Quote:
Originally Posted by ProRailbird
Yes, they can be stopped, but this forum (poker professionals) isn't going to be full of people that can articulate exactly how.
I've spoken to 3 people I'm very close with about this issue who I'd feel have insight into the issue and this was their feedback.
1 is a VERY big poker backer from China. He knows people personally that have run bots and he also has business in the software industry. He's confident bots can be detected once they become prevalent and sites are forced to deal with them or die.
Bots are extremely prevalent, but no one is looking for them. Sites have been losing 20% cash game volume a year since black Friday, and a higher % than that at higher stakes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ProRailbird
Another worked as the anti-fraud engineer for a big pay per click advertising company. He also thinks bots can be beaten but has concerns about how you deal with the money once you catch bots because in advertising the quickest anyone gets paid is 30 days so you have 30 days to vet traffic and check logs etc., but he's not a poker player either.
The third is an anti-cheat engineer for Valve who makes Counter-Strike and he is also confident you can defeat bots, however he'd like to see some negative incentive, legal or otherwise, against bots and treat it as trying to cheat a casino once poker gets fully legalized in the US.
What did you describe bots as? Bots these days are likely computer programs on a laptop beside an eastern European making minimum wage. They either screen scrape or have the operator input action and boards, and the laptop spits out an answer. The bot, just like current pro's, is attempting to get better and better at the game of poker, and it's in a game where the conditions change every table, and with extremely high variance.
The difference between current bots and good pro's stats wise is narrower than it's ever been, and a lot of these bots will be playing multiple sites simultaneously, so you can never get anywhere near decent samples on 1 SN before they change their strategy.
They are vastly different than aimbots your Valve friend will have experience with. I'm not as experienced with your other friends area of expertise, but my hunch is it's something completely different.
Sites don't care about bots, the answer on how to compensate players cheated by bots has never been answered, and it's a question that the sites want to avoid. They also don't want to send out emails announcing they have failed their players.
Regulators are all seemingly completely useless. If you look at the little information we have from the UKGC, who appear to be the most interested in actually helping their players, you will be extremely dissapointed. They recently had a survey actually. I started it and looked at the questions, the sense I got was "these guys don't have the slightest ****ing clue what they are doing, gonna be a waste of time to deal with them".
And then as a player you realize that the bots have reached a point where you need a significant amount of technical know-how to be able to detect them with a high degree of certainty (at higher stakes at least). If you are good enough at poker, and have the programming and statistical skills to find them, you would also be able to make a significant amount of money doing something else. Whereas to detect bots you will need to invest in hand histories, your time, and your reward will be a site stonewalling you for months and then banning half the accounts and telling you you should be grateful.
You can google poker bots, and you will find a fairly active forum with an out of the box bot that has worked for the vast majority of the past 7-8 years on almost all top poker sites. Sites don't give a **** about bots, and there are some excellent ones out there already. Vanilla NL has almost no time left, and as time moves on I think it will be sites creating new games, bots learning to conquer them, continuing ad nauseam.