I think we need to be worrying more about when the bots become self-aware and are able to construct themselves as cybernetic organisms, learning computers that look and act and seem just like real live humans. Then the bot-androids will also infiltrate our B&M games, take all the money & there will be no place for humans to play honest poker. I mean the implications here are for live poker as well as online.

lol, so the botting ring is more well funded than pokerstars?

talk about some nonsense, and sites can prevent minimum wage workers inputting data they get from a computer program.

100% facts thx for the laugh!

This is a complex legal issue...
But it's almost PRECISELY like criminalizing a spitball.

Bots MAY be a violation of TOS of a private site...
Many sites allow and use Bots...
Bots per se are not "cheating" or "fraud"...
Just like guns do not kill people...
People kill people.

*** Proving *** you are running a Bot...
Beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law...
Would be next to impossible.

You would need full-scale FBI raids...
And millions $$$ of high tech experts to testify...
And the Botters just say it's 14 yo nephew doing it...
Send the 14 yo mule to jail.

Is a script that clicks "Fold" a "Bot"...
Where exactly does a "Bot" and "cheating" start?

The testimony of a "poker site" is not credible...
Imagine FTP employees testifying in court...
99% of everything official FTP has ever said is a lie.

One can raise 100 questions such as this.

Joe Barton needs to be thrown out of office...
He has zero regard for personal liberty...
Besides being a stone cold idiot.

Good post. Bypassing human detection is too easy and the quality of the bots are likely much better than most ppl assume.

Those two things are what makes bots the biggest threat to the game..and like mentioned before we have to start accepting that some of those bots will be crushing our winrates from now on. They'll eventually play high stakes and then the big name pros will just play live.

Probably the scariest thing about bots is their evolving strategy.
You could plug in another computer and use the camera to feed information.
The bot operator only needs to perform the actions the bot tells him to perform.

How can you detect that?

I'm pretty sure it's a losing battle, it's just a matter of time.

The finance world is full of bots. It won't happen now, but 10 years down the line you should have a backup plan.

It's going to happen a lot sooner than 10 yrs if they're already crushing games up to 10/20 (allegedly).

There's some serious funding and/or smarts going into coding them.. there's too much money to be made. What's so frustrating is that I bet some "known" players that you see playing each day, chatting, crushing, etc.. are probably just bots. They're just so good at botting that you can't tell it's one.

I am sorry but all of "Sky is falling" doomsayers are way way off target. ((I am only referring to those who say there is no way a solution will be found and online poker will soon disappear for good.)

Yes, it is true bots are a major problem, but for you to think that a multi billion dollar industry is just going to give up and close shop because of bots, you are sadly mistaken.

Yes it will take some time to figure out, yes it will have a major negative impact in the games until the sites wake up do and do more about it, but all problems create a new opportunity for those who can solve it.

For those saying that it is impossible to create a system to prevent bots without running the fish off simply are not thinking it through.

Being able to create a system to separate the fish from the bots is not the issue. The fish are the farthest players away from bots in terms of play style, it is the multi tabling hudbot rake grinders who most closely resemble the bots.

Fish don't play tons of tables, fish don't withdraw large sums of money, fish don't play 14+ hours a day, fish don't play a consistent winning strategy, but the bots do.

Somebody will figure it out, hopefully soon. For now I will only play on Stars, they seem to have the best control of the situation at the moment. I will never play on a network where bots have been discovered.

How I imagine the future to be...

Bots rule online with the regular fish here and there. "The perfect way to play and adjust". (if the bots are crushing MSNL, they obviously have calculated an 'optimal' way to play.)

Players only play live and improve their skills by learning the 'optimal' move with their own bot.

Change is going to happen. If not bots then something else. Accept that online play has it's flaws as well as its benefits.

How hard would it be for the poker sites to modify a mouse so that its actual physical movements are stored on memory inside the mouse, then encrypted, then every now and again this information is sent to the poker site to be cross referenced with the data they have on the users mouse movements taken remotely when the client is open?

It would only need to be mandatory for large volume players to use such a mouse, and it might not stop bots completely, but if your computer is automating stuff it shouldn't be (running a bot) then the data from your mouse wont tally up with the data that the sites can ordinarily obtain from your computer.

If you were a bot operator you could get round this by running a bot that feeds you instructions, but you'd still have to sit there and use your mouse and this will slow any bot operator down considerably making it a far less lucrative and attractive possibility.

i am curious if anybody knows what is the AI situation in PLO compared to NLH? Some people posting in this thread seem to know a fair bit about botting. Does the fact that the decision tree in PLO is so much bigger than in holdem make it much more difficult to create an AI that can compete with an expert player? Or will it be easy enough to come up with semantics/abstractions for the AI so that it doesn't need to analyze the full decision tree? Are there any forms of poker which would be safe from AI/bots in the next 10-20 years?

