it would make the setup of a botter more complex though? please correct if i am wrong on that one.

not to mention all the huds that wouldnt exist (if they chose to disallow them)

anyway...I dont think the point is "can people still run bots that way" ultimately a botter can point a physical camera on his screen and scrape the info or even have human input. but if botters have to work like that then the pokerroom has done a pretty good job.

No one's ignoring that. We just realize that the bot makers/users will win that arms race 100 times out of 100 because, and also because sites just don't care that much about stopping this stuff for the half-dozen reasons already mentioned.

fyp

Does the future of online gambling possibly have a shot on other platforms other than PC, tablets, mobile devices, etc? Maybe a dedicated gambling device or something made specifically for this type of entertainment experience?

One of the biggest problems with online poker is how anti social and monotonous the game has become online compared to it's live counterpart but with advancements in VR technology, etc couldn't there be a future in some sort specialized gaming device with easier to implement security features against bots?

Colluding bots are already capable of beating solo humans and, I guess, even colluding humans. A solo bot will be able to beat solo humans at 6-max CAP and KO Poker, let alone Spin & Gos, in a year or two, I'm afraid, and note that the poker industry is drifting toward short stack games.

The artificial intelligence progress is speeding up: almost everyone was sure that computers wouldn't beat the top humans at such a complex game as Go for decades but then AlphaGo arrived. Poker is going to be the next toy game for AI developers as Go is beat now. The number of players in the game matters less nowadays than 5 years ago because multi-agent learning is developing very fast.

Obviously pros would jump through hoops. The issue is will a casual player be bothered to scan retina and set up webcam etc, when he just wants to have a gamble after a few beers. Without those you have no pros.

What do you think this means for current online pros?

^^ Casual players won't be asked to scan the retina. Only the biggest consistent winners will, and they'll surely put up with it.

The problem is that even webcam and live tables aren't 100% botproof: in FIDE chess tournaments, there has been some cheating with the use of a device hidden in the player's shoes or underwear; after the incidents with Borislav Ivanov, FIDE had to revise tournament rules in 2014 to allow arbiters to do strip searches.

This means that we should start looking for a career plan B.

That big botring on stars that won millions.. what game did they play? I thought it was Omaha? But was it HU or 6max

PLO zoom 200 was their main game. 7 of the top 10 winners in 2014 at that game/stake.

And it was 6max.

Hi Casey Kasem.......https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK75u5EDdEc

try to bot on stars
let's see if you last 1 day in there lol

And yet there was a PLO bot ring on Stars in 2014 which won hundreds of thousands of $. Please stop posting on topics you know nothing about. Your ignorance level is astounding.

The hard part of running a bot on an online poker site is not the poker decision making part. You could have used the information from the STT forum a decade ago to come up with a winning poker logic, that's not very hard at all.

The hard part is evading detection from a resourced, well-trained and well-equipped anti-bot team.

As MultiTabling identifies in the post just above, even bot operators who allegedly "won hundreds of thousands of [dollars]" get caught.

In my experience of dealing with Stars security team they are severely lacking in a lot of areas. I certainly don't trust them or have any faith at all that they keep PokerStars clean of bots/cheating/banned software. I would also say they are probably the best out of all the sites.

It seems you have never programmed in your life.
take a board game, a paper and try to make a recipe of how you would play that game(like war, for example). Add all the tricks you have and make it the best you can. Then take that paper, call some friends and play blindly following the recipe.

You will see that it's pretty hard to make your "paperbot" play anything but garbage. Programming a complex strategy in a competitive game is really hard, just look at all WoW bots, the only thing they do(in a competitive environment like player vs player) is to automate rotations that maximize damage per second.

Now think of how should you teach a computer to have awareness of the geography, tactics your enemies are using, how to stop attacking and take a more defensive approach.

I think that evading poker security isn't something that's hard to make(if you have the right hacking and computer skills to do so). A lot of people here already said a lot of strategies to evade CAPTCHA, programming the interaction between the indian and your CAPTCHA shouldn't be a big problem.

I believe in stars, much more than the other sites out there.
From all the hands I played (~800k), I've never seen someone that looked like a bot.

And if some guys can manage to beat stars security team, I can't imagine how it's going on the smaller sites

Rapidesh,

You appear to not realise that people wrote software that solved shortstack poker more than ten years ago. A successful mathematical strategy to a popular form of the game isn't new. More than a decade (!!!) ago, you could input the game state into the software and get a literally optimal strategy.

Because we've lived in a poker world where this has been a fact for the last decade, new developments in improving poker playing skill don't have a meaningful effect on the risk of bots. Indeed, one of the most popular format developments in the last few years - lottery style SNGs - also share short-handed, short-stacked play, so people pointing to a cash game bot have misplaced fears.

As I explained above, the hardest part of building a successful bot isn't the poker logic.

What is it then? Finding an Indian guy to watch the output from the bot and click the mouse for you?

Unfortunately this is because you do not know any better. I've been involved in the process for at least 2 bot rings on stars being reported/removed. On for a group playing up to 1knlhe the other playing 100 + 200nlhe, Some of the 200nl bots were reported by a group of us 18 months before they were finally removed.

WoW isn't a good analogy because WoW can't be solved by maths, where as poker has a huge maths part to it that bots can excel in. It would actually be pretty easy to program a PLO bot. For example, in PLO you loosely just go with your hand based on equity. And bot could calculate their equity against a preprogrammed range and instantly get their hand in if they have the equity to. Of course, these preprogrammed ranges require human assistance but a group of russians could easily buy millions of hands in specific games and run the maths to come to a predicted range that the bot then can use. And when these bots share hole cards they can clearly be very powerful.

Then try making a bot that beats tic tac toe, a game YOU solved when you were 6.
Write the bot rules(lines of code) on paper, make it play vs yourself.

Now imagine how hard it is to make use of a strategy someone else made, of a more complex game which is 20bb poker. Now think about 100bb poker, which is exponentially more complex than 20bb poker.

And those people who make bots to play on online sites aren't like those guys who made libratus and study pokerbotting since 1997, they are some random mavericks out there who know how to program and came out of nowhere.

In poker, 85% of the player pool is losing money. In society, a pretty small % can program, and from those, few program so well to be able to translate a highly complex strategy into lines of code. Now try to think about how hard it is to find someone who have both sets of skills.

And mixing a professional poker player with a programmer won't work, as I said: in order to convert a complex strategy into lines of code, you must know exactly what you're doing. The hard part is translating: if you put together someone who speaks only english with someone who only speaks german, they won't be able to translate phrases from one language to another.