had to tread in a lot of murky waters that I didn't want to be near. For example, say you have a roommate run the bot. How do you get the profits from his poker account into your bank account? Not as easy as it might seem.
    - mattmaroon 17y ago
      Pro-tip: the legal solution to the roommate dilemma is limited power of attorney :)
      - LargeWu 17y ago
        But since online poker winnings are technically illegal in the US, doesn't that invalidate any legal standing over them, similar to how gambling debts are unenforceable?
        mattmaroon 17y ago
        Online poker winnings are not illegal in the US. Playing online poker (or any form of gambling other than sports betting) is provably illegal only in a few states. But in those states, perhaps. I never had to pay an attorney to review that :)
- aidanf 17y ago
  What was your bot's ROI and over how many games?
petercooper 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. Those are ancillary factors that have an effect on net profit. They are not metrics. Taking the story from the post, if my "friends and family" were asking me about the "success" of a poker bot, I'd still point to net profit as the best metric with which to define success (unless you're doing it for CS/math reasons). It's a bit like if I'm a professional, regular poker player and family members ask me how I'm doing. I'd tell them how much money I've won (or lost), not the intricate details of how I play.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Well, I was a professional poker player for over 5 years, and you're wrong. I looked at it the way he did in his article. We all do. You probably wouldn't tell your dad that stuff only because he likely wouldn't understand, but it would be at the front of your mind. We're obsessed with the performance metric, big bets per hour for live players, big bets per 100 hands (BB/100) for online. Standard deviations, results ranges, levels of certainty. You obsess about that stuff or you end up broke. (Of course, you may do both.) In fact if you read online poker forums, hands and win rates are rarely ever discussed with dollar values because they aren't very relevant. They're almost always given in terms of big bets, and most if not all online hand converters (which take a hand history from a poker site and print it out in an easy to read format for posting on forums) convert to that automatically. The absolute dollar amounts are only useful for getting a very rough estimate of the level of competition given no other information.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    You obsess about that stuff or you end up broke. So are you saying that, ultimately, profit is the most important metric? ;-)
- dejb 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?
  - lliiffee 17y ago
    Why was it so bad as to be comparable to eating glass?
    - matt1 17y ago
      What I meant was that building a bot is worse because you don't realize immediately that it's a bad idea, unlike eating glass. This topic is important and deserves a long discussion--its one of the main things I want to write about in the future.
mattmaroon 17y ago
Yeah, I've gone through much of the rest of the process before between bonus abusing casinos, running a rakeback site, and my own poker play. Once upon a time Party Poker offered a guaranteed 10% APR on all balances up to $10k, paid out monthly given a certain relatively small level of pay. I imagine their multiple account detection process back then was relatively crude compared to what Stars has now, but it caused me some pain. And I know Full Tilt is very good at it now.
- matt1 17y ago
  Honestly I didn't even bother trying setting up multiple accounts. The money was a nice, but it really wasn't the primary goal. Plus, in order to maximize profits I would have had to tread in a lot of murky waters that I didn't want to be near. For example, say you have a roommate run the bot. How do you get the profits from his poker account into your bank account? Not as easy as it might seem.
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    Pro-tip: the legal solution to the roommate dilemma is limited power of attorney :)
    - LargeWu 17y ago
      But since online poker winnings are technically illegal in the US, doesn't that invalidate any legal standing over them, similar to how gambling debts are unenforceable?
      - mattmaroon 17y ago
        Online poker winnings are not illegal in the US. Playing online poker (or any form of gambling other than sports betting) is provably illegal only in a few states. But in those states, perhaps. I never had to pay an attorney to review that :)
aidanf 17y ago
What was your bot's ROI and over how many games?

petercooper 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. Those are ancillary factors that have an effect on net profit. They are not metrics. Taking the story from the post, if my "friends and family" were asking me about the "success" of a poker bot, I'd still point to net profit as the best metric with which to define success (unless you're doing it for CS/math reasons). It's a bit like if I'm a professional, regular poker player and family members ask me how I'm doing. I'd tell them how much money I've won (or lost), not the intricate details of how I play.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
mattmaroon 17y ago
Well, I was a professional poker player for over 5 years, and you're wrong. I looked at it the way he did in his article. We all do. You probably wouldn't tell your dad that stuff only because he likely wouldn't understand, but it would be at the front of your mind. We're obsessed with the performance metric, big bets per hour for live players, big bets per 100 hands (BB/100) for online. Standard deviations, results ranges, levels of certainty. You obsess about that stuff or you end up broke. (Of course, you may do both.) In fact if you read online poker forums, hands and win rates are rarely ever discussed with dollar values because they aren't very relevant. They're almost always given in terms of big bets, and most if not all online hand converters (which take a hand history from a poker site and print it out in an easy to read format for posting on forums) convert to that automatically. The absolute dollar amounts are only useful for getting a very rough estimate of the level of competition given no other information.
- petercooper 17y ago
  You obsess about that stuff or you end up broke. So are you saying that, ultimately, profit is the most important metric? ;-)
dejb 17y ago