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Comment by ketralnis | Hacker News Reader

What made you think that these groups of players were associated with each other? What made you think that they were bots, beyond just winning often?

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To put it extremely simply, there are specific ranges of acceptable statistics about what winning play looks like in poker. With thousands of hands of data winning players can intuitively pick out stats that are out of line.

For example, there are two related stats: went to showdown, and won money at showdown. These calculate how often you get to the last card and reveal your hand against another player/group of players to win the pot, as well as the frequency you actually win these showdowns. Generally, the more you are showing down hands against opponents, the lower your chances of winning money, simply because it's not always possible on average to have better hands than your opponents above a certain frequency of times you're getting to showdown. If a bot/player had access to other players' hole cards (like actually happened on the Ultimate Bet network) a telling example might be that they go to showdown way more than average while also winning money at showdown far above an average rate.

There are tens (if not hundreds by now) of common poker stats, this is just a simplified look at one related pair.

There are software tools which aggregate huge amounts of data (hands) from Poker platforms, like Holdem Manager. That's where you can see player stats like pre-flop, turn, river actions, percentages and so on. Once you have 2 players who played a lot of hands (+10k) and have the exact same stats numbers you should be a bit suspicious.

Yeah this. Dozen's of them with this weird strategy with a few very identifying features.

Edit: I can't recall the exact figure, but we had a few million hands combined.

He said it: their strategies were very similar and never seen before, nor taught anywhere.

So, some people got together, or one person was playing many accounts, and cleaned the amateurs out. Similar, novel strategies does not imply a bot net.

I'm glad you're playing devil's advocate, and you're not wrong in that a single player could have multiple accounts, this was especially true on the Ongame network, as it provided the platform which sites could whitelabel to run their own poker room, with individual promotions/branding etc, while leveraging the benefits of a large shared player pool.

The thing that stood out was the length of the sessions played by these players. The regular professionals (regs) would play multiple tables at once, usually 4-8 tables (Ongame software was shitty and prone to crashing) for a few hours at a time (poker is mentally taxing). These guys were playing 8-12 sessions on single tables.

In terms of amateurs, I'm not taking offence, but many of us were playing full time for a living at the time, and their winrates were beating many of us, without any game selection (explicitly choosing to play with weak players).

The strategies were indeed novel - the one I can describe in layman's terms - they never just called a bet before the flop, they always folded or reraised. This is a huge paradigm shift from all conventional wisdom at the time, and a strategy that is very difficult to execute well (hard to go into details without getting into poker terms/theory).

While poker strategy was (and still is) constantly evolving the overall stats/strategies deviated so far from the norm that we all agreed we were up against a bot. Again, without going into details the strategy had a much more mathematical/game theory approach than the far more commonplace exploitative strategies that everyone was using at the time.

Raise or fold was an aggressive strategy when I was playing in the early 2000s. I think SuperSystem even talks about it.

The players I knew were very much into theory and the math of the game. It wouldn't surprise me if one, or multiple, of them were who you were playing against.

Of course, great bots can be made and run easily.

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