Quote:
Originally Posted by wwwin
Hey dark_horse, I never worried about these bots before because I thought that they were beatable and most still are..but I was doing some reading and there appears to be a new breed of bots that uses an external server to share hand data and analyze the hands and the board in real time. When three or more bots are sitting at a table sharing their hole cards, then long term this bot would appear to have a good advantage by colluding.
My question to you is do you know if only Holdem Indicator has access to Bovada data stream because Bovado allows it or are the other programs not accessing Bovada because they don't care to but have the ability to access it?
I was reading your post onf the official thread on using CAPTCHAs, but I think that it would have to come up randomly and not only when you sit a a table because a human could just answer it and leave after opening the table. I think CAPTCHAs are preventive if used at random times but they are almost unreadable...I think you would not want to be trying to decipher one of those while playing a hand.
Zone poker might limit this type of colluding, but I don't like it to be at a different table with different players constantly changing.
Would love to read about this new breed of bots you found out about. The idea of colluding bots has crossed my mind, but once you allow yourself to step into the zone of conspiracy theories, your imagination has a way of getting the best of you. And when there's money at stake, and irrational responses to short term results, well we just can't trust ourselves to make valid conclusions when so much data is simply hidden from us. Which takes me back to my original point. I'm not a paranoid guy. But this environment, combined with my experience and intelligence, is letting my imagination get the best of me.
The answer to your question about HI vs others is a mix of both. I don't believe HI (nor anyone else) has access to any Bovada data stream. I'm not sure but I believe it gathers its temporary data based on scraping technologies - or whatever it's doing it is within the TOC of Bovada Poker. It is akin to you sitting there with a pad and paper and observing what you see, like it's a live game. Other tracking software populates its HUDs with data drawn from the user's database, which comes only from imported hand histories. I'm sure if they wanted they could build the technology on top of their product to build a HUD just for Bovada, but they choose not to.
Good point on CAPTCHAs. But I believe that a savvy and forward thinking development team can elegantly come up with ways to provide human verification to its players. It would only be a start, because of course a human can be sitting there watching its bot at work, and simply humanize his responses as needed. There just has to be a way, though. But only if Bovada wants that.