I agree with all of this. I'm not a botter by any means, but I see little wrong with what they are doing. They are simply being punished for being great with computers/electronics. Its not fair to always cater to the demands of less intelligent people. America learned that lesson during the George Bush Jr administration, where science was basically openly mocked and laughed at.

Being good with computers takes hard work. I respect these types of people and hope to have their willpower and commitment.

go buy a video camera and 70 minutes of tape or gtfo out of here Diablo

I think you miss the point that "fair" has nothing to do with it; it simply may be better business to cater to the demands of "less intelligent people", especially if your business is entertainment.

This general rule for entertainment likely holds in the specific case of a poker business also; A lot more people, who try them both, find playing video poker more entertaining than playing online poker against real opponents. What makes you think those people would care one whit about playing against "bots" were that disclosed ? People who decline to play video poker may be more "intelligent" or maybe they just find other entertainment more interesting.

Even if you think poker is more commonly about winning money than entertainment, do you think that the "more intelligent" poker players would want to play on a site which discourages play by whoever you seem to deem to be the "less intelligent people", especially if the latter are looking for entertainment value ?

FWIW, the difference between the best players you've never heard of and those you have heard of probably correlates with "entertainment" value, be it streaming on Twitch or tweeting about a KITN for Stars. (Not sure how many of them code, btw.)

there's a great old thread in HSNL (I think) where a bunch of posters, who at the time were playing very big online, imagined a future where all seats are bots and individual players' work would be tweaking their bot's strategy.

Entertainment value, the other EV

Ah yes, nothing like creating a new account to compliment and agree with the other account of yours that just got banned.

Interesting concept. But 60 is the new 40 so you would be wrong H47. Plus, experience, that's why.

To say this guy claims to be a genius, he's pretty dumb to think no one would notice a new account backing up his absurd thought process was him. This made me LOL

The endgame is more that people on minimum wage in low income countries play poker according to what a software tells them to do.

This is likely cheaper than programming and maintaining bots.

The software that tells them what to do exists today, it's just a matter of time until the infrastructure is built.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

lmao, how long have you been playing poker?

I've realized this 2-3 years ago. Even Ike and other nose bleed pros have been working on bot projects and whatnot. Maybe not bots specifically, but in the very least some software oriented project

The real problem is not bots but multitabling. The difference between having some Eastern European playing 20 tables of 5 nl and a bot playing 100 tables of 5 nl is just a matter of degree, and both phenomena are destructive to the poker ecosystem.

Someone upthread said that bovada is scary, but the games are super soft at 100 nl and below (despite the fact that there are probably bots) because the best players are restricted to 4 tables.

more of a problem are regs buying datamined hand histories and software features being out of hand while it should have been kept to basic huds.

Really sucks if bots will take over, that would mean that I would actually have to find a REAL job first time in my life. In my case it would mean McDonalds 'cause I am not qualified for anything else.

Ohh no, perish the thought..

Pray tell what is the "REAL LAW"?




Also, it probably is somewhat amusing that this brand new screen name that made a ton of posts immediately taking stances all over the place, posing as a tough guy mobster and acting as if he knows everything about everything turns out to be some guy who wants a bot.

I guess you didn't use the 'search the forum' link before starting this thread.



This topic has been discussed almost constantly ever since online poker came into existence. Bots pose an existential crisis for online poker, and sites that want to still be existence in a few years are engaged in a constant battle against them.

Hmmm, actually either you are trolling (very possible) or you have no clue.

I agree with you on the very good at programming aspect though. But it'll be very different if it is all very good programmers entering bots into games. People (probably especially bad players) do not want to play against computers. It is not an "education thing". Maybe it could be considered an advancement to be able to program a bot to play very good poker. But people not liking that is not an "education issue".

Why was this thread bumped from 2006?

Exactly. Wouldn't restricting multi-tabling remove one of the main advantages of using a bot? That is the ability to maximize winrate through high volume.

I honestly experienced this in the literal sense once. She said she was 40 (had the face and body of a 35 year old). Turns out she actually 60 with two grand kids.

GILF. Would hit again.

I was the first to predict sites will use GTO bots as props but to avoid the "rigged" prob bots will not be allowed to win money, their "wins" will go into huge bad beat jackpots. Rake will be increased making beating the actual poker game nearly impossible but the gamblers will still swim in for the giant jackpots.

[ x ] would not hit it again.

That **** that no poker player ever said.

Soon every professional player is going to become a software developer. Rather than improving their game, they will spend time improving their bots relatives to their opponents' bots.

It's the nuclear arms race of poker!

My definition of a bot is an unattended program that reads input from a live poker table and outputs actions onto a live poker table.

That type of bot can play unlimited hours and tables.

A software that tells you what to do does not qualify this definition and I'm sure no one considers a preflop starting hand chart a bot. Although the line can get blurry at times, sure.

State of the art 6max NLHE software is pretty close to unbeatable. It is not nl100 bumhunter level. If you think so you are gravely mistaken.

Teams are not a prediction. I run a team myself. There are issues like people crashing into each other / sharing secrets but those issues are much overshadowed by the fact that we are crushing away old school regs at a crazy pace, inevitably replacing them. "How did you get so good" "How did you move up so quickly" gets dropped daily by those non-team regs and friends. And my team isn't the biggest or the most successful (but still the best ).

In practical terms, software that plays autonomously is roughly the same as software which tells a player 100% how to act, since that software can usually be distributed and works independently of the skill of the player. The bot just saves paying someone $15 to input actions, but is easier to catch if it doesn't generate entropy similarly to a real player.

I would not consider a preflop hand chart a bot, though more complicated, branching decision trees could start to blur the line between bot and "assisting software," in terms of how they should practically be treated.

I certainly could be gravely mistaken, but I have seen no evidence of that in my own play. Granted, I have played mainly PLO recently, and only on U.S. sites. But considering the quality of play I've seen from some winning professional players (at NLHE), I have my doubts.

People have been saying "NLHE is pretty much solved," since 2008, and that was when opening 3x from all positions was the standard play. If what you say is correct, people are keeping this near-GTO software very private. I don't doubt for a moment that people are using sophisticated software to assist their play, but I have my doubts that it comes close to GTO.

Out of curiosity, what stakes does your "team" play? You obviously don't have to share if you don't wish to do so. But presumably they are beating 5k NL + if you are confident in your assessment that near-GTO strategy exists at this time for 6-max NLHE.