Not going to leak information I just received but even in some of the biggest entries Bots are there I am hearing. Rumours of suspended accounts due to it at the highest level. So is this it now? Are we to live with bots? Can we ever beat them ultimately as they advance and is the future death of poker "on-line?"

Is there really any security method to screen them out?

P.S. I was talking with a professional poker grinder millionaire and he said HUs he can never consistently beat a bot. So how long before 6 Max, 9 Max is unbeatable or PKOs or other formats?

((Colluding bots with an RTA Master, we going to see the death of poker like Black Friday? But Worldwide?))

Nah brah

online not going to die, I think AI will help combat all these issues, kind of like what WPT Global is doing, and essentially I guess what chess online looks like, prob even better

If you are in a decent nine handed game with two good opponents, and you replace one of them with a perfect GTO bot and one of them with a bad player, your EV goes up.

RTA is a bigger problem. There are ways to run it without the security team ever knowing about your cheating from your computer's end (no sign,no software, no screen sharing, nothing! For obvious reasons I don't want to give ideas to cheaters altough for sure lot have programmed it already!). Obviously you need to know how to play and adjust. Some players maybe follow it blindly in cases of downswings so they eliminate the risk of being statistically detected. In spins you follow it only in multipliers bigger than x and/or versus the thoughest opponent. If you play in the good times/sites you will have fish games x% of the time etc.

Also solutions can be made without using sketchy lines (the small probability ones that warrants a deeper/manual security check).

bots need to be run on the same computer, AI will detect the unusual patterns more easily etc.

Chess online doesn't get played for money.

They have one tournament a week called Titled Tuesday where first prize is $1k. Even with those low stakes, Cheating is endemic in chess, you can listen to Hikaru talking over this recent C-Squared pod on the issue to get an idea of the problem. That is with next to no money involved.

Listen to this kid talk about how he created and sold a private bot that is better than anything currently on the market. Large groups have hired these really good developers to make bots better than anything we have seen publicly

https://youtu.be/QYdVzg5WE3w?si=HlzEttbqaFauOGxg&t=211

I said this months ago and still think its absolutely nailed on true.

The bigger worry is when the "bots" are working together with the "poker" software and/or other "bot" liquidity providers in the game - then the "fish" "bot" helps funnel more chips to the house

Common for software providers to partner with liquidity providers who can program accounts however they see fit

I play bots HU regularly and they are beatable depending on how long you play and with variance - they never go on tilt so you need to be locked in for the entire session. I would love to see the best bots play the best HU players IN A FAIR ARENA who are actively strategizing on how to beat their strategies.

If you look at the Pluribus 6m bot results - the bot actually lost against a cast of characters over 10k hands but they used some AIEV metric to make it seem like the bots actually won in the game. If the bot is working together with the software provider code - all bets are off. If the best players have the time to track, study and plan against the bots strategies - I think it would be closer than people expect if it was once again in a fair arena.

Is there huge amount of money in cheating in online poker games?
yes

Is there any punishment legally even if you are caught cheating millions out of other players?
no

Is there any effective systems in place that prevents people from getting banned then making other accounts under another strawman's name?
no

Also its easier to justify than hacking into people's accounts or financial cheating. So for sure attract a chunk of the best IT guys who doesn't want or can't integrate into a standard working environment.

Even if it's just at the level that the bots are working together to share cards and incorporating population data to make exploits they are going to be raping the ecosystem.

I don't understand the HU part, you are essentially saying you can beat GTO HU, which is not possible. The bots you are playing I would suggest are just not very good.

Pluribus was made in 2019. That is five years ago. The field of AI has seen massive advancements since then. The explosion in LLM's and AI itself has meant none of the guys who were actively working in this area at an academic level are that bothered anymore. I posted an interview with Noam recently where he said there are trivial improvements with current knowledge to make them better. While we don't see this out in the open anymore, I am sure the black market still has plenty of private people working on them, like the interview with the guy I linked in my last post.

think hyper hu sngs havent been able to be beat for a human since like 10 years(few genis exceptions)

Exactly, the whole equation of those points adds up to an environment that if cheating wasn't endemic you would be asking why. The most pertinent of them is the lack of consequences. Imagine being able to take a shot at stealing loads of money day after day and if you get caught absolutely nothing happens. I'd say the one thing that saves the market somewhat currently is a lack of that knowledge in the general populace and obfuscation through a decent level of poker knowledge to understand what is involved to try. If someone outlined how easy all this is and they have a big enough platform, the mob that would descend on online poker would sink it forever.

The other thing I would add to that list, are the absolute joke shop of sites. I mean outside of Stars I wouldn't trust a single thing one of the sites, the whole security thing people are getting sold is a complete dog and pony show.

"I mean outside of Stars I wouldn't trust a single thing one of the sites, the whole security thing people are getting sold is a complete dog and pony show. "

but then you can decide:

1. you play in an environment that has lower cap on the EV winrates but you will likely realize more money because of less cheating

2. you gamble: you choose the site with higher EV winrates but noone knows how much of your EV you realize on the long run due to superusers, collusion, housebots.

Still money in it, either way tho.

