Thanks for the efforts of those in this thread. I don't enter this forum very often, but I'll take some time to read through this thread.

My guess is that FKeepers will have sports betting first, since the Tribal entities have less hurdles to jump than MCC and MGM do. In general there were hopes that sports betting would be ready at 'some' places in time for the NCAA hoops tournaments.

As far as poker there hasn't been too much noise ... just because you can have it doesn't mean there's a big enough market to sustain it. IMO the first 6 months will be hot and then we'll see where online poker goes from there. GL

Hrm. That sounds a little dicey then. If they are still able to play on unregulated sites I'm cool with it. But if not then not. And guessing nobody would be able to give a great answer since it seems like one of those things where we all just sort of find out the hard way when we find out the hard way, since it probably hinges on a bunch of behind the scenes stuff or whatever.

I guess when it comes to online poker I take a more shortsighted view of just what scenario would make for the most beatable games for these next few years, since I think it has so few years left regardless of any of this. For live poker I'd take a slow and steady wins the race mentality maybe, since that will probably be around and beatable for a lot longer by comparison. But for online, I'm feeling less and less confident that any of this stuff in this thread is actually a good thing and starting to weirdly root for no more states to join (unless any huge ones joined in short succession to each other, like if Cali, Texas, NY, and Florida all joined almost simultaneously and shared pools or something then maybe, and even then not sure if it would actually be better than the current unregulated stuff or not, money-wise). But yea, I basically just do the mental subtraction math in my head now when I hear some random fenced off new state is doing it of subtracting that state's population from the U.S. population, and dividing by the U.S. population and being like, great, I guess there's going to be 3% less players in my pools now.

Well, hopefully it'll work out for the best, whichever way it goes. But I'm a huge pessimist, so I'm hoping for the best but expecting the infinite worst. I figure it'll probably end up triggering World War III or something somehow and my last online poker hand will involve watching a thermonuclear fireball roaring towards my living room window while I sit there just staring at it in a confused daze whispering "Thanks a lot, Bill Frist..." to myself, and then just disintegrate into a pile of ash a second or two later.

Huge pessimist might be a bit of an understatement

lol

Lol ^^^ Katana you must be trolling with all that doom, nice try. You are entirely wrong. Feel free to quit playing yourself though, no one is stopping you.

Gee...ya think?

I mean, holy **** man...first you were freaking out about what's happening in your own state, and since you've gotten past that, you're panicking about other states even when you have no idea what's going to happen.

Dude, relax.

My friend who helped write the bill said he thought April would be the earliest for sports books

The "even when you have no idea what's going to happen" part is the reason I'm not relaxed.

When it is clear what is going to happen, I relax (even when it's bad, or even very bad news).

When it is open ended, I (correctly) get anxious, and keep trying to analyze the odds of the variety of different possible outcomes, and keep reassessing every time any new info or points of view enter the equation.

Open ended situations (particularly when there could potentially be things that can be done to improve the odds of one outcome over another), are not the time to relax. They are times to try to figure out which outcomes are likeliest, which outcomes are best, and what can be done to swing it in the correct direction, if anything. This requires a certain amount of amped upedness and vigilance and what some might label "overthinking things" and so forth.

I think most people will disagree with this, since it is generally considered extremely uncool to be blatantly nervous or anxious about things. But I don't mind, since I think it's the correct way to be in regards to this stuff, even if it makes me look deeply weird and uncool or what have you.

Why would I quit playing? Online poker is still beatable for the time being. No reason not to play it when it's beatable.

I don't think it'll stay that way for very long, though, since the edges are getting thinner, and the bots and RTS are going to be getting drastically harder to detect and better at crushing the non-HU deepstack games in coming years, and the rake is going up over time, not down, so, the combination of these three things makes it look very likeley that online poker won't be beatable for more than a few more years (which is why I'm not so sure this regulation stuff will actually lead to more actual money in winning American players' pockets, considering this whole shebang looks like it's going to take at least a few years to do its thing).

Anyway, I'll leave it at that for now, since I don't want the thread to get bloated with arguing, otherwise it'll get in the way of the news updates (which I appreciate, a lot, btw) from dhubermex. Regardless of what your personal stance and interpretation of said news updates is, the updates themselves are important (for those of us on either "side" of stances/interpretations, that is). It's like how reporters are supposed to be off limits during warzone combat. Both sides want to get the news updates, and (unless they are idiots) value the reporters' role.

So, I will bow out for now to make more room for dhuber's posts itt.

The following 10-minute video clip represents testimony provided by Lindsay Slader of GeoComply. It was presented to Washington state lawmakers in January 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z7xfm_Eg_A



* The embed works for me despite showing up as broken in the preview. Can others see the embedded YT video?

