Bot Paranoia
By Lee Jones
Soundtrack: "For What It’s Worth" by Buffalo Springfield.
- Paranoia strikes deep
- Into your heart it will creep
- It starts when you’re always afraid…
My Bigger Deal colleague, Richard Whitehouse, his heart in his mouth, writes that the Sky is Falling and that online poker as we know it is about to end. Or at least there’s some danger of that. The source of his hand-wringing is the reports about a series of matches played by poker pro’s Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against "Polaris" – the most recent in a series of poker playing programs to come out of an artificial intelligence poker research group at the University of Alberta.
The bad news is that while Laak and Eslami won, it was only barely – what any poker-savvy observer would call a draw.
There were some interesting features to the matches (including playing a "duplicate" format to ensure that luck didn’t factor into the results), but that ground has been well-covered in the various reports linked here.
I’m fairly sure it won’t – read on.
For a bot to consistently win money in online poker it has to do two things:
- Beat the other players
- Avoid getting detected and busted by the online sites, such as PokerStars
Let’s consider problem #1 – beating the players. That’s easy; it’s happening already, and will only get worse.
I have a good friend (and former colleague at PokerStars), Terrence Chan, who is a fairly well-known pro poker player. Terrence came second to Hoyt Corkins in the $2500 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em event at the WSOP this year, but he makes his living (a good one, thank you) playing cash games, most of them on the Internet. In his extremely interesting blog, Terrence writes:
Of course, it’s totally obvious that one day limit hold’em will be solved by a computer. I have no real good guesses as to when that will happen, or when they will overtake the best humans as the best players in the world (we don’t know how close to optimal the best players in the world play).
Just so. It’s a question of when, not if. And already there are bots that can routinely beat most of the players in the game – Terrence is simply wondering when they’ll beat the best players. After all, folks, this game is not rocket science. Compared to chess, it’s tiddly winks. And please don’t start with me about the personal element, bluffing, yada yada. Computers know perfectly well how to bluff, when to bluff, etc. You just wire an RNG (random number generator) to decide when to bluff, based on game theoretically correct bluffing percentages. Child’s play – and there’s no pattern to it.
Whether a computer will ever be the best player in no-limit hold’em is perhaps a slightly more complex issue, because the science/art equation tips a bit more toward art (i.e. playing your opponent versus playing the cards). But some bots already do a pretty fair job of beating big-bet poker. Furthermore, I’m sure that even world class players have betting patterns that they might not even recognize, but a good artificial intelligence algorithm would.
In short, some day in the future, a computer program will certainly be the best limit hold’em player in the world. If I had to bet, I’d wager that one day a computer program will be the best no-limit hold’em player in the world.
But as I pointed out above, that only gets the bot-masters halfway there. They also have to get past the online sites.
Now, let me pose a rhetorical question: Do you suppose that the poker sites will allow bots to destroy the industry that they’ve worked so hard to create, and that has brought them billions (with a ‘b’) of dollars?
Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought, too.
As many of you are aware, up until April 1st of this year, I was the poker room manager at PokerStars.com. I saw the first bots appear at the edge of the forest, make their way across the field, and storm the castle. I watched the battle rage between the bots and the security guys on our side.
A few bots have made some money, but mostly they’ve gotten caught before they could do any serious damage. One of the reasons is that to really leverage a bot, you need to get a bunch of copies of that bot running. When you get lots of them running, patterns emerge. All kinds of patterns. Some of that has been discussed in other forums, such as 2+2, but I’m not going to elaborate here.
In general, the bot detection technology has improved dramatically over the past couple of years, and it’s getting better daily. It’s in the poker sites’ interest to be as bot-free as possible, and they’re working hard at it. Of course, the bot-writers will improve their technology too, but right now, I think the online sites are winning the war, and in fact are increasing the gap.
Also, running a bot causes you to risk a lot of money. For instance, if you have a bot that’s beating $30-60 limit hold’em, it will need a bankroll of $15,000-$20,000 to be safe (remember, it’s a bot, not a magician). If the site on which you’re running this bot catches you, you’re out $18,000; that’s a big hit on your bankroll. And if you’re running 3-4 bots and they catch all of them, then you’re out $50K or whatever. And you can’t win that $50K back because you’re persona non grata at the poker site.
Now, will online poker ever be completely bot-free? Probably not. Particularly if the bot is used as an "assistant" to provide statistics, suggest plays, and/or auto-fold bad hands, they will be difficult (I didn’t say impossible) to detect. But that’s a very different scenario than the one Richard Whitehouse fears: an army of cyborgs gobbling up the unwitting carbon-based online players.
So, that’s the situation: the press will serve up stories about machines beating people at poker – it makes good copy, feeds our fears of being replaced by robots, and gives them yet another excuse to show us a picture of Jennifer Tilly. But as far as I can see into the future, in the real day-to-day world of online poker, a good player who sticks to his or her A-game will take home the money.
Posted by Lee Jones on August 2nd, 2007 in Bots, Online Poker, Poker.
