You don't forget programming.
You may forget how to code, how to program in a language, but you never forget how to make algorithms.

if you knew how to program, you would understand that in order to make only the logic of a bot that plays 9/5 nit poker will take you more than 3k lines of code.

Now imagine making a bot that plays semi-GTO lol

:thumbsup:

Good post but No need to feel sorry for either, both can find a way to adjust


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Try telling that to all the $100 HUSNG regs that complained about Skier's voice-activated "real-time advice tool" almost two years ago.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...tware-1533249/
That thread was a wake-up call for both players and poker sites, as it proved that 'advanced' software assistance was already here and it was enabling some people to completely crush the regs.
Stars has already "forced" several 'suspicious' players to make videos of themselves playing as per this thread. Occasionally a banned player will post in the Internet Poker forum claiming his innocence. In recent memory, there was one who received an email from Stars after he'd recorded his video containing words to the effect of "We suspect you are using an assistance tool, but we can't prove it [i.e. he didn't use it in the video ldo], so you can cash out your money, but you and your buddies are no longer welcome to play on the site."

Okay, since you mention it, let's consider GTO strategies first. Let's start with basics. John Nash proved that a GTO strategy exists for any finite poker game with any number of players. But existence is the "easy" part. Finding a GTO strategy (or strategies) is the hard part.

Generally speaking there are two different but related tasks associated with GTO poker strategies. One is to "find" a GTO strategy, and the other is to "encode" a GTO strategy once found.

To date, the only game that has been "solved" is HULHE. And, truthfully, I believe that it is only essentially solved since there is no way of knowing whether a true equilibrium GTO strategy (set of strategies, one for SB and one for BB) has been found. But let's leave that to the side for our purposes here.

The good folks at the University of Alberta solved heads-up limit holdem a couple of years ago. They used a sophisticated "learning" algorithm and immense computing power to essentially have a computer play trillions and trillions of hands against itself to eventually arrive at an equilibrium strategy (pair).

Once found, the Alberta team encoded the GTO strategy into a computer called Cepheus that is available for the public to play against. The complete strategy takes tons and tons of storage space on a very large computer and consists of literally zillions of lines of code.

Now fast forward a year or two. The team at CMU developed new sophisticated "learning" techniques to have a computer approximate a HUNLHE GTO strategy. The program/computer is called Libratus. Libratus played trillions and trillions of hands of 200bb deep heads-up no-limit holdem against itself until the CMU team was confident that it had reached a fairly good GTO approximation (abstracting bet sizes).

Rather than encode the complete quasi-GTO strategy it developed, the CMU team stores the preflop and flop strategy elements in computer storage. For the turn and river, Libratus runs a separate solver to derive the optimal strategy given the action to that point. For the Libratus challenge, the CMU team rented time on a supercomputer for this purpose.

When asked if the Libratus program could be transferred over to a PC, the main developer said that it is theoretically possible but would take a lot of work. Once successfully converted to a PC-friendly form, on one of today's fast PC's, Libratus would probably take at least several minutes on its turn/river decisions as compared to 15-20 seconds on the supercomputer.

The point is that nobody initially sits down to "program" a GTO strategy. That concept, as stated, is meaningless. First you must find a GTO strategy (quasi). This itself is currently beyond the capabilities of all but a handful of teams of academic researchers. Once found it would then take either immense computer storage to store the strategy or immense computing power to calculate aspects of it on the fly (or both).

Should the above fill online poker players with glee? Of course not. Computing power is going to continue growing in leaps and bounds ala Moore's Law. So even if HULHE is the only game truly solved to date and even if a quasi-GTO strategy has recently been developed for only 200bb deep HUNLHE, these methods and techniques may well be used to develop quasi-quasi GTO solutions of other poker variants in some unknown time horizon.

But that is not the most important or salient fear that online poker players have regarding bots. Pre- and post-flop solvers already exist and their approximate solutions can be ported to a poker-playing bot. Far-from-perfect strategies can be developed fairly easily and surely can beat many low-to-mid stakes games.

And the same advances in computing power and storage which will improve the hunt for GTO strategies will mean that "far-from-perfect" computer-playing bots will also continue to improve in strength, speed, complexity, etc. This is surely the largest concern.

Much of this is unknown and uncertain. But many people are worried that the future may arrive sooner than expected. Repeatedly saying how difficult it would be to program a poker-playing bot (either GTO or not) is naive and seems to be oblivious to significant advances in this general area over the last few years.

To boil it down to one sentence, I am not concerned that Cepheus and Libratus will be seated at an online poker table any time soon, but the recent advances in AI techniques that led to the development of Cepheus and Libratus will undoubtedly lead to the advancement of many other winning online poker-playing bots.