While this specific testimony applies solely to Washington state, it may provide a very informative glimpse into how other "regulated iGaming/online poker/online sports betting" services that have been authorized in other U.S. states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and soon-to-be Michigan are monitored from a geolocation perspective. Slader also testifies why regulated statewide iGaming services should outright ban the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

People like you keep saying that (for close to a decade by now but who is counting, right?), meanwhile all I see are awful and mediocre regs trying and failing at poker. A revolving door of failing regs as the recs keep being recs and the actual good regs keep crushing. Are you pulling the moderate democrat card, concerned about how the average to below average reg should be able to keep making a living stacking fish and not getting picked on by good regs? This game is ruthless, you keep winning or you die off.

Your point about bots an the like are more valid, yet there hasn't been almost any cases of this on U.S. regulated sites. It's breaking the respective state law and risking account fund seizure. You need to be an actual real person with a SS to register. If you're talking about bovada/ACR/global that's a different story.

The more US regulated state wide poker, the better. The sky is falling rhetoric about edges getting thinner does not in any way match up to reality.

It won't matter how severely against the rules the botting and RTA stuff is, when they won't have any way to figure out who is a bot/RTA-player and who is just a really strong non-cheating human. The top players all play extremely similarly nowadays, and becoming more and more similar by the day as they converge closer and closer to GTO the more solver work they keep putting in. That's already a big problem in and of itself, given that rake exists, so those thinning edges do matter, a lot, but it's a GIGANTIC problem when taking into consideration how easy it'll be to make bots/do RTA'd play that just plays in the same exact nearly-but-not-quite-perfectly GTO style that the top players all play. These bots and RTA programs will just keep getting cheaper and easier to acquire for an exponentially larger and larger amount of people, and be impossible to catch at some point pretty soon here, so it'll suddenly go from one year being like 10 or 20% of the player pool to the next year being 98 or 99% of the player pool once they become impossible to catch and super easy to acquire, and that'll be the complete and utter end of online poker at that point, a few short years from now. It won't be a slow, gradual progression. It'll go from seeming very beatable "as usual" (i.e. the way you see it right now, and base your opinion on) to suddenly just WHAM, game over.

Anyway I said I didn't want to discuss this side-topic more since I don't want to flood out dhuber's posts, which I consider a lot more valuable than mine, since his are actual news updates and facts, and mine are opinions and side-arguments, so, if you reply to this, I apologize in advance for not replying to your reply.

What does RTA stand for?

Real Time Assistance. Basically a person just running a bot program, or a giant database full of pre-solved scenarios, and using its advice to make their decisions or aid in their decisions while they play, but they're still physically the one playing at the table. Whereas with a pure bot, it's doing 100% of everything on its own.

Anyway, the point is, once they become impossible to differentiate from human players, and they will be, and quite soon imo (already are in some cases as we speak, imo), and they go fully mainstream where the entire world has easy access to them, which will also happen very soon imo, then that's it. That's the end of online poker. And in a very fast, non-gradual, all at once sort of a way. One day it just goes viral, and can't be distinguished from the non-cheating players, and that's the end of it all.

Ho hum.

mixed games. also, reverse engineering solvers to spot solver abusers should be simple. like a giant heat-seaking libratus living in the sky.

The thing is, you're freaking out over the possibility of one state not being able to play on US-facing sites for 6-12 months before they would have been cut off anyway.

Anyway, you do you, it's really not my place to tell you how you should feel, so I won't try. I just think it would be good for your stress level if you could find a way to worry less. And maybe a little better for some threads.

Yea, just to be clear, I'm def not freaking out about this one state leaving the pool. If it was just going to be this one random state, that's only like 3% of the rest-of-U.S. pool leaving, so, big whoop, I would just shrug it off.

My worries were/are in regards to this whole thing, in and of itself, of states in general (since there may be numerous more of them that will do the same thing that Michigan just did) leaving the pool. If another 10 or 15 or whatever more states do it, and some of them have big populations, and then it could be like 70 million or 100 million or 150 million people leaving the player pool, which would be a lot more serious than the 3% of this one random state.

And worse yet, my own state could end up being one of those states, which leads me to the next worry-aspect:

The "6-12 month" figure you just stated. If I thought these processes were going to take a mere 6 months or something like that, then, again that would be a lot less worrisome. But it sounds like its more like a 1.5-2 year thing from the start to when the actual hands are being dealt on an actual site you can play on. So, considering my personal guess on online poker's beatability lifespan is like 2-4 years, probably leaning closer to around 3ish years left, then that would eat up a huge chunk of it.

So, no, I'm not just worrying about this one Michigan thing, that's not that big of a deal imo. It's the bigger picture aspect of what this type of occurrence means, and whether it's a good type of thing I should be rooting/pushing for more of to happen in the future, or the opposite.

