Yes, obviously, much like the same live players that were saying that "online poker is rigged" had a vague idea of what AP and UB did to the online world specifically. What remains is the tarnished reputation of online poker and the irrevocable damaged done. Did you have a point or you were agreeing with me?

I dont get it. Why do you need proof? How is it relevant? In any case, its pretty clear that OP is at least savvy in poker bot. He is a good source of information.

Why do you care if it is true that he made 30k and decides now to stop? What if he actually still is runing his bot; does that makes him a less valid source of info? No it doesnt.
What about if he in fact had a bot that was just break-even and he is lying about making 30k? Well he still had a bot up and runing without being detected and still has plenty of usefull info for us players.

You dont need proof because its not the important part of the discussion.

Or do you doubt of the existence of bots and thats what you want proof of?
Bots have been around for ages. Some people run them. Why is it so unbeleivable that once every blue moon one of these people speak out?



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Ive researched it, thanks. It turns out that customised, expensive bots are advanced but bots using the technology that he showed an example of certainly aren't. From what I can gather they can't even connect to PT. Time for your research now.

I personally would like to know at what rate OP thinks bots are becoming more sophisticated. Are bots becoming infinitely better year by year or is it a slow improvement that is matched by the improvement of overall play by regs?.

Pretty safe to say that bots are improving at a higher rate than actual players. Nowadays bots can be winners at midstakes which has not so long ago been considered impossible.


@OP:

are there any sites which are considered no-go-areas in the botter-scene due to high risk of getting caught? If so, could you name these sites?

This time not .....but only this time not

OP, what was your acr location?

I guess my conclusion is based on the fact that over the years, more and more software has been steadily made available. I am looking at the explosive growth of the 3rd party software industry, as well people's increasing use of them as the indicators of trend. I do disagree with the first line, at the time I was exposed to online poker, there was a considerable movement against PTR and Sharkscope from many that felt like it led to unsustainable predatory behavior. As far as the rule breaking, the general point I was trying to make is that people will disregard rules if it benefits them and if the rules aren't enforced. I would also argue that breaking botting rules probably ruined a lot fewer lives than sites making themselves illegally available for online gambling. However, the outrage is markedly different because one personally benefits a lot of 2p2 players, the other doesn't.

I am not sure why you think connecting a SQL database is rocket science. I promise that's not the hard part. Getting data is 1% of the work, 99% of the time and effort goes to actually figuring out how to make that data useful. In any event you could just take the 2nd/3rd software stacks I gave out and google Poker Tracker with it to find a couple of quick, short guides on how to integrate it with Poker Tracker. Based on their previous actions, I don't think the mods would approve of me linking that info publicly here but rest assured, it's not the challenging part of botting.
My bot ran a custom, self-created profile and my tablemaps were custom made my me. I'd also disagree with your contention that you need expensive, "advanced" bots. You need an engine to connect and interact with the poker client and you need to code the logic. There are open-source stuff that will help you do both. You don't really need to spend a dime if you don't want to. I think maybe the disbelief stems from the fact that you were expecting super-fancy decision making algorithms? Yup, turns out that not only are they not needed, it's actually harder to get good performance without using a bottom-up, heuristic, and sometimes messy approach. Simple poker scripting languages with simple syntax + a lot of time commitment to continually add and modify situation-based rules will still produce some of the better results.

I wasn't really exposed to the botting world before 6/7 months ago so it's hard for me to make these comparisons. I think the breakthrough that most botters really point to is the development of poker-specific scripting languages that gave them the ability to create the decision-making engine or fine-tune it to their specification without a huge learning curve. I think someone made the comparison to coaching and that's a good analogy of what the botter/software relationship is usually like these days. Of course, the "coaching" has to be meticulously written and tested but it's a lot different from 5-6 years ago when a good poker player (but poor programmer) would have an extremely hard time transferring his knowledge to the bot.

I answered this a couple of times, but the general consensus is that you really need to know what you are doing on multiple levels to take on Stars. That's the only site that I've really seen be either discouraged or considered "off-limits". I can't really speak to this more assertively since I never considered trying to bot on Stars. Most other online sites are considered to be bot-friendly to varying degrees. Some sites are harder, not because they crack down on bots, but because they have more frequent software updates or revisions that require bots to be reconfigured. The decision on where to bot is actually the same decision as players make when they decide where to play. Botters are thinking about promos/bonuses/rakeback, traffic at the game and stakes they have the bankroll for, withdrawal timeframes, etc. They choose a particular site for probably the same reason you chose that site to play on.

USA, can't tell you the state.

Man I really hope that creating this thread turns out to be the catalyst that leads to your name being discovered and Google-bombed as per usual confirmed scammers. Here's to the hopes that in a months time a simple google search of your name will forever result in:

[your name here] from [your location here] is a scammer and thief.

Any mods who have contacts at ACR wanna share OPs IP address with their security department? See if it's linked to an existing, recently emptied, ACR account?

