oh yeah, and collusion is SUPER SHADY.

unless it's on the bubble in an SnG and it's unspoken with a person you don't know

i was 24 tabling today ( oh 24 tabling keeps the mind at work... i love it.) for about 3.5 hours and someone called me a bot...Honestly, i dont care if there are bots on online websites because they will end up losing against a real poker player sooner or later. besides, if i ever think someone is a bot i would exploit their tendencies


hell, after a while i felt like a bot because i took soo many bad beats i am use to them. I remember the time where i use to get mad at the player who played 58 after calling my raise and ends up hitting 2 pair on the river against my aces.

I have been on the side where i flop 2 pair against aces and somehow the aces river an ace giving the playr 3 of a kind

so do we have a bot list?

Would be so ****ing hilarious if the pokersites needed an anticheat to stop all the bots. But that would be out of the line, ridicilous that people are so lazy they need bots to play for them.

I don't think they trust their own skill level and they use bots because they play better than them.

True, but that's only one of many things why people uses bots.

I love playing Texas hold 'em on facebook

It's a reasonable idea...
And the first thing the engineers would consider.
Make the poker table difficult to track by machine...
Sort of a Captcha poker table.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

But this idea is quickly discarded for the following reason:

To make is a difficult enough challenge for machines...
You would have to make font variation so extensive...
That players would have a real burden reading data.

Players would NEVER tolerate this level of font variation...
In the context of making difficult poker decisions for money...
Usually while multi-tabling.

My idea would be to give EVERY high volume player...
Which means the Top 1% in volume...
A customized Security Token...
That has BOTH a fingerprint reader and GPS coordinates.

That would pretty much eliminate Third World Bot Farms...
Bots run by smart humans is sweat shop conditions...
Which is the only real threat to the online poker economy.

Did you know that for $1-2 to $5-10 NLHE on PP...
The Top 20 accounts by volume...
All play > 10,000 hands/day?

This is pretty much humanly impossible.

This is probably not feasible but perhaps one way to determine who is using bots is to occasionally update the client altering the graphics slightly (eg card graphics, positioning of cards and chips) so to make the screen scrapers require re-programming. From this many of the bots should be detectable by change in playing volumes correlated to the client updates. Sure bot makers will make better screen-scrapers and not every bot will be caught, but I would think it would catch many of the current generation of bots.

Well, maybe the sites can offer instead some well defined and well documented API, so that bots can plug through it, instead of scaping at all?? That would be nice ...

I would think that if a bot was only as smart as its owner/operator, then there would be no problem. The smartest programmer/poker player gets themselves an edge by way of increased knowledge and capabilities. This percent of society is so small, no net change to the general balance is realized. Just as no net advantage was realized with the release of Phil Hellmuth's "Master's of Poker"

Unfortunately, in this digital age we have script kiddies and we have entrepreneurs. Script kiddies buy products from entrepreneurs. And with each sale, someone's level of play is brought up far beyond their achievable capacity.

Also, more devious entrepreneurs can put the average data entry skillset to use and farm out the lower-level skillsets to execute their "wealth building strategy" (witness the second hand "gold market" in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft where there is essentially slave labor.)

So it is not too far of an extreme to imagine a 'botting genius' such as the star of our current thread farming out thousands of copies of his optimal strategy bot creating an extensive network that filters profits from the little worker fishies all the way up to the top, 'our resident expert' ... and in my mind, that is how bots could undermine the poker economy. Those profits never see the light of day at another poker table.

/tin-foilness

All this talk reminds me of my days playing chess on the internet and fears of facing someone using a computer engine to help them analyze the moves.

It makes me want to play more live poker.

At my level, I guess I don't have to worry too much. I hope.

This is very true, but you have to appreciate computers have reached a far far higher level of competency in Chess than in poker. In fact on fast time controls, your average brand new PC running commercial software will thrash less than great players every time.

QFMFT!!!

Wow, this guy thinks the problem with poker is that people get better at it.

The Sharks are the "problem"... not Bots

LOOOOOOL!!

Internet chess servers have also become very effective at figuring out if a player is getting computer help or not. This gives me some hope that botting can be kept under control in poker as well.

Luckilly everytime I suspected someone from using/being a bot it turned out to be a real bad bot .

Which pokersite could give me the best "guarantee" I won't be playing bots?

I play at a pokersite where 100s of guys from Talinn have signed up the past few weeks and they are all doing very well so far. Also some other people that really don't know anything about poker manage to get itm most of the time and they all come from the same (small) place. I played 3 years at that site and hadn't experienced this kind of stuff till the last few months.

Kind of on the same topic; are there pokerrooms where pokertrackers don't work? Another thing I noticed is that people that don't know me at all make amazing lay downs -face up !#$%^- that can only be explained by them using trackers and it seems like more and more people do so.

I would love to play at a place where bots and trackers don't work.
Back to the basics.

1. There will always be some sites on which poker tracking software won't work, if for no other reason than the time lag. If I start Clif's Poker Room tomorrow, it would take time for Poker Tracker, Poker Office, Hold 'em Manager, et. al., to write the code to include my site. On the PokerTracker website (pokertracker.com), they have a timeline or other posts there they state what sites will be added soon.

2. If you think that a site is rigged, or that there is cheating going on, you should write to that site and see what kind of response you get. Be aware however, that humans are wired to remember the band things that happen more clearly than the good. In poker terms, you remember your bad beats longer than you remember the times that you gave a bad beat to someone else.

Why would I think a site is rigged?
I don't see how 2. is related to my post anyway.

I don't think cheating is going on; I am sure it is in many different ways.
Let me get back to my example.

One tourney I played 100s of times always against more or less the same about 500 opponents. Only a few of them are any good. Till a few months ago we got 4 more good players that all came from the same small place; Spijkenisse and the last few weeks we got even more good players that again all come from the same place in this case Talinn.

Then I read the articles on this forum and decided to do a small test to see if the stats of these players are similar and found they are. Though I can't be sure at all these players use bots I am convinced they do for a number of reasons. One being that these guys from Spijkenisse don't know poker at all, which I found out by asking trick questions to test their -lack of- knowledge.

By now I got to know my bots a little. They are not so good at poker, but very good in gathering chips. It is hard to beat them unless you start at the same table. The bot is very aggressive and has the biggest advantage when the blinds are high. They are a serious problem that needs to be solved in the interest of most of us and poker in general.
Step one should be to make using pokerbots illegal, just like stealing is.
Now it is illegal for poor students not to use them and of course they will.

Same response as before. If there are bots, or any other kind of cheating, have you communicated with the site about this?

How widespread is the use of bots? Do we have any evidence they are in use? I would hate to play at a site against anyone using software to secure an advantage.

Some threads ootomh
another

There are more but there's enough reading there for a while

how can you know if your opponent is using a bot?