I don't think there's anything unethical in botting. If the project gives you enjoyment and you acknowledge the risks, go for it. I would be surprised if the games I play didn't have any bots but I don't mind at all.

Well, when the program literally begins to tell you what you should do, I would consider that a line. The line is blurry, but it exists all the same. I don't feel like probing all the spaces in the algorithm spectrum to figure it out right now, though.

Yes, you are also taking money from other dedicated/smart people, but at uNL most of it is from the undedicated or otherwise incompetent and unengaged ime. Certainly, I might have been up 1 or 2 BI versus other decent regs (EV or $won) when I played the great stakes of 25 and 50NL, and down some BIs versus others, but the vast, vast majority of my profits and EV came from the guys playing terribly, probably intoxicated in a lot of the instances. I don't believe most of those people were really dedicated to improving their game, perhaps I'm wrong, but that's a read I've gotten between online and live play: some players just want to lose money, even if they don't realize it, and they're the ATMs at the table that keep the games going for those looking to profit.

The fools would not lose their money if they played only against other fools. Some of them really do prefer that 0EV gamblefest. I suppose many do. If there were no sharks in the water, all the fish would just keep chasing each other around in a dizzying play of idiocy, having fun while losing their 2% each hand for the pleasure; there'd be no blood in the water.

gumpzilla's post says a lot of things I agree with also.

So it doesn't seem unethical to you at all that he'd be breaking the rules to which he agreed to abide and that he'd be using a prohibited and largely unexpected method, quite different from the way the game is usually played, to make money from others?

Is any conduct at the poker table unethical? If yes, what conduct, and why?

I don't see what's wrong with drawing the line right where it's drawn in the terms to which the player voluntarily agreed.

What's wrong is that you would be expecting people to refrain from making more money simply because of what they sense to be a completely arbitrary rule. It is not going to work.

I simply disagree. I am not particularly certain so maybe someone else can weigh in, but as far as I can tell they would probably end up losing even more because the fake feeling that they can win would be much stronger.

You would get banned for life + all money taken from your account if you got caught. soooooo fast. But wth do it imo. Why? Because you cant.

So the ethics line is right where people's natural, self-interested behavior puts it? Anything that people tend to do is ethical? Or does enforceability enter into it too, so that anything that people tend to do that you can't stop them from doing is ethical?

I posited above a test for for when something is not ethical — when it is against the rules, is harmful to others, and is not expected, it is unethical. But I submit that the inverse is not true, and that in fact in any voluntary context, intentionally violating any term to which you willingly agreed, without some change in the circumstances from the time you agreed to it, is unethical.

And yes, that means that if the T&Cs ban Sharkscope or calculators or HUDs, I believe using them is unethical. If it is against the site's rules, it is cheating.

To draw the line anywhere else raises the slippery slope argument — but it can all be avoided if we acknowledge that breaking the rules is cheating. yes, that means most poker players are cheaters, but frankly I think we knew that anyway. People cheat. People behave unethically — in fact, people usually behave unethically.

Back to your response: the question was what was ethical, and you responded regarding what was some combination of normal and enforceable. Are you sure that's where you want to put the line?

Yes. A rule that is unenforcable punishes the nice people and rewards the douches. To me that is immoral. People should not go out of their way to only make the life better for people less considerate than themselves. In poker that is exactly the case - due to the game mechanics the only people you are effectively taking money from are other winning players, and if they are douches, you should not be nice to them. Nice people deserve more than the douches, not the other way round.

How much a nice person has to go out of his way to not break a rule also depends on his connection with the rule. A good rule should thus make sense intuitively and be acceptable to the players. The pandora's box of tracking and algorithms has already been opened. We've stepped on the slippery slope and there's no backtracking - even for relatively nice people, stopping at a random point feels arbitrary and thus all the more frustrating considering they're giving up their edge to people less ethical than themselves.

This is not the case with botting. Although equally unenforcable, relatively few people do it, it is unacceptable to the majority of the community and makes far more sense intuitively. As more and more people pick up botting, it will become more and more acceptable and we will also start rolling down the slope faster and faster. Only a douche would do it now, only a person that IMO is actually too nice would refrain from doing it after it has become standard. The source of this inevitable slippery slope is the fact that in case of unenforcable rules, the douches are going to do it anyway, and the nice people should not go out of their way to reward the douches. I recognise that this approach is not widely appreciated because it seems it provides a comfortable justification for almost anything. I personally believe that honest thorough inquiry is capable of sorting things out in that sense.

Would it be unethical then for a human to play in the bot room if they know they can beat the bots?
I don't see how you can separate things like this and it has to work both ways.
I really don't see how you can be for HUDs but against bots.
Easy solution is to get rid of all automation. The whole idea HUD, pokertable ratings, 20 tabling was a pretty dumb idea to start with for the long term health of the poker economy. Bots are just the final step in this over fishing.

How?

Having a bot play for you is clearly unethical, as it gives you an unfair advantage over other players. Imagine if a robot could shoot pool for you or play chess for you etc, it is basically the same thing.

It shouldn't be considered less of an ethics problem just because a poker bot is harder to write than a chess bot, etc.

