Dodgy Users

[equinoxx]

I was on JetSet Poker the other night and was in one of their freeroll games and there was a user who was saying 'Nice Hand!' whenever anyone won. The problem is it was getting very repetitive and when he won he would still say 'Nice Hand!' so it got me thinking that it was a bot so I addressed him and asked if he was from Texas or something just to see if he repleid and he did respond with a 'No' The thing is, I then said soemthing like 'I reckon (forgot his name) is a bot' and then he came alive and seemed to be full of conversation. The reason why I am telling you about this is I was wondering whether I was right and that the word 'bot' alerted the people running the game and then they took over. I know this may be a little far fetched but the guy was saying 'Nice Hand!' even when he was winning which is well dodgy. What do you guys think thogh?

[GETT1NLOTS]

Re: Dodgy Users I was playing someone who did exactly that the other night as well. I think that some players think that 'the software' rewards polite punters more than the silent or moody players - hence the nice comments. Superstitious lot us gamblers you know. :lol

[Oskar]

Re: Dodgy Users Im hearing more about these bots in the internet poker world. I know for a fact 'bots' are being used on sites like betfair, clearing up all the arb opportunities and that, and we have the computer that beat the russian chess bloke a few times, but i still cant see how they could consistently win at poker, esp no limit poker. Maybe limit would be easier, where in advance they know the info regarding the max each hand can cost etc, but I just cant see how you could write a program to go on instinct, or reads from a player. I know artigicial intelligence is going from strength to strength but I feel kinda safe that the bloke sat across from me from Norway with the stupid name (no offense to the fellow Norwegian punters lounge patrons) isnt a pentium 4, he may not be from Norway but at least im sure hes human.

[equinoxx]

Re: Dodgy Users They could be programmed to call all raises and to reraise though. It seems well dodgy.

[tipstar]

Re: Dodgy Users http://www.casinorobots.com/poker/robot.htm

[Oskar]

Re: Dodgy Users Oh my god! They are out there... :( Or maybe ive just found a fantastic excuse to use to the misses if she ever discovers my poker losses

[Markpl1]

Re: Dodgy Users Bots are certainly used to clean up the arbs on just about all betting sites and this is common as it is just case of finding a price and a bit of mathematics. Poker is a different game as it has more to it. I know i've heard top pros (daniel negrenau for one) say that no matter how sophisticated technology gets it would be hard to win at poker. How do you read a Gus Hansen as he bets 50000 dollars on a 2 3 when the board has no 2's and 3's on it. If your up against a bot i would imagine bluffing would be quite a worthwhile exercise.

[Jezza]

Re: Dodgy Users Hi guys, The problem for artificial intelligence with poker is that it requires you to adapt to your opponents. Chess can be "solved" in a sense in that you can pretty much always find the logically best move through a recursive mathematical algorithm and although I dont think they have quite a perfect chess playing program yet it seems they are pretty close. Poker is nothing like this. Every player plays totally different - indeed the same player might play the same situation totally differently from one week to the next (consciously or not!). This makes it EXTREMELY difficult for a computer to beat any sort of competant poker player let alone a world class one. It holds QQ and the flop is K1010 the heads up opponent goes all in...what does it do? The correct answer is dependant on so many things (who the op is, what sort of mood he is in, is he tight loose weak or passive, does he change his style, does he like to bluff) that a computer is just not ever going to be as good at judging this as a good poker player is. Basically, artificial intelligence sucks ass and we dont need to worry about The Terminators judgement day for a while yet :lol. All that being said, bots do exist in the online gambling world. They work well on exchanges hoovering up the best prices and people definately have tried to make them for online poker. However if MIT fail miserably to make a half decent poker playing computer you can bet your ass your average 20yr old geek has f all chance of coming up with anything decent. It would be incredibly easy to spot both by the players at its table and by the servers it was running on. To cite a recent example, there was a bot called "saabpo" (or something similar) playing in the party poker sit n go tournaments the other month. It was so incredibly simplistic, basically it had two moves - fold or ALL IN (lol). As the blinds increased its standard for doing the latter dropped. When it first started out it seemed to do ok as it was on the 5 dollar sit n gos at first then after a week or two it was on the 10s :lol. Unfortunately for it soon everyone realised what it was up to and the best way to play it (You just had to min raise its blinds and it would either fold them to you or go all in, if it went all in you would know what it had depending on the blind levels). It became a cult celeb on the party servers and indeed when it was online there were mass fights trying to get a seat at the games it was in as it was totally dead money towards the end of its career. Party soon closed the account after it was rumbled, there is a website dedicated to taking the piss out of this thing and if I can find it again I will post it up. equinoxx, that does sound a little strange but obv a bot wont be able to hold a decent conversation....if you see it again doing the same thing try talking to it again I guess and see if it answers Jez

