Sadly this is not true. Bots that play midstakes 6-max and full-ring LHE have been a serious problem for more than two years. There are a number of threads in the archives that document their discovery at various sites.

One major gang of bots is easily recognizable by their cloned playing style, unnatural leaks, and absolute avoidance of multitabling. I face them on a regular basis and while they don't play as well as the best human players they play at least well enough to easily beat the softer games.

Bryce, the reason I am writing this post is that you are the expert's expert. When 2+2 Magazine publishes an article by you saying that competitive LHE ring bots don't exist, it makes it that much harder for those people who are trying to get the online sites to do something about their bot problems.

I think you misinterpreted what he said.
Right before your quote he said:

With this he meant that semi-competitive bots can easily be (small) winners in games with a lot of weak opponents. The typical bot that's grinding a small stakes ring game will win like 7ptbb/100 against the fish, but lose 6ptbb/100 against the winners in those games. (just made these number up, it's probably way off)

The part you quoted is about bots being better or equal in skill with the best players in a certain game. So far this has only been possible in HU LHE and shortstack NLHE according to Bryce.

I didn't understand how bots can drain the poker economy. This is flawed. This is like saying that Pros can drain poker economy - so any educatonal materials has to be banned.

If you assume that any winning bot can scale to infinity by multiaccounting then I would agree, but multi-accounting which is much easier to detect. If eveyr bot author can run a single bot like a pro, I don't think there is any effect on the poker economy (as it is known that ratio of winning/losing bots is the same as for human players).

The inflated marketing of "how dangerious bots are for the online poker" is what harms the games, scares and hence attracts less fishes.

It's more like "winning players drain the poker economy" and since stronger bots can beat up on weaker players they can indirectly harm the competitive professional players.

Sadly, this isn't the case. I was basing my assumption about bots not being a factor in ring games on the fact that all the competitive poker Universities haven't been able to come up with a 6-max bot that can play for beans, and that the equilibrium strategy doesn't work for them. Any reasonable claim about a bot should always be taken seriously and investigated.

I understand your point Stellar, however I think we do have far worse things to worry about ATM. For example, trying to get online sites running without corruption.

But alright, back to your point. Was there any evidence brought forth regarding bots on the Prima network? I did have a strong suspicion at one time.

isn't the problem that if an excellent player is playing with a bunch of good bots, then the house is the big winner?? i'm pretty bots can play TAG and be programmed to mix up their play. good at keeping track of opponent actions too. and bots can watch their blinds alot more closely than multi-tablers (for example).. i'm assuming full ring limit.

I thought bots multitabled a ton? Not true? How come?

why should they? it's not that hard to set up a couple of accounts and a couple of computers.

lol ...

It's not hard to setup it, right, it's only hard to sustain it

I dont get it. Why set up 4 PC's to play 4 tables when you could setup 4 PC's and play 40 tables?

The question is, why chance playing bots when you can play in a live game? Only play online when you have no choice...

Here in europe its hard to find live cashgames.

I did some research and this whole bot histeria seems to be more of a scare. People will always try to beat the system. From what I have seen, it does not look like many are having a good go at it.

You can't be serious... For one, many may prefer to not deal w/ 20-30 hands/hour, excessive rake, -EV BBJ drain, pointless tipping, transportation/transaction costs, and being around morons for extended period of time.

On another note, I think I remember Bryce saying in an interview that some poker sites are starting to employ these students who have worked on these poker bot projects. Not sure if PS and FTP already have such departments, but it would be great if they did have a dedicated team of people who are trained and adept at detecting AI on their sites... However, I am afraid that there may no be enough of an incentive at this point for them to allocate much resources to this issue, as at the end of the day the make money on rake and a bot is just another contributor to their bottom line... So the pressure must come from the players, but here we have the standard problem of "collective action"...

d'

You don't hire Poker AI grad students to defend against Bots. That's more in the domain of Internet Security expertise... a very different discipline dealing with spam, viruses, hackers, etc... where you have very sophisticated corporations doing security work on a corporate level.

My general view of the academic Poker Bot scene...
Based on my software engineering background and reading scores of papers...
Is that these folks have no money, no staff...
And are doing not-exactly-leading-edge work on a shoestring.

Any billion dollar corporation...
That decided to throw $100 million at the Poker AI field...
Like Google or anyone else...
Would become totally dominant in 12-24 months...
Buy why bother... where's the money?

Poker sites are more likely hiring Poker AI experts...
In order to build well-designed Shill Bots...
That will increase action and rake on the tables.

People have to get over this ILLUSION... that online casinos "care" about the customers they are exploiting... or that their business models are ethical.

I don't get the fascination with poker bots. I mean,
The only possible reason one would have to develop a poker bot would be to put it on some site and let it win some money for one, which is cheating for obvious reasons.

So, the only purpose of developing bots would be to cheat. And since we hate cheats, by association, we should dislike and repel bot development too.

Its not like we are curing cancer here.

Developing bots and AI is something absolutely normal (take for example stock markets). In poker, and anywhere, it happened long time before and will happen long time after some kids decided that they can make money with internet gambling as they have seen on TV.