True

True. As I said at the end of my previous few posts, I would prefer to not argue about the stuff I was arguing about in this thread for a while, so as to not distract from dhuber's updates, which I think are very important. But, people keep making rebuttals and then of course I make rebuttals to those, so I kept getting sucked back in.

Anyway, hopefully we can just leave it at this for now as far as my side-discussion thing. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that abouttimeiate is going to make another counter-argument to my previous post. So, hopefully I'll be able to just not reply to it, even if it makes it look like he won the argument, hopefully people will realize I almost certainly would've had a counter-argument to his next counter-argument and am just intentionally choosing not to reply to it for the sake of the greater good of this overall thread.

This is a good point. It also seems like if they wanted to put this amount of effort into stopping bots, they could buy all of the available bots that they could find and compare how they play the same hands that players are dealt and see who matches up exactly.
I think you just solved the bot problem man lol.

No.

The style of bot that will overtake and destroy online poker will not play 100% perfectly like a solver to where you could just reverse engineer its play or spot that it isn't human. It'll just play like the current top non-cheating human players. It'll obviously be programmed to not play every spot within every hand 100% flawlessly, but instead have some randomizer to veer off the flawless bet sizing by some small to occasionally moderate or large amount, for each and every action it takes, and also to occasionally screw up a hand on a randomizer interval to play at the same overall quality level and style that the current top non-cheating 25/50 regs play with (or for ones at lower stakes, then it would play like the top regs of those stakes).

Thus, there would be no way the sites could distinguish between the bots/RTS and the people who are just the strongest non-cheating humans at whatever stakes level, no matter how much they tried to reverse engineer people's play to try to figure out who's real and who is a bot, as a result of the intentioanal imperfections via a randomizer that brought it down to right in line with and indistinguishable in terms of its play from the top human players.

So, the sites would have to either just ban all the strong winning human players along with all the bots (throw the baby out with the bath water), in which case, any of us trying to be serious winning regs are ****ed, since we'd be the ones getting banned in this spot in spite of doing nothing wrong. Or, they'd have to just not ban any of them, since they wouldn't know which ones are human or not, in which case the games would no longer be beatable for anyone since they'd make up like 95+% of the player pool practically overnight once that type of program went worldwide viral, and thus the rake would be unbeatable at all stakes in that scenario, and that would be the end of that.

The one thing they could do (particularly to try to salvage the higher stakes games, where human players would be more willing to do this) would be to require all winning players on the site to play on a multi angle webcam setup with angles all over your room so there's no way you could hide your secondary RTA crap anywhere, and could visually show that it's really just you playing. And then, given that this would be too annoying or intrusive for some of the whales, they could do it where the whales wouldn't have to do it (they'd be losing money, esp on EV, which would be the giveaway that you don't have to worry about them, since if they're losing, then who cares, no need to even know what they're doing in their room if they are losing anyway), and only would suddenly and immediately have to do it if they started playing good and/or winning over any significant sample (i.e. in case someone took a strategy of pretending to be a whale for a while, and then started playing good, with a bot or RTA, and started winning. That way that wouldn't be able to be an exploit.). Combine this with the fact that the higher stakes pool is already fairly small to begin with and most people know most of who is who up there, and that would make it even easier to police the higher stakes games.

So, high stakes might actually survive this doomsday scenario for a surprisingly long time IF the sites handled it perfectly, in the sort of way I'm describing.

But... lower midstakes and below... yea... I think that's almost certainly gonna be pretty ****ed.

Lol, I keep saying I won't reply, but I think this particular post was actually a fairly interesting tangent within the tangent, with some interesting and important concepts and that will almost certainly end up being very relevant in the next few years, so, I'm okay with making this particular one.

Anyway, yea, you should definitely be a lot more worried about it. It will not be easy at all for sites to identify them, and will most likely become literally completely impossible for sites to distinguish them from strong humans, pretty soon, once they are done correctly (well, there most likely already are a few like that as we speak, in large-pool midstakes or below, but, I guess none of these undetectable types of bots have gone cheaply easily worldwide available viral yet to where it totally swamped out any sites yet, but it's a question of when, not if). (And those undetectable bots are the ones that will go viral that everyone will end up using when the flood happens, not the crappy bots that were able to get identified by the sites). So yea, it's going to be pretty grim, imo. Enjoy online poker while it lasts. Doomsday clock is def ticking imo.

Yeah, i thought about the idea that they could change a few hands here and there randomly. But still, it seems like a workable idea might be able to spawn from this concept. Maybe having anyone who plays 97% of their hands the exact same as a bot would be required to play on camera for a short period. This would obviously have a horribly negative effect on anyone theyre wrong about though.
But if pokerstars cant think of a better idea, doing something along the lines of that might be the only option. These bots are just going to be too good. And even the bad ones are annoying to play with for a rec like me.
I hate bots lol.

