For some reason I'm not surprised - if I wanted an outside party to determine if someone were using a bot or not, I would certainly choose one of those guys.

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"?

Does this timing data take into account the connection quality?
I am curious how the data can be so accurate since we all know internet connection quality can vary every second, or even less.

Ahh, yeah, I do. Running a bot is just as serious as collusion. You are the first bot sympathizer I've heard. my concern is with innocent players accused of botting, not those that are actually botting.

Well I guess I am the second in a group I'd rather not be in... but I have to disagree here.

Collusion is far worse than running a bot. Collusion is breaking the rules of the game, a bot is breaking the rules of the site.

I would far sooner play at a full ring table with 9 independent bots than with 9 humans colluding against me. I do not understand how this is even a question.

Why would you want to do either? Both are clear cheating situations. Confiscate funds and ban both. Why are you even discussing this?

I would not knowingly and willingly play against colluders, or somebody with a "super-user" account, or (in a live game) somebody dealing seconds or using a marked deck, etc.

I would knowingly and willingly play against a bot.

To me, that's a huge difference -- the bot wouldn't scare me away from playing. The cheater would.

Well I guess I'm the third.
Collusion is a crime, botting gives no advantage from game theory standpoint. Collusion is disallowed even in botting tournaments with no money prize (like the university of alberta one).

Botting is cheating only if the specific program is prohibited by the particular room (hence gainst the EULA). This is what every room develop by itself.

For me it is very ridicolous how casinos mix up in their terms of service (sometimes under the same bullet list):
1) criminal things (like collusion, money laundry, document counterfeiting, chargebacks);
2) with things that give unfair advantage (pokeredge, etc.),
3) with things that give no unfair advantage, but are not preffered by the majority of the player base (botting i put here)
4) with other things (not allowing proffesional play, "you should not say something bad about our casino in a forum", etc.)

This is my final post on this thread. I want to thank everyone that tried to get at the truth for posting. For the record I did not use software assistance to help me play poker. The bottom line is that I keep giving up more and more information about myself with no expectation. I can’t even convince Mike Haven that I’m innocent when I have given him all of the relevant information, even the stuff that is bad for me. If I can’t convince Mike of my innocence when he has all of the info I don’t have chance here. Rather than doing myself further harm I am going to quit posting while I am behind.

Sillysal

I've said here before, some months back, that there is certain information that would allow any site that wanted to to know with 100% certainty that a player is a robot, if they are using some of the popular robot software available.

If they actually explained what this was information was the software makers would eventually find a way around it and the most sophisticated robot users would become all but undetectable.

Not only that but several other sectors that wish to detect non human interaction with their sites would find life a lot harder.

I am of the opinion that if FTP are prepared to risk the bad publicty that confiscating this big a BR is bringing them (since some will inevitably believe they are wrong), they are making use of this particular 'tell'.

My only criticism of FTP is that, if the OP is indeed using a robot, they had the ability to detect this behaviour long before they took action and that they, along with all the other poker sites, turn a blind eye to robot play unless someone complains.

sillysal - wow, I have to say I did not expect any more postings from you. I have been more critical than most about you in this thread and still believe you could have updated your "supporters" more than you did. Anyway better late than never.

You are still protesting your innocence but it sounds like you have accepted the inevitable. You have obviously not been entirely forthcoming in this thread - you state "I can’t even convince Mike Haven that I’m innocent when I have given him all of the relevant information, even the stuff that is bad for me". If you have nothing to hide what is bad for you?

As you are not being open with this forum we can only assume things. I see we have 2 options:

1. Believe FTP who have carried out a thorough investigation and had it independently verified that cheating has occured. FTP have incurred costs and bad publicity and will get no benefit from declaring you guilty.
2. Believe you who stands to lose $47K and has not been totally open and honest even by your own admission.

We will never be privvy to all the information unless you decide to make it public by posting. I am sure this is not going to happen. However, if you are truely innocent then keep up the fight and I wish you all the best.

This is very basic level of thinking and far away from anything.

The only reason FTP do not want to give more information is because they don't have it, or that they are afraid that more publicity will hurt them. And simply they don't feel a need to do it. Their way of thinking is "why the **** are we obliged to report to the mob", and not "we do not want to hint software makers".

I disagree.

Not giving a full and detailed explanation knowing that a proportion of your customers and potential customers will think you are little better than thieves is not good for their image.

They must have a very good reason for not wanting to divulge the information.

From my experience with detecting non-human interactions I believe they are behaving very responsibly in taking the bad publicity hit in preference to tipping off robot producers.

Where they behave less responsibly is in not proactively checking all players for the most reliable robot indicators all the time.

FYP.

They do not have a very good reason for not wanting to divulge the information, and it is as simple as that. If you really worked on detecting non-human behaviour, that should actually be obvious to you.

Can you tell me how full tilt will hint anyone if they say:
* your timing between mouse clicks is X1 seconds and std is Y1 seconds, while the mean of all players is X2 and the std of their std is Y2. Which makes it very improbable [number how much here] that you are a human.

instead of:
* we caught you by timing tells.

How is this hinting bot makers exactly? If a bot maker decide to spend the time and implement protection against timing tells, he will not just implement the first thing that comes to his mind, he will conduct human experiments, extract the neccessary statistical properties, and take them into acccount.

On the rest - ok, it's your opinion, so its fine, I don't feel a need to object here.