I'm gonna have to strongly disagree with you that bots are the number one reason recs don't play online anymore. I'm not saying your lying about what you hear at the tables, but I am hearing very very different.

I play a **** ton of 1/3 live. The lowest limit, the most rec players. And I often have a tablet or something that I play a table or 2 online at the same time. So I am constantly getting noticed that I am playing online by recs at my live table. I am CONSTANTLY being asked "woah what site is that is that real money? You can still play online? i thought all of the sites are gone." And they are eager to find the site and deposit when they get home, and they usually do.

I am gonna guess you are not playing your casinos lowest limit, where the most regs are. Because i can see competent players being scared off by bots. people who are gonna 5+ table all day all night. But the average rec "i just wanna be able to gamble poker online" i really don't think gives a **** about bots. I highly doubt most of the "recs" have ever or ever plan on withdrawaling. They just wanna play.

So yeah i bet the fear of bots runs off a lot of live, decent at poker, has delusions of making online their full time job type guys.

But i don't think your average fish doner rec even knows about, of would even care if they did know about bots.

From me playing online constantly while at the live table i have been questioned about it literally hundreds and hundreds of time and never 1 time has a single thing about a bot come up. 99.9999999% of them simply don't know they can play anymore after the big sites left the US market

Maybe its just me, but it seems like online poker will not be able to keep the bots out forever, and in the not too distant future they will be much more sophisticated then they are today and possibly even better than the best human players. I would think most people have heard about a computer beating one of the best human "go" players, and "go" is an incredibly complex game. Also recently heads up limit hold'em has essentially been solved by researchers, who are now working to beat humans at heads up no limit in staged competitions with pros. Anyways if we extrapolate technology out a decade or so it is not too far fetched to envision robot like machines that can "see" and process what is happening on the computer screen and even be able to move the mouse, or a google glass like device a person can wear that can capture what is happening on the computer screen, provide a new type of hud and link to the cloud to process data. Are sites in the future going to be able to protect against these technologies? It may somehow be possible (they would probably need to have you turn on a webcam so they can determine if you are using any of the equipment that i previously mentioned) but who is going to want to play when you have to deal with that? Even if the sites use advanced detection techniques people will probably find ways around detection and it may be too difficult and expensive for the sites to even want to try, as is maybe happening now with the bot situation. Seems to me like online poker and many other professions will be made obsolete by technology in the not too distant future and people should embrace it. Maybe we can create a science fiction like utopia in the not too distant future with Robots, AI, Virtual/augmented reality, self driving cars along with universal basic income so we can all work less and spend more time playing games, relaxing and hanging out with friends and family. While I do not approve of what OP has done, I think we need to realize technologies related to online poker are going to keep evolving rapidly and players are probably going to be left behind.

It's pretty cool seeing your point of view, I think quite a few players have pondered the intellectual challenge of running a bot.

The bolded is what I based my research on, and it revealed that the site whose framework your code sample came from does not integrate with PT (unless you call hard coding player aliases and player types "integration").

Thanks for posting OP, interesting thread to say the least.

OP thank you very much for doing this thread and your honesty about an unknown topic. LOL at people with their swords drawn who want him to out himself just to give him the ungabunga.

OP what are challenges/limitations you've had with botting/strategies and what do you think can be improved in the future? I'm assuming the challenges are more for programming and not so much poker strategy - we already have bots who play limit HU optimally but there are infinitely more variables in NL so I'm guessing you have a general strategy the bot plays but constantly have to make alterations for weird spinoffs? Or is the bot doing wild stuff like deciding someone's range on a river is straight garbage, it 100% has the best hand, overbetting 2.8x pot mixed in with perfect frequency etc?

So the first post ever by a cyberperson is a wall of words - also a rather unoriginal manifesto full of SF tropes. I do sincerely hope our cyber-future is more interesting than your presentation of it

Certain things are so useful they'll remain with us unchanged into an indefinite future. For example if we are still using an alphabet & text in one thousand years we'll also probably be employing paragraphs or marks standing in for paragraphs.

haha, sorry I a tendency to ramble and I am probably too enthusiastic about future tech. Just hoping to somehow add to the discussion. Maybe I want to make the argument that soon we should embrace bots? The sites probably wont care if everyone has a bot as long as people still want to play. After all if everyone had near equal bots playing poker it would be like playing blackjack/slots or other casino games online, and people still do that..

I'd rather play against bots than nobody at all. OP, would you rather have 3 bots at your table or 3 good human regs? Also not sure if you addressed if bots are common in mtts and sngs? Very insightful thread op, thanks for transparency

Dear Cyberperson - I quoted you above, but dropped the superfluous "?"

As you know we already live a semi-augmented life & the traditionalists have not always responded well to what is a brute fact. At the moment I can go to my local pub quiz night & there will be one person every time who must sneak out to the loo to ask Siri a few questions - honour sullied just for a measly £50 team prize. This is going to be a problem when 'smartphonePlus' is an device/app built into our brains.