The style of bot that will overtake and destroy online poker will not play 100% perfectly like a solver to where you could just reverse engineer its play or spot that it isn't human. It'll just play like the current top non-cheating human players. It'll obviously be programmed to not play every spot within every hand 100% flawlessly, but instead have some randomizer to veer off the flawless bet sizing by some small to occasionally moderate or large amount, for each and every action it takes, and also to occasionally screw up a hand on a randomizer interval to play at the same overall quality level and style that the current top non-cheating 25/50 regs play with (or for ones at lower stakes, then it would play like the top regs of those stakes).

Thus, there would be no way the sites could distinguish between the bots/RTS and the people who are just the strongest non-cheating humans at whatever stakes level, no matter how much they tried to reverse engineer people's play to try to figure out who's real and who is a bot, as a result of the intentioanal imperfections via a randomizer that brought it down to right in line with and indistinguishable in terms of its play from the top human players.

So, the sites would have to either just ban all the strong winning human players along with all the bots (throw the baby out with the bath water), in which case, any of us trying to be serious winning regs are ****ed, since we'd be the ones getting banned in this spot in spite of doing nothing wrong. Or, they'd have to just not ban any of them, since they wouldn't know which ones are human or not, in which case the games would no longer be beatable for anyone since they'd make up like 95+% of the player pool practically overnight once that type of program went worldwide viral, and thus the rake would be unbeatable at all stakes in that scenario, and that would be the end of that.

The one thing they could do (particularly to try to salvage the higher stakes games, where human players would be more willing to do this) would be to require all winning players on the site to play on a multi angle webcam setup with angles all over your room so there's no way you could hide your secondary RTA crap anywhere, and could visually show that it's really just you playing. And then, given that this would be too annoying or intrusive for some of the whales, they could do it where the whales wouldn't have to do it (they'd be losing money, esp on EV, which would be the giveaway that you don't have to worry about them, since if they're losing, then who cares, no need to even know what they're doing in their room if they are losing anyway), and only would suddenly and immediately have to do it if they started playing good and/or winning over any significant sample (i.e. in case someone took a strategy of pretending to be a whale for a while, and then started playing good, with a bot or RTA, and started winning. That way that wouldn't be able to be an exploit.). Combine this with the fact that the higher stakes pool is already fairly small to begin with and most people know most of who is who up there, and that would make it even easier to police the higher stakes games.

So, high stakes might actually survive this doomsday scenario for a surprisingly long time IF the sites handled it perfectly, in the sort of way I'm describing.

But... lower midstakes and below... yea... I think that's almost certainly gonna be pretty ****ed.

Lol, I keep saying I won't reply, but I think this particular post was actually a fairly interesting tangent within the tangent, with some interesting and important concepts and that will almost certainly end up being very relevant in the next few years, so, I'm okay with making this particular one.

Anyway, yea, you should definitely be a lot more worried about it.

No, you still are misunderstanding what I meant about randomized non-GTO play. I didn't mean that it would play inhumanly GTO and perfect 97% of the time, and then be programmed to occasionally make a divergence once every 3% of the time. I meant it would be programmed to randomize on each and every action on each and every street of every hand and diverge away from the "computer play" by somewhere between zero amount and some large amount, per action, continuously. And as for how much: it would do it at an equivalent frequency and severity to that of the top grinders of that stakes level of that point in time.

It would not be distinguishable from strong human play. It would literally just play the way a random strong human player plays.

So, you'd have to put all winning players on camera. (And multiple cameras at that, to get every possible angle of view in the room, so they couldn't hide a screen under their desk, or between their legs or what have you.

It's going to be borderline impossible for online poker to survive what's coming in these next few years, other than at (maaaybe) the highest, most exclusive stakes, where it might be feasible to go to extreme lengths to keep it going, since the whales wouldn't necessarily have to go on cam, so long as they kept losing. But, high stakes alone is such a small club that it would barely generate any rake, so, you can't really build whole big reliable serious sites around that. So, I think it's just going to be the end of online poker a few years from now, pretty much. Get your volume in while you still can, dude.

Also, GTO play itself (not even trying to be disguised) is made up of mixed strategies, which means the correct play is, for example, to call with a 30% frequency and raise with a 70% frequency (and which they choose is selected randomly for any particular spot), so the only way you could tell if the person is following correct GTO advice is to stack up many instances of the exact same scenario and see if his mix of actions matches the expected ratio for GTO play. And you would need A LOT of samples of EACH scenario before it would approach the GTO recommended mix.

Yea, that makes it even worse, combined with it being able to diverge in 100/0 or 0/100 spots occasionally when they arise, and also diverge in terms of its aggregate to a human level of avg longterm divergence from the equilibrium percentages (meaning even once they had enough sample size, it still wouldn't reveal anything anyway)

I'm so glad I'm bad at poker .. good luck sicking a 'bot on me!! GL

Well that sucks lol.