I don't see what building a gto bot has to do with detecting non-human play. bots, gto or not, have uniform decision making and patterns of symmetry (on their decision trees, elsewhere), even when dealing with randomizer percentages, even when those are rotating on an algorithm.

I get your point, whosnext
By now, bots haven't been a serious threat to the overall poker community(except from a few ones, like that PLO bot ring), but in the future it looks like it will be way more threatening.

people may figure out easier ways to make a bot(rather than using the rule-based techniques I said here) which plays better and is able to beat higher stakes.

But in the end, if things get ugly, the pokersites will have to adapt, if botting becomes a huge menace to the integrity of the game, then poker sites will have to make more efforts in security.

And I think it's tough to beat stars security right now, if they put even more effort into catching all botters, gg then. One important hing is that developing this kind of program takes a lot of time, and if the risk-reward aren't right, it will prevent people from developing them.

I'm not saying this is solved by their current efforts. I'm saying they need continuous streams of any winning player over a decent sample. No webcam, no playing.

Get rid of the personal computer, this won't work for everyone or row obviously but if you had to play online at your local casino that shared a common regulator and got to keep the rake for their players added to the pool it addresses most of the bot issues

I don't even...um...uh...wait, what?

Everyone already has the option of going to their local casino to play. If you think there are too many bots online, you can go play at the poker room - no one's being forced to play online.

Shutting down online poker everywhere but at a local casino isn't addressing the issue, it's surrendering to it.

Too bad recs (and grinders too) only love holdem and to a lesser degree PLO, if every game was a mixed game of like three variants, coding a bot to play all three well would be an enormous effort.

The fact that I love horse, 8 game mix, stud and stuff like that and no one wanting to play that stuff is almost as big a problem to me as the US online poker problems, maybe I can get two birds killed with one stone here.

For those who have kept mentioning the site's bot detection improving and an "arms race" ...

Endgame will surely be humans (bot owners or $5 an hour Indian workers depending on sophistication of bot) manually inputting bot's solutions in real time..

Although this won't be much different to people running Pio in realtime - which I'm led to believe could potentially be feasible already...

Personally don't think this fight is winnable and those who think otherwise are naive to what is going/will likely be going on in the next couple of years ...

You aren't understanding my post even remotely. How does opening up online poker inside a casino shut down current online poker (hint it doesn't).

Playing poker at your local casino now isn't the same thing as playing online poker, you can't multi table and you play far fewer hands per hour. You should try both to see the difference.

Playing in a casino would address nearly every comment about why bots can easily bypass anything put in their way via the pay a cheap laborer to follow instructions. You already have surveillance systems in place many of which share information, I'm sure this would go a long way to reduce or eliminate collusion too. You have software developers and anti cheating measures in place at a casino.

The infrastructure is already here I'm just talking about making a slot machine that poker players would like to play. No huds, no bots, and criminal deterrence for trying to cheat. Jesus.

^

That is the dumbest idea I have ever seen, no offense.

I doubt it would catch on but if online poker as we know was killed then maybe slot parlours, rather than casinos, could offer something like it in towns too small to have proper live poker. The trouble is would they gaf about people using advisor software on their phones?

Ah, silly me - I don't know how I ever would have gotten the idea that you were suggesting shutting down online poker everywhere but in a casino.



Your message delivery could use a little work.

Yes, I'm aware of the difference, thanks.

It absolutely would address many cheating concerns. However, it's not going to happen without a high degree of chance for success, which I doubt it would have.

First of all, this would need to be more profitable for a casino than whatever else could be put there in its place, and I have my doubts that it would be.

Secondly, you'd need a large number of casinos on board to make this viable. When you're talking about the ability to multitable across a variety of stakes, you need a good-sized player pool.

Finally, this has to be appealing to players. While there are benefits to online over live poker that could be replicated in a casino, one of the biggest ones couldn't be - the ability to play from wherever you like. I'm far from convinced that a large number of players are concerned enough about cheating, yet enamored enough with the benefits of online, that they would be willing to play online in a casino.

It's an idea not completely without merits, but I don't think it's realistic.

Good idea, you first

Until a human can match the bots ability to have perfect hand recall and analysis of billions of hands, I guess the bots kind of have a bit of an edge over humans.

It wouldn't have to be a casino it could be at a 24 hour OTB type establishment. Of course getting to one would be a pain in the but if you lived in a rural area or wanted to do a short hit and run type session. But casinos have linked up slots in the past and betting pools are linked up at OTB parlors.