smbsmb stated in the other thread that funds seized were roughly 80k$.

Also why the f*** would pokerstars say "we are not at liberty to identify the specific games or player(s) in question" when its been out there on 2+2 for a few days already (and confirmed by the players in question!).
This sounds completely ridiculous to me and once again 2+2 forums are a much better source of information than ps support...

False. I remember in 2008 when people were thinking that in 5 years top, poker would be dead.

Online poker probably won't die in our lifetime, it will just get harder and harder. What makes you think it's gonna die?

Unfortunately sooner or later bots will beat the best human players. And more importantly those programs will become enough "user friendly" that everybody will use them, effectively killing the game.

this is just silly imo, as long as stars can detect these bots they will take action to stop them, online poker is a multi millon dollar industry it wont go down so easily.
i can imagine though that within a few years the average reg will be quite better than the average reg now, which will reduce the edge, altough we'l always have fishes so i really dont see online poker becoming unprofitable anytime soon

Except that at some point it will probably be impossible to differentiate a bot playing by itself and a human helped by very strong software.

nothing is impossible

even stronger software will be able to tell the difference, and if not, stars will ban the use of most or all software...as i said, billon dollar industry.

All I know is that every year, X number of poker players say poker die in Y years because whatever reason and that bots can beat humans in Z years, and that computers will find a GTO in year B. But when you ask programmers they all say they don't have a ****ing clue when bots will beat humans at poker. Most poker sites also don't have accurate estimates as to when poker would "die". Having that said, I highly doubt Pokerstars business plan is limited to 3-4 years.

Some guy in HSNL thread about bots said that you can play chess online for money and sites can detect bots based on the moves they make or something like that. Idk how true that is but the guy seemed to know his stuff. If someone is familiar with this please let us know.

I think speculating on the long-term status of online poker is not that useful to a lot of us as I'd be surprised if many of us will grind online poker for a primary source of income in 10 years or w/e.

Bots already beat the best humans at HULHE.

i.e. ban all 3rd party software

The biggest sites like playchess and icc can detect bots but cant really distinguish between a bot and and a decently stong player helped by software. Which is why there is pretty much no money at stakes in online chess. There are regularly cheating issues in live chess too, when players somehow get software help during games. It is somewhat easy to detect when its a non top player and moves match houdini first line but when its a very strong player you cant deduce anything from the score sheet themselves (as was apparent in the Feller cheating case) as in one game a top100 player is very capable of matching houdini choice on most moves.

Also you can draw another parallel between chess and poker: in chess the best software have been crushing the best humans for quite some years now but the game is still very far from being solved. We still have no idea what the outcome should be, is it a first player win? or is it a draw? nobody knows for sure, and we dont even know what the best 1st move is (the way to solve chess is by actually moving backwards, we now know GTO play for any 7 pieces or lower position, it takes 140000 GB of data!). The same will be true for NLHE, bots will beat the best humans long long before the game is even close to being solved.

Well that could work for somebody masstabling. But once such software is available to a large public there will always be ways to use the information available.
I mean it already exist for all push/fold SNG/tournaments situation and even if lots of software are forbidden by pokersites its still easy to access very strong software information while playing.

I meant NLHE, but yeah.

Im not arguing bots won't beat humans in a certain number of years/decades or whatever, I'm saying there might be a way to have it so bots can be detected etc...

BTW out of curiosity and this might be obvious, but in chess when there is 7 pieces left, does the GTO play guarantee a win ? Or is it draw (is that possible ?) if other player uses GTO but win for any other situation (when other players deviates from GTO) ? Is there an advantage to acting 1st ?

Im not sure what do you mean exactly but the way it works is you can set up any possible combination of 7 pieces or lower, with one side to move, in the tablebases and they will tell you, for that exact configuration obviously, which outcome the position is (white wins, draw or black wins) and GTO play to reach it. For example it could announce you "white wins, mate in 142 moves" and the GTO play for those 142 moves is already precisely known. If you deviate from GTO the win may necessitate a larger number of moves or it could just switch the result from a sure win to a draw or a sure loss (assuming perfect play on the remaining moves).

dont bots have a way easier time calculting GTO for chess since all the information is open?

in poker a bot cannot see the holecards of the opponent so it will be more difficult to make a correct play. even when the bot has to guess or estimate a range of hands (which would take way more data than chess GTO with 7 gamepieces) i believe its very very hard and bots will always have 'exploitable' patterns imo

In chess, there are 20^20 possible situations after each player moves once. Calculating GTO is ****ing impossible with modern computing power. Both games have astronomical numbers of situations so deciding which one is easier isn't really worthwhile.

And, the reason I say poker will die in 10 years is a combination of things, bots being the biggest. If sites have to spend more to detect them, that cost gets passed down. That means higher rake.

Of course, if something happens in the US wrt legislation making online poker legal/regulated, and making botting a criminal offense that lands you in jail, this could cause a semi-boom + long term sustainability. But in it's current form it will die.

Bots obv biggest threat to online poker. They dont need to be better than the best players in order to ruin it, even if they are breakeven it is a pretty terrible result. Very strict legal deterrents are also the only thing I can think of that would stop them.

The thing is computers are much better than humans at finding betting patterns, estimating range and opponent tendencies. Computers are powerful, objective and cold blooded - everything humans aren't.
The only reason chess programs are very strong and poker programs aren't that strong is that chess is more open field (more teams exchange ideas) with much longer tradition and 100x more man hours put into it. There are rating lists, tournaments and a lot of competition. On the other hand in poker it's bunch of amateurs organizing closed teams and starting from scratch implementing their own big idea.
In chess you have very strong open source programs you can start tinkering with. Tens of people put many months to optimize most computationally expensive part of the code. In poker you have nothing like that. Even simple stuff like available equity calculators are 100 to 1000 times slower than decent implementation let alone more complicated parts necessary to make good AI.
Then if you make good AI you have no one to compete against so your choices are to play poker vs it yourself or go bot route which is off putting for many programmers who could help making the step forward in the field.

pretty silly to assume that people wont be able to be better than bots, and that no action would be taken against said bots

If you are still thinking that bots wont ever beat top humans you are just delusional.

I t actually dont matter much, it just changes the nature of "solutions" or "equilibriums". Chess is a deterministic (or whatever the english is for that word) game that dont involve GTO mixed strategies at all. Take NLHE, or any other poker form, the game is non deterministic and GTO play involves tons and tons of mixed strategies.

Not sure about your number, but the commonly established game tree complexity for chess is roughly 10^123. So obviously we wont ever see the perfect GTO strategy for all possible configurations. Still chess programs beat top humans for over a decade already. The game is actually completely solved for 7-pieces and lower. For more pieces configurations softwares use evaluation tools that allow them to drastically reduce the game tree complexity by eliminating all obviously non-best moves right away. The relevant space to explore is much much smaller than the full 10^123.

Very good post, I completely agree

http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/

google glass+any botting software as primitive as montenegran botting technology or better=gg live poker also :x