[equinoxx]

Re: Dodgy Users

If your up against a bot i would imagine bluffing would be quite a worthwhile exercise.

Well, the trick is knowing if you are playing a bot or not. That's the catch.

[equinoxx]

Re: Dodgy Users Jez, what I was wondering was whether they could have been alerted to me addressing him? I know, I know I am looking at this with a conspiracy theorists mind but it was really weird and the second I did address him as a bot he got chatty but before thast it was 'Nice Hand!' 'Nice Hand!' 'Thank You!' 'Nice Hand!'

[Jezza]

Re: Dodgy Users Equinoxx...he would have been at his computer watching his bot play if this was the case. This is certainly possible but he will have to leave it on its own at some point and if you try and chat to it then he wont be able to respond Jez

[Jezza]

Re: Dodgy Users Ok it seems the website was on www.saabpo.com but the guy has taken it and now its just a big advert for porn... However for a short while you can still read it by accessing it through googles cache here... http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:nuNwfibdku4J:www.saabpo.com/+&hl=en Jez

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users Computers haven't cracked chess just yet ! Deep blue beat kasparov thanks to an utterly awful opening blunder by Kasparov in the last game. He did actually beat in in individual games. The most recent man V machine contest was a draw overall. Although Kasparov was beaten in a game, he also won in a game. Hence proving computers haven't cracked chess just yet. If chess is ever "solved", ie a computer powerful enough to calculate every single game of chess possibly appears, then it will be unbeatable, unless there is some sort of forced win for either colour (white most likely). The problem for chess and with poker is the evaluation part. It's easy enough to program in rules etc, but eventually you have to tell the computer to stop calculating and make an evaluation. This is where it struggles. Things humans can do in seconds a computer would have serious problems with. Eg someone I know to be a very good poker player raises all in pre-flop in a tournament. I'm sat with QQ, what do I do ? Fold of course. What would a computer make of that ? Purely on maths it's likely that the QQ is winning against 2 random cards, but it isn't 2 random cards and you have to take into account your opponent. Is he gonna throw all his chips in preflop with anything other than AA if he is a very good player ? I would guess no and hence fold. A computer would have problems I imagine, espeically if it were holding KK. That's just the tip of the iceberg, there's a whole other host of problems it would have. I would certainly not mind playing poker against "bots"

[Jezza]

Re: Dodgy Users Yeah alien.....I didnt think they had quite got there yet with chess but it is certainly coming close I imagine? Just off the top of my head I would guess when they finally do "solve" chess that when the computer starts as white it will always win or at least draw if it was playing itself as black possibly. Jez

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users Well yeah, as someone once said if 2 super intellects were to play a game of chess. White would move and they would either agree a draw or black would resign. They are alot closer than they were with chess. But the fundamentals of evaluation still aren't there, no matter how much techno jargon they try and disguise it with.

[DeepBlueDevilFish]

Re: Dodgy Users I personally don't think they're that close to solving chess but they are getting very close to cracking draughts :- http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Echinook/

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users They are closer purely because of raw processing power. They have turned quantity into quality. Now computers can anaylse millions more positions per second this has therefore made them able to play better, they can calculate deeper before they have to stop and "evaluate". There have also been slight improvements in computers ability to evalutate positions but they are nowhere near yet. The thing is depsite the huge processing power of computers there are billions of billions of ways of playing a chess game, I would expect you would need a quantum computer to be able to "solve" it.