Not the good ones, I'm pretty sure I have a solid edge over all the bots (especially when they play hu after a table breaks) and most of the good regs I've talked with agree. They obviously beat up on crappy regs though.


Pokerfish_, your comparison to winning players is just laughable. The differences between bots and sharks:

-EVERY HUMAN PLAYER TILTS. Some tilt a huge amount, some less, but regardless a human player that could somehow never tilt would have a HUGE edge over every other human and that is precisely what these bots do

-The guys running the bots don't actually need to play poker. Of course this is cheating, can you imagine if you could just capture your A game and have it play multiple tables for you 14 hours a day while you play video games? IT would be epically unfair for everyone else

-These guys are also using MANY accounts, especially on ipoker where you can create accounts on different skins. Imagine the A game scenario, but now you spread that A game over 10 accounts all playing 14 hours a day


Anyone who thinks a human player with those abilities is a 'fair player' is completely beyond help. Either that or they are just trying to justify the fact that they are botters cheating players out of $. That is all.

Why does majority seem to think that bot accounts would be either multitabling or playing a lot of hours? That doesn't really make any sense.

Sure that might be true for some 18 year olds running bots they downloaded at the micro SNGs, but I doubt any competent botter is doing that. It makes much more sense to have 50+ accounts spread on different networks and play relatively low volume on them to avoid unnecessary attention. Weren't all those midstakes bots caught recently 3 tabling or something like that?

Decision tree on PLO is significantly smaller than in NLHE. How is that not common sense?

5 years ago best bots were probably breakeven at NL50 (which was significantly softer back then), now they are crushing NL1k. Where do you think they'll be in the next 5 years? How about in next 10 years? To me it seems almost inevitable that soon (within 10 years) there will be bots playing close enough estimation of GTO that theyll beat any human player.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/10...ortant-986399/
I suggest reading all the posts by FullyCompletely in that thread, it should give you a good idea how much poker AIs have improved in a short time and what we can expect in the future. (He's from University of Alberta and working on Polaris project)

2008 edition of Polaris had 5 strategies, the best of which was beatable for 11.75BB/100 with optimal counter-strategy, but that was good enough to beat the best LHE pros. The current version is only beatable for about 5BB/100.

He also makes a good point that neither chess or backgammon have been solved yet, but still computers are far superior to any human players nowadays.

when i was playing ipoker most of them were playing 3 tables at a time and there were plenty of accounts playing at the same time for long hours. im assuming (since they all played really similar) that they are all run from the same botter(s).

man i completely agree, was just addressing that guy's post because a few people seem to think that they can beat good 5/10 regs or are pretty close to GTO currently. im in no way trying to downplay the seriousness of the issue, just clearing a few things up.

Only the (hopefully) very harsh legal procedures against botters that could come with legislation would stop the problem enough to save the game.

Because once poker is regulated, botters will be stealing from the US government, and the only thing the US government cares about is money, so that will end up terribly for these people and certainly discourage most of them from even trying.

In the meantime, play on Stars end of story, because I guarantee that iPoker/Ongame etc....are never going to do anything about these bots.

Even if they want to, they don't have the ability, their security support is run by incompetent idiots who can't detect anything.

At this point in time, they're likely not letting the bots play on purpose, they're just incapable of detecting any form of botting/cheating/collusion and their messages of "no bots on iPoker, we can guarantee that" are just meant to hide the fact that they cannot guarantee the fairness of their games because they suck at poker security.

So I know that 50%+ RB is nice, but at this point you just have to choose between RB and the integrity of the games you play in. On top of the fact that rake on PS is much lower...
But I highly doubt that mass-emailing iPoker will do anything, we've been doing that literally for years, now.

Now, if all the regs stopped playing completely for a whole week in protest, that might achieve something. But again, I'm not even sure because it seems to me that the problem is more a question of incompetence than anything else.

this is the best idea yet. ultimately however, the legalisation and acknowledgement of the need for protection for this business is the only way the disincentive will ever be great enough to make bot constructors sit up and take note of the risk in using bots. confiscation rarely worries them, i doubt they keep more than 5/6 buyins online and accounts are made through relatives etc.

perhaps sites could give a specialised mouse to suspected botters on which to prove play for a limited time period.

It is worth noting (just to enlighten the people not familiar with these bots) that they dont play many tables simultaneously, they play loose aggressive and they play for almost random amounts of time.

Stars is the only site that really cracked down on identity and has a comparatively huge security system. Sadly its the monopoly stars holds worldwide which has impacted on the lack of progression in other sites security, the stars business model not being in direct competition with other (high rb) euro networks. Legalisation and the risk of getting bent over by some mad mexican in prison is still the way to stop and make criminals think.