Obviously Alberta's research does not advance the internet gambling business as such, hence to judge if it its good or bad, depends what is the primary purpose of 2+2 as a media, forum and community: Is it about poker, or about the internet poker business. Someone that develops pokerbots is a poker player no less than someone that just used pokertracker (and by the way, in fact, using poker tracker holds more unfair advantage than developing aritificial AI).

Poker Bots are fascinating to Software Engineers...
Because it's a very interesting and very complex problem...
And closely related to building Automated Trading Systems.

And neither are degen Poker Pros.

But the core issue is...
The lack of real, ADULT money in Poker Bots.

For example...
Let's say there are 2,000 financial trading operations in the world... that have Pro Traders managing sophisticated Automated Trading Systems... making > $1,000,000/year net profit (of which I am one).

Any of these firms could easily branch out into Poker Botting... but it makes ZERO economic sense... because there's 100 times more money to be made in the financial markets.

I've probably devoted 6 months in the last 4 years to poker and poker AI... and it's been ultra-interesting... but there is a major OPPORTUNITY COST. Any resources that I move from trading to poker... slow down the expansion of my trading operation... which has 100 times the potential of anything you can do in poker.

On the preventative level this is true, and I imagine the majority of resources go towards this type of security. The handful of people who have gone on from AIs into industry contribute in that their skillsets are useful for devising methods of detecting bots which make it past the first layer of security.

There's a bit of a dilemma here. If the word goes out that bots are a major problem it will scare away the regular players/fish, which we don't want. But on the other hand, the only way the poker sites become fully motivated to stop the problem - which we do want - is if they come to believe the regular players/fish are leaving because of the bots.


PairTheBoard

Interesting discussion. Only one thing to add: RedmanPlus- you have the single most annoying way of typing I've ever encountered. Too much use of ... when commas or periods would suffice. Makes your posts, which have interesting info, very hard to read.

Avast, an anti virus company, teamed up with a maker of thumb drives. Avast scans the host computer when the drive is inserted and on request. What would be great is a partnering of online poker rooms with one of these companies to scan for and remove screen capture malware and other nasties, as well as find and remove poker bots or any other software that the sites deem unfair advantage.

Us new fishies would feel much more secure about online gambling if major malware fighters were involved, and we might even improve our game due to a new, paranoia free ability to concentrate on our play versus the play of our opponents, as opposed to our play in light of the fact that the two guys next to us might be bots (and possibly communicating?), and the guy on the other side of us might be able to see our cards. Since losing more hands than I want to is part of the learning process, like it or not, I at least want to know I lost because I played the hand wrong, and not because I was a naive bozo to sign up for online poker in the first place.

@RockSpider - that may work for software like "see your hole cards" (to make fishes feel safer), but not for bots, as bots don't run on anyone's machine, they run on the machine of their author, and only there.

Also, as it is pretty random what is "deemed unfair advantage" by the various sites, there is no particular logic behind it, definition, or indistry wide agreement. E.g, pokertacker which most often is used to gain unfair advantage is allowed, while developing bots, which has no unfair advantage, is often not allowed.

Therefore AV software getting into that will be nothing more than a private deal with a particular casino (not enough wrt what you had in mind I guess).

Nobody who uses any form of datamining software can complain about bots.

If you are willing to use a program that a lot of your opponents don't know about, how can you complain about your opponents using a program that you don't know how to make?

You are exploiting players who don't know about datamining software, and they are exploiting players who don't know how to make a profitable bot. What's the difference?

When somebody sees poker on TV and decides to try out online poker do you think they want to play some 12 tabling, red bull drinking, dataminer?

No, they think that everybody sees the same poker client. If you see more info than they do when you look at the table you are cheating them.

You have your edge, and bots have theirs. Talking about these edges scares the fish. If people didn't talk about them there would be no problem at all.

As far as a scanner picking up software that indicates the use of bots, I don't see why software can't scan the players' computers for bots, as well as for malware they are not aware of, and also scan for connections to another computer that might be running malicious software or that might be connected to another player at the same table. I certainly hope the latter is already being used! My fault for the confusion, though, I used the word host incorrectly because of my thumb drive analogy.

As for the advantage of bots as opposed to the advantage of software to predict hand strength and such (which I'm not using), I guess I'm more worried about programs that let bots collude with each other online than I am about going up against an individual bot. And I would think that someone using a hand strength calculator is still subject to tilt, while a bot never is.

Of course, my biggest worry is someone seeing my cards. I've had malware that read my keystrokes as well as transmitted what was on my screen in the past (unrelated to playing poker online, however), and I'd rather be scared of the possibility of this sort of malware screwing up my poker game than not know the probability of that occurring, possible signs of infestation to watch out for, and so on. After all, eventually, I'd find out about it, and feel stupid for not knowing sooner, and I'd also feel disinclined to ever spend money on any poker site again, and there your fish would go. Poker sites shouldn't ever downplay or ignore legitimate threats, and if they want to stay in business, they won 't.

Besides, I find malware and stopping malware infestations utterly fascinating, especially since it is at least partially responsible for the deaths of two of my computers. My early attempts at finding and getting rid of the malware was also a contributing factor.

I suppose the discussion probably does get old, though, since this site is famous for busting Absolute Poker, a disproportionate amount of discussions are probably dedicated to people cheating at online poker sites. I should leave off and go study pot odds posts and articles, something I understand considerably less about than I do about malware infested computers.