Good luck have fun

PS: I'm a TAG fish always available for donation if we ever run into each other live LHE Midwest or Commerce post vaccine.

OT: Sean Snyder twitter 2020

Maka, the story of Cepheus is really quite fascinating just based on what little I know. As I understand the algorithm, they basically just taught it the rules of HUHU LHE and had it play against itself a zillion times until it was ridic close to the solution for the game. Using this "simple" technique, they got far closer to the solution than they had in almost a decade of working on the project. For example, Polaris was the first HUHU LHE bot to defeat a top human (HossTBF). But they estimated that Polaris was something like .85 BB/100 from a perfect GTO solve. I suspect that the 2008 version of Polaris was still strong enough to beat today's top players. But interestingly, I suspect that today's top humans would significantly outperform Polaris against a recreational player since their exploitative arsenal is so powerful while Polaris just spams a static strategy.

What I find most interesting is that the algorithm used to build Cepheus sounds almost exactly like the one used to build AlphaGo and AlphaZero, the bots that made headlines by dominating Go and chess respectively. Those 2 bots are considered revolutionary, so it is super cool that the Cepheus team managed to get there 5 years before AlphaZero and AlphaGo. If I were less lazy, I would check to see if some members of the Cepheus team worked on the chess and Go bots.

Thank you very much Unguarded!

Think reopening my MS word to add this to 2+2 epic post(s)

OT: Won once at above 1k post qurantine playing under 6 hours

Hopefully, my 5k downswing this year will break even during Fall 2020

I have no real insight into the Cepheus or AG/AZ algorithms, but this video discusses a fascinating approach for developing a strong player.

Thank you.

Will watch after maket close.


*Very OT ON NBA HC 2020+*
Which team would be most +EV to hire Dantoni?

Thinking Chicago Bulls to help recruit?


Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) tweeted at 10:33 AM on Wed, Aug 26, 2020:
Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni — in the final year of his contract — will be an Indiana target should he become available, sources tell ESPN.
(https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1...029737984?s=03)

Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Is there any proof that would reasonably convince that the majority of the players on Bodog 10/20 and 30/60 are bots (house bots or otherwise)? Does that proof not exist almost by definition on an anonymous site?

Doug Polk offers four indicators of possible bot play:


1. The player takes about the same amount of time to act every hand.
2. The player doesn’t answer to moderator in the chat or to an alert.
3. The player plays for unreasonable amounts of time.
4. The player plays an unreasonable amount of tables.

Unfortunately, only the first indicator is something that a player on Ignition could be in a position to observe. There is no chat on Ignition (there may well be on Bodog, but I can't observe it from Ignition). There is no way to tell how long a player has been playing, unless you, too, have been playing with them for a long time at the same table. The software limits cash tables to four, so a single account can play in only four cash games at a time -- but I understand that tournament tables are not limited in this way. In any event, players have no way to determine how many tables another player is playing.

Ignition does have the feature that (twenty-four hours after the player leaves the cash game or after a tournament ends) they can download all the hand histories, complete with revealed hole cards of all the players, and examine them for sketchy play.

But the anonymity makes it impossible to identify a player in multiple sessions to see if their play is peculiarly consistent like a bot's would be.

So it will be extremely difficult to prove if there are bots on Ignition and impossible to prove that there are not.

If the security team gives a ****, maybe they have the knowhow to look out for these things and other telltale signs of bot play. But the word on the street is that most grey market sites are far more concerned about money laundering than they are about botting or other cheating going on.

My own opinion about bots is that they make the games worse in pretty much the same way that multitabling regs with tracking software and HUDs make the game worse, and (except for never tilting) worrying about one and not the other seems a bit off to me. The fun players will lose to both and lose in just about the same degree.

It's collusion cheaters or superusers that pose a greater threat to the underlying integrity of the game. Collusion is as easy as having a phone call going with a buddy while playing.

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.“
Warren Buffet

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.“
Peter Drucker

Hi all,

Since this seems to be the only active thread--
I was wondering if there are any decent limit training courses/materials out there. I've heard tales of old cardrunners and deuces cracked materials, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything newer available.

I've been playing a lot of live 20/40 lately, and the games have been fun and really soft. Even so, I'm finding myself just clicking buttons in way too many spots.

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”

―Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

I guess the quote fit perfectly for a dying game by a science fiction author

Yabbut The Transmigration of Timothy Archer isn't science fiction; it's a mainstream book about the life and death of a thinly disguised Bishop Pike.

It was the final novel that Dick finished before his death, published posthumously, so in that sense it is just as apt.

