I have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
The vast majority of people that play poker absolutely suck and think they are being cheated because they lose money very quickly. Most bad poker players would literally be better off playing blackjack.
Played thousands of hours in casinos. Saw some asshole show down cards to someone still in the hand, stuff like that, but never anything I thought was collusion.
Plenty of other angles, though.
Having a poker solver isn't enough. Let's say you play tournament poker, just having a basic understanding of concepts like ICM give you a massive edge. Let's say you take it a step further and understand concepts like "future game" and actually study them using tools, you're edge has expanded further.
There are a bunch of charts out there that tell you what hands to go all in with if you have 15bbs or fewer. None of those charts take into account ICM. Also how do you adjust the charts if your opponents are calling with too many hands? How do you adjust them if they call with too few hands?
Let's say we are just talking about cash game poker, it's not enough to have a solver, you need to understand how to actually study with the solver. People try to use them like a cheat sheet that tells you what to do, not understanding that a slight change to the inputs of the solver can drastically change the output. The purpose of a solver is to understand how different ranges interact at different stack depths on different boards.
ie: Playing 100bbs deep, on a KK3 flop with a flush draw, what hands should i check or bet as the preflop raiser? What happens if that 3 is a 7? What if it's a J? What if it's 33K instead of KK3? What if I'm 200bbs deep instead of 100? What if the opponent calls too much? What if they call too little?
There are multiple tools on the market that solve preflop all-in game for multiway pots with ICM and more advanced chip utility models. Those are very easy to solve you don't even need a chart (on the fly solving is fast enough on a laptop). You can also solve them with adjustments for certain players.
Do you think I can't exploit that after buying the history of millions of hands it played on some shady website.
I've rarely met players whom I think could even act properly on the knowledge.
I've also never been in a room that wouldn't take it very, very seriously.
Today, we've got 6 Las Vegas locals, and 1 rich Chinese tourist.
The LV locals are making small-talk, "hey bro you go to the gym today? Nah my back is super-sore from my last work out. bla bla bla"
All 6 locals have butt-plugs plugged in. Two clenches means, 'I got this'. The tourist doesn't stand a chance.
Writing a winning poker bot is not trivial, you are unknowingly spreading false information.
How so? It's not like the entire game state is visible to all players, and a big part of poker is playing the other players.
I think people fundamentally don't get that poker is not like chess. The vast majority of money I win is from identifying when players are too attached to their hand and never folding or when they just give up on their hand and fold to any bet.
I feel like there was (or will be, if it somehow hasn’t yet occurred) a very short gap between one site being unwinnable and all sites being so.
Second of all, poker is fairly capital intensive and whenever your bot account gets banned the site will confiscate your funds, so there's risk involved as well. And every time you get banned you need to create a new account with new KYC etc.
Third of all, bots play differently from humans and many of them are detected and caught by the players in addition to the site security. Further adding to the challenge is that the community of professional online players in the US is pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else (we're all on Discord together, basically). So new names appearing at high stakes out of nowhere get scrutinized more.
Fourth, even if you're playing against a bot or cheater, you can still make money, since winrate is entirely driven by fish. You might lose a little against the cheater but as long as you're winning far more from the fish you'll still make money. This separates poker from other competitive games.
I don't mean to imply the bot and cheating issues don't exist, they're real and serious and existential, and every online pro these days spends a lot of time worrying about it, worrying if a certain opponent is cheating, etc. But I think the bigger issues facing online poker are actually regulatory (in the US, an unregulated market has sprung up since the pandemic that is now struggling with a lot of legal changes; Europe has a lot of anti gambling laws these days and more every year) as well as general game quality (fewer recreational players wanting to gamble large amounts of money online and more pros than ever trying to split that smaller pie).
Please explain to me how you think these bots work? Do you think they are literally hooked into solvers and solving these hands in real time? If you actually understood poker you'd understand that the winrate from GTO is not good enough to make real money playing poker without a massive sample size, the game is all about exploiting players when they deviate from GTO. Explain to me how you program your poker bot to know intuitively that a player has too many bluff combinations when a flush arrives on the turn after they check back on the flop therefor you should call wider than standard? There are a billion little unique situations where people don't bluff enough, bluff too much, call too much or call too little and that is where the winrate from poker comes from.
This is the difference between having a 3 bb / 100 winrate and a 10-15 bb / 100 winrate. Maybe there are a bunch of shitty poker bots winning at 1 bb / 100 but if they are winning it's because some players suck really really bad, not because they are playing perfect poker.
Even some people who are victims of scams admit that at the time they sent some/all of money they knew it was a scam but did it anyway.
The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
The operator running his bots would be a betrayal and probably end the business of the poker site involved.
Maybe it’s worth a couple hundred words.
Sure you could use an AI agent to write that code, but it wouldn't actually being that AI agent in the hot loop constantly coordinating your UI interactions with the poker engine...
Comments like these make me feel a bit safer from AI in my engineering job. People think it's a perfect no brainer fit for so many inane situations.
This decline was underway a full decade before bots really came on the scene.
Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.
Anyone who thinks machine learning can’t conquer poker is fooling themselves. I used to have bots collect every hand played on major poker sites in the early aughts so I’m sure there’s infinite training data.
And if it can be done we know there’s sufficient financial incentive. So I (former long time professional poker player) feel reasonably confident online poker must be unwinnable by now.
It doesn’t matter how many hands you “train” something on. Poker is a game of incomplete information and many assumptions must be made about an opponent’s range, bluff frequency, etc. One small tweak in assumptions and the entire GTO output changes with solvers. It’s very difficult to get these assumptions right. As I said it’s an unsolved game. Even the GTO solvers only work in 1 on 1 pots (assuming the assumptions you’re working with are close).
Respectfully, although you claim to be a former online professional (I have played for 20 years, at times professionally) - you don’t seem to understand what you are talking about.
Surely you're not implying that writing a good short story is a solved problem for computers?