Quote:
Originally Posted by El_Hombre_Grande
Philes: I can only assume that you do not entrust any meaningful sums of money to online poker rooms. If you did, you would probably feel the need for balance between the rights of innocent players to be sure that their funds will not be unjustly seized, and insuring that bots are not being used.
I can't speak for others, but I'd rather play against 100 bots than have one person's funds confiscated unjustly, so you can guess how I feel about "balance".
Part of poker is selecting your opponents. If an opponent (bot or otherwise) plays good, don't play against him. If you have thousands of hands against a bot playing heads up LHE, you obviously think you are better than said bot, and you can't really claim to be much of a victim. If you only have a few hands against a bot, your results against that bot are basically variance anyway, and if you lost it was mostly due to the cards and not due to playing against a bot -- again, your claim to being a victim is suspect.
The main folks who are "victims" of a bot are the fish who run at -10 BB/100 who happen to sit down against a decent bot, and the sharks who lose the opportunity to relieve said fish of their money. But those fish would have been chewed up just as quickly by a human shark, and the sharks -- well, I understand your frustration at the loss of opportunity, but let's be serious, claiming that you're a victim of the bot because it got the fish first?
Now, the above applies to bots in ring games. Bots in tourney situations worry me a lot more, for two reasons. One, you can't get up and leave whenever you want, and two, the mere possibility that two bots could be in the tourney and cooperating is 100 times scarier than playing a heads up cash game against a single bot.
Note that I'm not advocating that we let the bots run rampant. That's up to the individual sites, and if their rules prohibit bots and you run a bot anyway, they should be free to shut you down. But in my perfect world, unless they can prove actual CHEATING (such as collusion -- which is impossible in a heads up cash game), they'd just freeze the bot's funds for long enough to inconvenience them, maybe confiscate some small percentage of the funds to cover their bot-policing program, and then give them the rest back with a lifetime ban. To me, total confiscation of the entire account balance should be reserved for the most egregious of cheats (tourney collusion, AP-style "superuser" cheating, etc.). Botting isn't even close to the same level of crime, and it shouldn't have the same level of punishment. We don't treat shoplifters the same as bank robbers, right?
Just a thought question... If somebody deposited $60,000 onto a site, ran a bot for a week at high-stakes LHE, lost $13,000, and then got caught, do you still think they should have the remaining 47 grand confiscated and returned to the "victims"?