The Russian Olympic team were unofficially officially encouraged to break every doping reg in the book & got away with it most of the time for decades - a Borg mentality rubber stamped by a tyrannical, gangster state

Games, sports, rules have to face up to this & perhaps poker will not be the sort of game that adapts well to what's coming, but there will be new games for money that will make augmentation a feature [augmentation being a wider subject than boring old bots]

Resistance is futile!

The way this post reads to me: "I made X amount of money doing something and never got caught, its a process that involves no input from me....but I swear I quit "

Webcams are interesting and I think will be important from an enforcement standpoint. Sites could run biometric solutions such as facial recognition before and/during play to not only ensure your face matches the identification on file but to ensure at any given moment you're umm actually there playing.

Most new laptops being sold today and most smartphones already include a front-facing webcam, so the webcam requirement will be minimally cost prohibitive for consumers, even moreso in the future as more people buy and play on laptops and cell phones and as the costs of webcams go down for people that don't already own one. It's clearly evident that people who want to gamble do not mind being under direct and constant surveillance--just step inside any landbase casino. I don't foresee online poker players making a fuss of webcams if it ensures a level playing field.

But at the very least, poker sites of the future need to make the penalties for cheating as punitive as their lanbase casino counterparts. When a player is caught cheating, not only do you ban said player from the property they cheated at but ALL properties and for life. AND you make it a crime as such that you can be fined and even be sent to jail. Obviously the latter requires cooperation from law enforcement and for there to be laws on the books on this, but as sites become more mainstream and more regulated in the countries they operate in these punitive measures should or ought to be the norm going forward.

You are so mad, fish. Are you really that stupid to think that bots aren't super common in online poker? Shouldn't you focus this anger toward the sites who allow this? Obviously, cheating is wrong, but when a high number of people are cheating, and the website won't prevent it, you're suppose to just get ****ed? How much of a fish can you possibly be?

I'm absolutely shocked that the OP continued to reply even after all of the ******ed speculations and feedback he has gotten. I guess I shouldn't expect anything different on a forum without upvotes/downvotes/thanks frequented by some of the most dense people around.

Very interesting thread OP. Thank you for shedding a little light on the botting situation.

I'm not sure how you didn't run across PT integration. My code sample was 6mo old btw and from a previous bot I first started with. I replied that I won't give out any current code because of reasons enumerated in past replies. But, even so, I'm surprised you didn't find it. I'm pretty sure I would get banned if I posted it publicly so best I can do is if a mod PMs me, I will share the info for PT database integration from both the github repository for the open source framework and user-manual how-to's for a couple of cheap, plug-n-play products. On your last point, I did also hard code for player aliases for certain regs who would end up being on almost every table the bot was playing on.

Creating bot behavior for different situations is still inelegant grunt work. It basically involves beginning by coding the fundamentals of what types of hands a bot should play based on position, stacksize, etc. and how they should play those hands post-flop. Then you run the bot, get a few thousand hand sample size, go over the hand histories and start coding for specific conditions and situations that you see come up that you haven't differentiated yet. Then you run the bot to get a few thousand hands and repeat the above step, over and over. To get my bot to perform to my standards at the 50/100nl level was roughly 3 months of daily brute work. It's pretty labor-intensive to be honest. For example, when I first started, I may have coded the bot to play full houses a specific way but then I'd run across a hand where there are trips on the board, and the bot has the best full house available via the board but would lose to some overpair pocket pairs in the villian's range. Well, I would now have to add instructions for the bot so it can deal optimally with situations like this and other situations comparable to this (like if the bot has a pocket pair itself, etc.) FYI, I'm not a noob so I took this into account on my first version--the above situation is just for demonstration purposes Once you get a lot of this grunt work down, you can start incorporating more opponent-specific actions for these situations and so on and so forth.

This is a fantastic question. I would much rather have 3 bots in my ring tables than 3 really good human regs.
Bots are more common in MTTs and specifically certain types of sngs. Fundamentally, the narrower the scope of decisions that a bot will have to make, the easier it is to build it to play well. I focused all of my attention on 6max ring but I know that in general, from observing threads and chats, sngs and MTTs where far more popular. Specifically, hypers seemed to have the greatest interest. Games that start off shallow or that degenerate quickly to <25bb or push/fold situations are godsends for bots. Some botters also seem to like the idea of having the bot play through the early rounds of a bigger tournament and transfer control to a human player once it gets close to the money or at the final table.

If you read through some of my previous replies, this wasn't the case for me at all. No "free money". Every day that I ran the bot I would have to put in hours after the completion of all sessions to examine, fix bugs, modify/add code, etc.

Thanks! I wanted to structure this as a well so people are more informed and familiar about botting culture. I expected to receive a fair amount of abuse but I was/am hoping to also field some more interesting questions.