(There are other works that were published later, but they had been written earlier and were sitting in his filing cabinet or a trunk or something.)

imagine how simple it is to get a program to delay a click by random numbers relative to getting the whole operation on the ground. imagine how easy it is for the program to send the operator an alert any time the chat mentions the accounts name (with several variations) so they could step in to interact. imagine how easy it is to just not have the account for ridiculous hours or playing ridiculous hours.

the best solution by far is having software that distorts the graphics periodically to mess with whatever screen scrape tech they have. if you need someone sitting there manually clicking the buttons then it's really not much different from actually playing.


but there are important differences as to why this is worse than adding another strong reg to the playing pool in that strong regs are generally only willing to play when the profit ceiling is above a certain point where bots will keep on chuggin' as long as the expected profit is > 0.

a recs suckiness is often so marginal that, even if it may have been very worthwhile to play them hu, it's just not worth playing with them at a full table with other strong regs, especially at 10/20 and below. not that it's unprofitable (though in theory it could be), but many will just play other game types or lower stake tables with weaker competition instead. and when regs sit out and focus on other tables it increases the profitability of the ones who remain. the bot otoh will continue to dilute the profit ceiling until there is none to be had.

it's like the difference between wages being pushed down from competition and wages being pushed down from automation.

Wouldn't the card sharing benefit of bots in PLO would make it the game of choice for cheats? Knowing that the other bots at the table had folded the A and K of the flush allows the bot in the hand to make insanely profitable plays. The huge variance in the game would seem to hide ridiculous runs.

If there were still large $/hour in poker games, the price of a low cost human to interface for a bot would seem to be a small cost to crushing mid/high stakes. If you can hire miners for video games...

when dealing with something like midstakes + then yea, but small to micros (where the large majority of action is, and are the games easiest to bot) would represent pretty thin margins for would-be botters who have to hire button clickers.

i guess if you go out to rural china and find people to do it for $5/h it's tenable but if you're that industrious you surely can find better ways to use cheap labor. also quite different from farming gold in videogames in that if the people you hire screw up even once in a while it becomes instantly unprofitable.

i agree that PLO is prime cheating ground. would be a waste of time to collude at holdem by comparison. the scary part is how unsophisticated you'd have to be to manage that. the optimist in me would like to think the sites are at least cracking down on the brazen examples but even that's not so clear. my guess is their precautions is checking for people who have logged in from the same IP and using that as a starting point. seems almost unfathomable that they're scanning through millions of hands daily to test something as subtle as the increased rate at which player x bluffs when player y folded the nut to a 3 flush preflop.

i'd hardly call that subtle, and it would be pretty trivial to write a script to check for it constantly, if they were interested in catching cheaters. if it's "unfathomable" for any particular site, it's because they would rather pretend the problem doesn't exist and keep the rake flowing.

of course it would only work for catching high volume cheaters.

All four of these, most importantly, 1 and 2, can be and are likely already taken care of.

I am certain that bots are programs that are paid for and not developed by the user in almost all cases. I know they are updated similar to how your PS4 updates Skyrim.

I also believe that it is far easier to run a bot with less possible hiccups and to also collude via telephone on ACR and Betonline than it is on Bovada.

how's playing outside gents?

I'd much rather play outside the ladies, so I can check out who ever goes in our out.

I would have assumed this was a joke if I didn't know it was actually happening in Cali. I haven't been there, but it sounds like something I might include in a short story where the protagonist goes to hell and is doomed to eternally play poker in an absurdly uncomfortable environment as punishment for his life of degeneracy.

Or just reward?

what counts as high volume? i'm not talking about some micro grinder playing hundreds of thousands of hands. in those cases it's not even worth doing because you'd be better off just playing straight up.

the risk comes from mid to high stakes players where it's very easy to avoid triggering the script by creating new accounts every x thousand hands. if you're doing this at 25/50 the time/effort it would take to rotate in/out new accounts would be a trivial task relative to the payoff. do you think it would be evident after 10k hands? 5k? it depends on how liberally they're using the info obviously but i think less than 5k hands at 6max and it would all blend in with the statistical noise unless they were really, really cavalier in capitalizing on every single spot that the info was relevant.

i don't agree at all that sites would rather pretend the problem doesn't exist. if there was a cost effective way to do it they'd very gladly get rid of cheaters who are withdrawing at rates faster than most pros. they'd gladly get rid of honest pros if they could without it being a PR nightmare.

It isnt pretty playing in bellagio these days... outside could be worse. I cant imagine watching a game break, stuck 5k cuz its too cold out to play.

Playing at Bellagio is fine these days...

Playing at Sean Snyder involved private games Im sure is best games of 2020.

Very OT but has anyone played or contacted Sean Snyder within last month? 0 tweets since Sep 10 so I hope he's doing well