Quote:
Originally Posted by Game Theory
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.