These bots that are plaging online are beatable, since they're not made with the purpose of being unbeatable, they're made with the purpose of beating recreationals as hard as they can. They're not the same as a HU GTO bot.
In reality, they play pretty bad if you know a thing or two, but yes, i agree they should all get banned, and yes, they're a plague right now on a lot of pools

Once you understand how to navigate the "online" ecosystem - it all comes down to the same thing as it always has - getting in volume repeatedly with bad players

There are more arenas than ever available and so many bad players out there - being able to identify those players and arenas where you can gain EV is a bigger skill now than ever before because lots of places give off the legitimacy of "real" "poker" due to marketing. Once you find big losing bb/100 players who you can get volume with at stakes high enough for your poker goals - it's still the same game as it's ever been for cash games.

Common strat people are using for example is running their own club for HU matches against fish who are punters with no clue how to play. You can scale this as high as you want with little barriers using crypto and apps. Sometimes those people create their own software for the matches that allows you to program the account playing against the fish for whatever level of variance or play you want. There is no restrictions or security against this when the people operating the software or the club want to implement that strategy and as of now, we have seen little accountability for the people who are taking advantage of this.

I wasn't suggesting playing on Stars, I am saying that they are the only site I trust in terms of what they say in public, they aren't colluding with bot makers and have a security setup that makes some difference to the level of cheating taking place.

The rest of your post is exactly what I said previously about people still playing if they can find win rate and you will obviously gravitate towards wherever that is higher.

From Day 1 of online poker people have been crying rigged, bots, colluding, blah blah blah, if people feel that way then just don't play.

I used to play for a living online, I pivoted many years ago and am now a Software Eng. I'd am a recreational player these days. I would happily love to play online and punt away a certain win rate and maybe even look to improve my game over time to play more, as I still love the game. I won't sit in environments though where I know I am most likely getting cheating.

The idea that the dream is now to improve so you can maybe get into some dodgy crypto game isn't exactly something you can sell people on towards getting into poker. and is actually really sad.

Yeah they've been there from day 1, but the solvers didn't exist, bots were basic and collusion didn't change. People make a living from on-line poker...think saying that's all said and done is sort of defeatist. Not just that a fair game should be had if it can be.

The type of player that can truly evade capture or notice is rare. The basic crap that could be utilized to fry the bottom feeding bots that are stealing from people should be stopped. Just like Credit Card Interest Rates and Ongoing Subscription to memberships. I don't think it fair we should feed a guy sold a setup for 20g to rob mostly Americans and Western Players!

Most marketing for poker these days is centered around tournaments and live stream cash games - you can still become one of the best high stakes online cash players but new routes are open now that weren't before - cryptocurrency and all of the new poker arenas really changed the game for strategies you can use online. Mechanic of Poker is a good show showcasing who some of those online players are today for cash games.

The dream now is different for everyone - lots of people want to use poker as a way to make money however they can, some want to play high stakes on the live streams, some people vloggers, some people win a big tournament event, some people play the highest stakes tournaments - lots of routes open these days.

Easy to look at it as one big negative because of how easy it is for people to be cheating but there is a lot more to the story and not every arena is the same.

I watch some of the live streams, still keep up to date with some of the drama and have a decent handle on the current ecosystem. I have even watched, Mechanic of Poker pod a few times. The thing that initially attracted me back was curiosity around solvers and wondering how close we were all playing to some kind of theoretical baseline back in the day and of course being stuck inside during covid. I have messed around loads with solvers and it certainly seems easier than ever to get better with the likes of Wizard but the incentive seems poor compared to when I got into the game. I don't feel my comments are necessarily negative in regards online and more I'm speaking around facts/reality that many people don't want to hear.

Please get back doing some pods yourself, we all miss them.

It was def possible to beat chess engines back in the day using things like the horizon effect, by directing it to these positions as much as possible. For the slow thinkers, playing at correspondence speeds obviously helped

Same thing with old Poker Bots like PokerSnowie, it had plenty of weak links in the rarer spots you could navigate it, plus the too stringest sizing constraints.

A current AI bot with quick real time nodelock capabilities might just be unbeatable HU though, but as others mentioned, 6/9 handed the entire table composition might still be the most important aspect in determining your EV, not how tough the bot is.

I assume you have never used a solver, because anyone who has would never put the words "quick real time nodelock capbabilities" into a sentence.

Computing Power grows exponential ... It's just a matter of time is all! I worked in PCs since the early 90s and built my first by hand as a baby. Just time so powerful they will do any calculation in a snap of the fingers. GTOW/PIO are complex for now, in 2 years/5 years the computers will do the work fast enough and the bots will have proprietary solvers in them as good as any built at state of the art 5 years ago. Then we're looking at real security measures or playing machines ...

Totally possible. Obviously not with the ones available for anyone for 100bucks a month lol

Depending on the format it can be quite easy. SNGs, spinngos suck because its quite easy to not just have GTO solutions but some other pre-nodelocked solutions that change according to your opponents stat. You just need to know the most common leaks and create couple profiles, even starting from the flop.

And there are other high level stuff such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgau2BKTHbk


Basically it automatically "nodelocked" based on past hands and also tried making predictions where else they might have the same leaks.

And bad news this video is 7 years old. The whole research paper is out there, public if i remember correctly. My capabilities are way below to even understand it at this point.

GTOWizard AI is fast. Why do you think a similar feature would be so hard to be developed and integrated into a farm of bots?