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Originally Posted by lnternet
The endgame is more that people on minimum wage in low income countries play poker according to what a software tells them to do.
That is a bot. The "software..." that "tells them what to do" is the bot. It's just using a real person to provide the physical inputs on the poker software, probably as a way to try to avoid detection. Though you may be right about that essentially being what happens someday.
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This is likely cheaper than programming and maintaining bots.
You're still building the bot, you're just paying a human to relay info from the bot to the poker client. Bot software may be expensive to create or run (if it requires enormous processing power), but the cost is roughly $0 to maintain. It only costs money to improve. It can be distributed for near $0 as well, but like I said, may require powerful computing power to run, at least in the near future. There may be slightly weaker versions with a precomputed game tree that can be run by weaker computers and distributed to a larger group of players.
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The software that tells them what to do exists today, it's just a matter of time until the infrastructure is built.
Not really. There's a difference between bot software that can win as a 1/2 bumhunter and bot software that can beat a high stakes, heads up PLO or NLHE player. To my knowledge, there are not very many forms of poker where a bot can beat a strong player yet. There's limit hold 'em, and maybe super short-stacked heads up NLHE/PLO. Other forms of short-handed limit poker may also be easily solvable with today's computing power.
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Right now is the age of teams / stables. They will dominate online poker for while. They will naturally get more efficient, bigger and reach the endgame above.
Many of the best players are completely solo, and most of the others I would guess only cooperate for specific purposes (affording super high-stakes, high variance games) Staking, working together, or bankroll sharing has benefits, but also its costs. Rarely will all players be equal skill, equal work ethic, equal risk tolerance. It's usually a long-term unstable relationship. Probably works best for live high-stakes MTT's, where long term variance is enormous.
Though if bot-fears do come true, teams organizing to take maximum advantage of it is a more likely possibility than the spectrum between Bumhunter and Heads-Up-Hero that exists today.