Comments: 9
Play Poker
Play Poker Against Lee Jones - sign up now to play in the monthly tournament with all Bigger Deal's writers
Comments
Comment from Richard Whitehouse
Time: August 2, 2007, 5:09 pm
Just for the record, I did not say, or get close to saying, that online poker was about to end.
I did hint strongly that the way we look at opponents will change forever.
Why don’t online sites encrypt communication between client and host?
This would make it very difficult for bots to pretend to be players using the client software.
I welcome all efforts by online sites to eliminate bots.
If they could contribute officially to the debate, that would also help.
Comment from Andrew
Time: August 3, 2007, 10:32 am
The data between server and client is encrypted. But that won’t stop bots, if you can display the data on the screen (which you need to, to see what cards you’ve been dealt, to display the table etc), the bot can interact with it.
Comment from Johnny Hughes
Time: August 3, 2007, 6:36 pm
On the side of his travel trailer, Puggy Pearson had the old chestnut, “I’ll play any man from any land, any game that he can name, for any amount that he can count.”
Nobody said anything about machines.
Comment from Lee Jones
Time: August 4, 2007, 12:47 am
I had replied to Richard before but somehow it didn’t get posted - this is a second try.
1. I apologize for mis-characterizing Richard’s comments - he’s apparently much closer to my position than I thought.
2. As poster Andrew said, the data between the server and client *is* encrypted, and the bots can still get their hands on the information for the very reason that Andrew stated.
3. I don’t think the poker sites see the bot issue as a “debate”. They view bots as a threat to their business and are reacting accordingly. It’s probably in the sites’ best interest not to make more of the bot issue than it already is - people get freaked out unnecessarily. I suspect they believe their best strategy is to simply keep quiet and shut down the bots as quickly and efficiently as possible. I agree with their approach - I don’t think that anything good would come from (e.g.) PokerStars trumpeting all the work they’re doing to counteract bots. That would simply turn into “Bots?!?! You have bots!?!?!”
Also, if the sites stepped into the discussion about bots, one very natural question players would ask is, “Well, what are you doing about bots?” The very natural answer would be, “Well, we’d rather not say.” Given that the conversation would be short and not very productive, I don’t see much point in having that conversation in the first place.
Regards, Lee
Comment from Charley
Time: August 5, 2007, 12:17 am
I can offer an analogy to Internet Chess. The best sites have very sophisticated methods of detecting “computer cheaters”, as they are called: people who use programs without disclosing that fact. (And, as most of you will know, programs today can defeat just about anyone, or make that “anyone at fast time controls”.)
There is, I am sure, far more money involved in Poker than in Chess on the Net, so I am not worried. Safeguards will definitely be put in place when necessary. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they existed already.)
Comment from Allen
Time: August 5, 2007, 9:46 pm
Lee, Why do the poker sites see the bots as a threat? Don’t the bots generate just as much rake (if not more) than the typical player?
Comment from Charley
Time: August 6, 2007, 6:48 pm
Allen, surely the bots would scare away the typical player sooner or later?
Comment from Lee Jones
Time: August 7, 2007, 8:25 pm
Hi Allen -
Charley has part of the explanation - that bots scare away legitimate players. But also, sufficiently good bots, widely deployed, would make the games very difficult to beat (and not very much fun). If there were (e.g.) one bot at every table, that would represent a 10% increase in games available and the site’s business. All in all, most sites (and their players, in fact) would probably be happy with that. But like the old Arabian proverb about the camel getting his nose into the tent, the bot-masters wouldn’t be happy with one bot at each table.
Answering Charley’s comment: “There is, I am sure, far more money involved in Poker than in Chess on the Net, so I am not worried. Safeguards will definitely be put in place when necessary. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they existed already.)”…
Yes, as I described above, the safeguards are already in place and are improving daily.
Regards, Lee
Comment from Mugwhump
Time: August 8, 2007, 12:19 pm
As a former security specialist at Paradise Poker I can state that it was quite simple to detect these bots at first and even as they became more sophisticated simple additions to the bot detection tools at Paradise Poker ensured that we were at least very close to them and not some way behind in catching these bots. This is possibly due to Paradise Poker being in the business a lot longer than most poker sites. Now that the original Dise is gone having been replaced by a Boss Media skin the poker world should be allowed to avail of these tools/techniques that Paradise Poker used to detect bots. Unfortunately due to confidentiality clauses that I am still confined to even though I have left the employment of Paradise Poker I cannot divulge the exact nature of these tools. However I can state that in my time as a security specialist at Paradise Poker we used many of the bot programs available against themselves to gain the knowledge to detect them easier I also tried them on many other sites and was extremely surprised to find that only 3 sites from 25 that I tried the bots on were able to detect them.
Just so I don’t get the usual “hey your full of it and you’re telling lies” I’ll ask Lee (although he doesn’t know me) to verify my story by thanking him for the 12 or so bucks he left in his account and told us to buy a pizza with it when the ban on US players forced him to close his account at Dise.




Write a comment
Lee checks these comments and will reply to them on a regular basis.