I'm not comparing 1 reg vs 1 multiaccounting botter, I'm looking at the bigger scale. For each succesfull botter there are like 1000 regulars who kill the game. People at microstakes complain they don't enjoy poker anymore, you think that is caused by bots? No that is caused by a huge ammount of 24 tabling microgrinders. At least I hardly enjoy it anymore when I'm up against 5 nit players. So who's killing the games here? I hear more complains about Russians then I hear about bots btw.

Your example of 10 accounts at different skins of ipoker makes no sense as well, yes you can play with 10 different screennames but not at the same time, when you try to login to the client with your 2nd account it says you can't login twice or something like that. And if you find ways around that like different IP, well I guess it won't take long till they figure out and ban you for multiaccounting.

I believe this thread went the wrong way completely and missing the target.....the target should be that every player out there who wants bots out have to complain and we have to organize to get things done...

How to detect or prevent bots IS NOT our problem and it should have never been so therefore that is for the software owners to deal with witch apparently most of them couldnt care less...

My point is that every normal reg can spot a bot from a mile distance and report suspicious behavior of that username and the network should have enough resources, staff and whatnot to realize the truth and ban the account of the pointed username if the suspicion is true.....

Well they DONT and they are just looking away dont giving **** about it....

What if for example we can gather big enough critical mass of regs who will all come together to the network...in my case ENTRACTION....and ask for them to check the usernames and ban them from site because we have more than enough reasons to believe that they are BOTS....

and if they dont we can for example agree amoung ourselfs to not play for 1 agreed hour a day just to prove how serious we are about this...and plus we will do everything in our power to inform every poker site out there about the issue and make them bad publicity....and as a final resort even quit the network if they continue to just look away.....

Now i wanna come back to the beggining of my post and say that we need to take appropriate action about this not debate over wheter they are easy to beat or similar...

So in that light if any entraction reg feels the same way and believe this would be a good place to start pls speak up in private messages or here or whatever....but lets get the bots out once and for all or at least minimize the amount of them and make the site do their job witch is BANNING BOTS....

p.s. sorry all for my bad english

Now that I look into this Barton bill...
It's the worst form of Crony Capitalism.

It's sole purpose is to hand a Poker Monopoly...
To the Nevada Casino Lobby...
And criminalize in a Draconian way...
Any poker not controlled by Nevada Casinos.

No wonder it has Totalitarian criminal provisions...
Running software = drilling a slot machine.

Compare this to, say, Canada and many countries...
Where online poker is legal...
Because there are no laws prohibiting it.

People should be careful what they wish for...
The wrong bill will end online poker as we've known it...
Like this Barton bill.

http://calvinayre.com/2011/06/25/pok...-bill-hr-2366/

sites are not willing to do ****. i emailed the support on iPoker about a bot and they just said that he wasnt when i personally think it was pretty clearcut - 5500 hands per day every day this year so faar, slightly loosing but winning with rakeback @ NL 10


"guntas" on iPoker

http://www.pokertableratings.com/ipo...-search/guntas

This. And also people making it seem like bots are not a huge issue are either botters themselves or really don't understand the situation.

As for action... I really think we should STOP PLAYING completely on Ongame and iPoker. I already took my money out of Ongame but not yet on iPoker.

For people who do not play HU I don't understand why you would not just go play on Stars. It's pretty clear that they take the issue seriously unlike all the other networks. And it's obviously clear that if the bots have no one to play vs they won't be very useful.

Some regs will stay despite this just to bumhunt the games... and it's because of things like this that there is so much crap and injustice going on in the world.

The number of starting hands in plo is more than 1000x that of nlhe. The number of decisions for any given hand is smaller but the full decision tree contains every starting hand. Evaluating each option also becomes more complex, because you need to consider a larger number of potential holdings for your opponent.

The DEA is an agency of the US govt. Are druglords more well funded than the US govt? No. Are they more well funded than the DEA? Yes.

Pokerstars Security is a division of Pokerstars. Are professional botters more well funded than Pokerstars? No. Are they more well funded than Pokerstars Security? Yes.

I posted in the leg forum but once there is clearer legislative situation and some cheaters are prosecuted in civil or criminal Courts for cheating and fraud then there will exist more disincentives.

Not many as a student want to risk graduating with a criminal record just to make some side money with a bot.

I am sorry, but any player who continues to support a site by playing on it when there is proof or at least a high suspicion of bots are the ones who are missing the target.

You have two types of sites, those with bots and those without bots or at least those who are doing everything they can to prevent bots.

The obvious solution is to support the sites making the effort to eliminate bots, instead players continue to support sites like Entraction by playing there.

Actions speak louder than words, send all the emails you want, but play on sites that are doing their best to eliminate bots.