I'm not entirely convinced that bot'ing is stealing. If players aren't good enough to beat a program that doesn't have the capability to learn, they are giving away their money. It seems to me more like "delegating"

Idunno

Hahah. Going to prison isn't a big deal. Losing your money is

I have no doubt I could create a winning bot.

I could also sell crack to high school kids. I don't do that either.

If a site opened where botting was legit and above board, I'd probably have to give it some consideration. However, such a site would be exclusively filled with bots and players looking to exploit bots with very few fish so it would be unlikely to be a viable site. Botting is like counterfeiting - The only way it can survive is to camouflage itself as legitimate play. Which makes it, at best, cheating.

I have thought about it, but probablly not because I would never get better and I could never win the WSOP main event

I want to make a Real Life poker robot that sits at the tables and owns. Then ill split the profits with him.

winnar

No.

1. I like playing poker.
2. The risk of getting caught and having my account shut down just isn't worth it.
3. As much as poker is not at all like a real job or business, I like "earning" my money, not having a bot do it.

I will throw out some other food for thought:

1.) there are lots of easy ways to get around the normal bot finding strategies (including chat box typing on occasion, random timing, random session duration, random click points, etc)

2.) so long as you played (person, not bot) sometimes on the account, your stats would look random enough

3.) if you cash out correctly, you can lower risk to a negligable level (meaning even if your account gets banned and money confiscated, you would have already broken even or made a profit on THAT account)



so say there was a 17% chance you get caught at anytime (meaning that site is now dead to you), but you could easily make $150K/yr just letting it run (semi-supervised)...

what about now?

If someone is a poor enough player that they cannot beat my bot then I deserve their money anyways because they can't beat a fragment of poker ability, plus I bet the effort into making the bot and hiding it.

17% chance of getting caught and making 150k a year... I could easily just play poker legitly on another site and supervise my bot. Pretty sound investment.

From a moral standpoint: no, because I agreed to the ToS, but more importantly because it creates an uneven playing field. Sure bots might not win as much as I am capable of, but bots also don't have any of my flaws - no tilt, no emotion, perfect poker according to the coding every street.

From a financial standpoint: no, because even if there were a site to pop up and openly allow bots to participate and it was all above board, it would bring all of online poker into disrepute. The generous paying customers who pay my mortgage would immediately be asking themselves if all sites are overrun with bots. People who get crushed by their M$ Chess game on easy level certainly don't want to play against "the computer" for money. It's a short leap from other people are bots to lolpokersitescreatetheirownbotsandrigdeckslol.

OK, I'll bite. I'm such a fish....

What if someone, having spent the last 20 years studying computer science and the last two years studying FRNL, wrote an intelligent, adaptive (i.e. learning) poker "bot" as their thesis project such that the source code would be publicly available for download by any scrub who could use a C++ compiler and who could then hack in a randomized timing algorithm and a screen-scaper to create an undetectable super-bot?

What if that project was due in ten months?

What if they had to make the decision to pull the trigger in the next couple of days?

I have this feeling that if I made a bot that it would have tilt problems and lose all my money

You guys forget that the sites' software (at least FTP and Stars' software does) actively monitors everything that your computer is doing while the software is running... good luck building an 'undetectable' bot

No, if I wanted to be a bot I would shortstack.
j/k

Seriously, 150k a year doing almost nothing would be pretty nice, but I play poker because I love the game and I want to challenge myself and become the best player I can.

Honestly, I would let the bot run for the free money. But with that extra money I would play 200NL instead of 25/50NL to challenge myself... and get some coaching from *Split*

There must be bots out there. If they become successful (e.g. when anti-bot regs become a joke) they are likely to kill what ever game they play due to a tragedy of the commons that will inevitably occur.

For the same reason as CMAR mentioned (crack analogy) I wouldn't do it.

No way.

Maybe my perspective of computers and the ability of computers is a bit different than most. I believe that this can be done and has been done. With the database technology and remote control technology, it can be done and non detectable. This is not saying that it would not be exploitable. The bot would be exploitable but it can be built adjust to the exploitation. Just like each of us. I don't care what trap the site sets up, it just creates a smarter mouse to avoid the trap.

But this does not answer the question. My goal with playing poker is for the sake of the game. Just like when I play a video game, I avoid the cheats that are posted all over the internet. I play it for the challenge of the game. Why would I want to cheat? Poker falls in this same category. So no, I do not believe that I would ever build a bot, but I can definitely see a path to make such an endeavor successful.

No.

If there was a poker site that allowed bots to compete then I might.

The state of the art in Poker AI is the work being done at the University of Alberta Poker Research Group. They're the guys that created polaris.

If you're interested in this stuff there lots of interesting reading in the publications section of their website.

http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/

noes, because i would live in fear every day i'll get cought someday. i play only on stars and like it very much, i won't risk to get banned. + playing process is kinda interesting and challenging.

Btw, anyone who's good enough at programming to create and maintain a working, winning poker bot could earn more money with less hassle doing other stuff.

No nay never.

It's just like when you play a video game and you find some sort of cheap tactic or cheat that can beat it in like 50 seconds. Such as creating a super character in an RPG or cheating yourself a God weapon in a shoot 'em up. That is never fun, and I know there is money involved which is nice but I play poker mostly to challenge myself, play a game I like and thirdly make money (which is part of the challenge). Add to that the risks of getting caught and it doesn't seem worth it.

If I were to create a bot it would play from Asia or Germany and shortstack. My account would also play 16-20 hours a day, by 3-4 different "bot supervisors."

It's as if you went into the future and copied what I was going to write. So 100% accurate here.

Not so sure about this actually. Especially given the current economic situation.
This all relates back to short stacking, it would be so easy to write a rathole bot - I mean couple days easy. I have written programs (not poker related) with 20x the logic needed to rathole profitably and it's not hard to get the information off the poker client (how do you think all the betpot scripts work?).

There is a lot of $ leaking from the poker economy via short stack bots, sites don't care because 90% leaks into their profits.