Life punishes the nice people and rewards those who are not nice.

Ethics means, inter alia, doing the right thing even when it is not optimal for one's own interests... and even when one could get away with doing the wrong thing. Stealing when no one is looking is still stealing, and that's still unethical. Cheating on an unproctored exam is unethical. Underreporting your income when you were paid in cash is unethical.

Nice people may deserve to be rewarded... but in material terms they're not. The liars, cheats, and thieves are rewarded; that's why they lie, cheat, and steal. This probably has a lot to do with the rise of religion, because society worked out that it needed some way to convince people to do things that aren't in their immediate self-interest. (That it didn't work all that well is not the point.)

Probably not easy, but clearly a nice idea in principle imo. But good luck selling it on a poker forum to people 90% of whom use some or all of those tools.

I think a lot of people underestimate (or just do not understand, of course no offense required) the great technical and poker skills required to build a successfull bot and the fun associated with that. It's not just coding a strategy that you would normally play and then just let it run, there is whole other universe of skills, algorithms and things you need to apply.

If you think poker is fun (That is the game plus the competitive environment plus some money incentive involved) - then building an AI in a similar competitive enviroment could be x10 more fun and more obssesive.

And it could cost you your entire online bankroll, plus get you banned for life.

Well, there are already competitive arenas for computer-on-computer poker. This gives you all of the challenge without the ethical problems of using your bots against unsuspecting human players. If you are just interested in this from an academic challenge viewpoint, here are some sites to check out:

Annual Computer Poker Competition

University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group

VP$IP: I have to admit I didn't read the thread even the OP, sorry for that. So my post could have been completely out of context.

If it is about ethics of using pokerbot where it isn't allowed - then it's just cheating, just as any other form of cheating (e.g. using HUD on Cake, or using PTR where not allowed, etc.).

It's not only about the academic challenge, but the challenge to compete against actual humans (human intelligence), and even the against human intelligence that give their best (i.e. plays for money, not for fun).

Yes. I guess I was saying that
1) wether something is right or not depends on wether it is benefiting/harming nice people or douchebags
2) wether something is right or not depends on how much it is accepted
3) the severity of wrongdoing depends on how hard it would be for the commiter to refrain from it

But if nice people deserve to be rewarded, then wether or not they get rewarded or punished changes wether something is ethical or not.

But stealing from a criminal is less of a crime than stealing from a decent person. Cheating on an exam when everyone else is doing it is less unethical than cheating on an exam when noone else is doing it. Underreporting your income when anyone else would do the same is less unethical than underreporting your income when noone else would.

Isn't too relevant, but I think this is wrong BTW. Life has generally already punished someone if they are douchebags, wether it's through low capabilities, terrible conditions or dysfunctional emotional structure. If you take the happiest people in the world, I don't think you're going to find a lot of thieves and frauds among them. As far as I can tell, friendly human interactions are typically quoted as the biggest source of happiness. A douchebag has limited access to them. Life gives instant gratification to douchebags and takes it away from nice people, but that is hardly the endgame of happiness.

No way.

I don't doubt a single word of this; I also don't think it's relevant to a discussion of whether botting (in a human site where it's disallowed) is ethically wrong.


Edit:
Never mind, you got it.

Exactly the justification for pirating music and software. May be technically illegal but unenforceable and the practice is prevalent in the mainstream.

It seems to me that this point is invalidated by the fact that (far as I know) no real-money sites explicitly allow bots.

Yep. Piracy has even one more thing though - if you wouldn't buy the product even if you couldn't pirate it then you're actually not harming anyone at all.

Again, I think you're basically right, but I'm enjoying the discussion, so I'll press on:

I take it that the main thrust of your argument relies on the voluntary nature of agreeing to the TOC and the fact that botting is a violation of it. But, let's imagine a world in which there is a company exactly like Pokerstars called Pokerstars*. Pokerstars* does exactly what pokerstars does with regard to botting. They frequently police their site, removing and banning suspected botters and the poker community is similarly incensed by botting. However, at Pokerstars* there is no official TOC to sign when one agrees to play on the site, so there is no formal agreement against botting. Is botting on Pokerstars* wrong?

I think you're likely to have two responses. The first is that botting on Pokerstars* is wrong because it A) is not what players expect and B) is harmful. But, outlawing things for these reasons requires you to bite a number of bulletts with regards to what's allowed at Pokerstars*. For example, HUDs are both unexpect by fish and harmful to them. Another example is that in certain spots in SnGs (especially HU with fewer than 10bbs), the correct shoving and calling ranges are calculable by a computer. If I memorize these ranges and use them against my opponent, this is both unexpected and harmful. So, a number of ordinarily allowed things on Pokerstars now become wrong on Pokerstars*.

A second response is that you might say that there is nothing wrong with botting at Pokerstars*, but I think this too bites a bullet because it means that the only determinate of right and wrong in poker is what a self-interested business put in their TOC. I think the hatred towards botting suggests that its wrongfulness is not contingent in this way.

Again, really enjoying the discussion.

How immoral would it be to release an open source poker AI (such as GNU Backgammon) that was able to beat all humans?

not immoral at all. it will happen eventually.

edit: game theory is legit academic research