[DeepBlueDevilFish]

Re: Dodgy Users Yeh that's right Alien. There are far more possible games of chess than there are particles in the universe.

[Jezza]

Re: Dodgy Users Yeah ok point taken...there is an "end" to it tho that can be reached, unlike calculating pi which just goes on forever Jez

[mr onemore]

Re: Dodgy Users Interesting discussion - chess, poker, maths, right up my street. I agree with most of what's been said - but I think there's another point here. A poker bot doesn't have to beat 'the best players in the world', it just has to be able to beat your average player - and I'm pretty sure that can be done if it's not been done already. When that becomes a widely known fact, I think that internet poker might just die off - or at least have to change in a way that I can't imagine - as your average player won't want to pay money to lose to a computer all the time. This has of course happened in chess - a PC can run a program that will defeat over 99% of the chess playing population. That's why you don't play chess for money on the internet!! It would be computer v computer every time. Now of course, chess hasn't died out, and poker won't either. In fact, the amount of new players generated out of this period of internet poker will ensure the popularity of the game for all time - just that there will undoubtedly be a time when internet poker becomes a quaint historical past-time, to be replaced by more live play poker. People will still want to play - and that's how it will be. I'd also say that time will come sooner than we think. It wasn't long ago that chess playing computers were a bit of a fantasy - I can't quite believe myself just how strong they've become. Forget the arguments about particular hands, particular players - if a bot is perceived to be cleaning up at the base root of the game, and as I say I think they can do that, then internet poker is finished!!!!! On that bombshell....

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users You are forgetting in poker no matter how "well" you play if the cards don't fall for you, you can still lose. This is not the case however in chess, where your destiny lies entirely in your own hands. A generation of poker playing bots scooping up the cash ? Can't see it really.

[mr onemore]

Re: Dodgy Users

You are forgetting in poker no matter how "well" you play if the cards don't fall for you, you can still lose. This is not the case however in chess, where your destiny lies entirely in your own hands.

Not getting your point here Alien. Unlucky cards are unlucky cards whether for bot or human. Of course I understand the difference in the full v part info available to each player - not sure why you're so certain that computers aren't capable of handling this situation in a better way than we can?

A generation of poker playing bots scooping up the cash ? Can't see it really.

They used to say that about chess and computers. I remember a famous mathematician / chess player who used to have a yearly bet that he wouldn't be beaten by a computer. David Levy I think - might be wrong though. He knew he'd lose one day though, and he did in the early eighties. Was quite a big event in it's day. Even now, as strong as they are, the top players easily beat computers in chess. Kasparov was perhaps not the best choice of player to represent the 'human race' versus computers...a more positionally based strategy is needed to beat computers, and there are better exponents of that style than Kasparov - as you well know fellow chess fan:D Anyway, I think we'll see similar stories with the Poker bots - they'll get better, inevitably. And as I say, it doesn't matter that if they get good enough to beat the very best players, they'll make a handy living out of us lot and that will be that (for internet poker). Anyway - just opinions - suppose we agree to disagree:ok

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users Similarly a person doesn't have to be an amazing poker player to make money. Just better than the people he is playing with. I am sure there must be some fundamental differences between computers playing poker and computers playing chess. There's alot more variables in a sense in poker, hmmm I dunno it's a difficult one. Also tournament poker and cash poker would also be very different things. Some people say that karpov in his prime would be ideal agaisnt computers. He used to bore opponents into losing with his positional game squeezing out minute advantages. HAving said that Kasp can play a not too bad positional game himself :lol It'll be interesting to see how good computers can get at poker. But even if they get good will they stop people playing online and cause the death of internet poker, that I definitely cannot see.

[Markpl1]

Re: Dodgy Users Interesting article on a new video poker game that daniel negrenau is promoting. Anyone else got a pokibot? http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/showarticle.php?a_id=14642&m_id=65559

[aliensyndm]

Re: Dodgy Users Ah good stuff. Interesting how he remarked about computers having trouble about going all in early etc and the general "feel" which is basically what I was saying. Ten years research ? That will be cool, I'd like to see what they have come up with.