So you believe that anyone working on security systems should divulge all the techniques they use and effectively create a manual for those who would bypass the security?

An interesting approach, but not one that is used by anyone who is actually responsible for security systems for reasons that should be blatantly obvious to anyone but a complete idiot.

As I said, that is so blatantly obvious that if you don't know the answer I very mcuh doubt that you will understand the explanation, but I'll try:

If they gave a detailed explanation such as you suggest it would tell the robot maker exactly where they need to change the parameters of their click logic to bypass that particular security check.

Could it be any more obvious?

Apperently you have no clue netiher of bot building, nor of anti-bot protection if you tell me that the info I wrote, if given by FullTilt, will be of any use (beyond ultra minimal) to any bot builder.

Such info, of much higher quality, is available on many places in the internet and every bot developer (not user of bot framework) knows it.

I would propose to discuss this by PM if you like to discuss this seriously.

It seems very clear from the above that you are a robot developer yourself and the nonsense you spout is a futile attempt to finesse information that would be valuable to you in your endevours.

As the saying goes: Nice try but no cigar.

If I am a bot developer or not that is irrelevant, but I know a lot about software, including such software that can play poker. That's why I'm saying (and I am qualified to say it) that your level of thinking is very basic, and you have no clue of bot detection or anti-detection.

And if you are thinking that a place like this forum, or sporading mail from a casino, is good for extracting information about bots, LOL. Really, LOL.

im of the firm opinion if theres a way to cheat at anything some1 will find it..but qpw is right why make it any easier for them to do it..security is there for a reason to catch thieves not educate them on how they got caught..so they can do it better next time..im sure the bot makers will catch on soon enough on their own,

For the record, owing to your continued protestations that you are innocent and that there must be a huge error in FTP's primary records of your play, you know that I did my utmost to persuade the consultant and his team to allow you to travel to his offices to meet you and watch you play live for two days, to compare actions, timings and whatever else they might want to record, entirely at your own cost for travel and all fees, (which you agreed), but unfortunately the consultant felt that there was no point in accepting your offer. He is certain that as each of the various methods they used to determine bot-play indicated bot-play to such a high degree that there is absolutely no possibility, statistically-speaking, that you were not using a bot during the time you played at FTP.

Apart from all that you say, my whole point was that providing proof that someone "cheated", has nothing to do with reveling information that helps botters.

For a bot developer there is zero difference if fulltilt say "we detected the bot by timing tells" or they give proof in terms of std etc. The bot developer will either not care to protect himself from timing tells (hence will play only on sites that allow bots, or sites that do not check for timing tells) or if he decide to protect himself from timing tells - he will make it undistinguishable from human play - dot, no matter what the site do and check.

This is not knowledge like a "sentence that is passed" or something. You should be able to undertsand this even if you are not computer scientists but a mathematician, i.e. take a problem like prime factorization, to prove that several numbers are factorization of a prime number is easy - it's polynomial time problem (you just need to multiply the numbers and compare if they are equal to the given number), but to find such prime factorization of a given number is NP-complete problem (hence all inet security is based on that). My point is - that for them to prove cheating this has nothing to do with revealing hints about their detection process, neither they make the life of any pokerbotter more complex, or more easy.

daisy - assuming botting is cheating (which I don't believe but not discuss here) - you are also "normally" correct that "better not make life of cheaters easier". However, I keep this whole discussion going on (and trying to explain that proof makes no difference from bot POV) because I think it's in the interest of the community here once the thread was started, and the topic was raised, to get more, and more reliable information.
Otherwise (if you don't agree to me) you are simply saying that you agree with my "don't care for the mob" statement, which I only made provocative (i.e. I don't look at the community here as a mob).

To be fair, actually what I wrote some posts above is not proof. It is actually the same thing if full tilt provide the timing std, because noone can verify this. So if fulltilt decided to cheat/lie noone can detect this (for example because they closed the account of a winning player because too many other players complained from him, and they needed to come with some reason for that. I don't however believe that fulltilt cheated in this case, as Mike Heaven confirmed that Darse from UniOf Alberta verified the evidence, which can be trusted).

You are absolutely correct in your assessment that the level of thinking that says: "do not tell the opposition anything about how your security systems make decisions" is extremely basic thinking and you complete inability to recognise and understand the elementary wisdom of that basic tenet marks you out as either a complete idiot or someone who is clumsily trying to get information about security algorithms in order to improve his own robot.

For the criminal (or rule breaker), any source of information is as good as any other. Again, your failure to recognise this simple fact marks you out as either a fool or someone with an entirely different agenda from those trying to secure their sites against robots.

qpw, see my previous post (the long one) and tell me if you still don't get it.

At this point my feeling is you are not only talking nonsense but you can't even argue rationally.

I never said full tilt should disclose anything that compromise their systems. I said they should provide proof or strong evidence for when they close account, and this has nothing to do with compromising their security systems.

For me this case is closed, because I know the guys in alberta and I know that if they were involved in the verification, then it can be trusted (which might not classify as evidence for the rest of the guys here - therefore fulltilt and UoA could have made better job).

Fulltilt and their consultant are being extraordinarily arrogant and unfair.

It has long been the case, certainly in the UK, US, Canada and Austrailia that you are innocent until proven guilty.

This so called 'expert' is effectively saying: "I'm an expert and I'm sure I'm right, and on that basis I am right and there is no point in trying to disprove anything I say".

This is completely and utterly unacceptable behaviour to anyone who cares a jot about justice.