THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

And an online scandal last year in poker involving Absolute Poker:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/the-absolute-poker-cheating-scandal-blown-wide-open/

So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual named Scott Tom, who seems to be a part-owner of Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the Web site had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.

I’m a professional poker player, and I specialize in one of the few games that bots can compete at - heads up (one on one) limit hold’em.  I’ve probably played 15,000-25,000 hands against bots.  I’ve also publicly worked to get them shut down.

Off topic for this blog, but here’s the story about the bots

1) They’re very good at heads up limit hold’em.  I doubt there are 100 people in the world that have an edge against them.

2) They will never be good at games with more than 2 people at the table.  They will probably never be good at any no-limit games.

3) They’re pretty easy for me to spot.  They play a unique style, they never adjust to their opponents (this is something bots in general are capable of doing however), they never get frustrated and play bad, and they play at an unnatural speed.  Poker sites should have a much easier time spotting them than I do.

4) Poker sites don’t tend to do anything unless someone makes a stink publicly.  They get paid whenever someone is playing poker it doesn’t matter if its a bot.

5) All the major sites except one (Poker Stars) have had bots with some regularity.  I only play on one site that has bots on it.  The first six months I played heads up limit hold’em on that site, over 50% of the mid-high stakes games had a bot in them.  Those bots got shut down, and in a couple months a new batch popped up.  The third batch got shut down a couple months ago.

6) On the one bot site I play at, the bots make in the neighborhood of $100,000 a month when the infestation is at its peak.  Although when they get shut down, they lose all the money they haven’t cashed out.

"over 50% of the mid-high stakes games had a bot in them.”

Should specify that this is only mid-high stakes heads up limit hold’em.  Bots would get annihilated in mid-high games that either weren’t limit or had more than one opponent.

I am quite familiar with online poker as well.  I would add/change that there are tons of bots in low limit multi-player limit (as opposed to no-limit) games.  While bots are not particularly suited to multi-player games and are easily “handled” by a good player, those low limit gamea are soft enough that a halfway decent bot will pull plenty of money out of those games from the poor players.  They might only make 3 bucks an hour, but if you have 100 of them running 24-7, well…

I very strongly doubt that is happening.  The poker community is extremely good at catching these type of things.  Other than the mid-high stakes HULHE bots I talked about, I know there are bots on WSEX (which is a site that doesn’t try to make money from poker, so they have little incentive to spend money on keeping their games clean) and there are the occasional very small operations.  These low limit bots would have to be much better at avoiding detection than the bots I don’t have trouble finding in order for them to stay around, because there are many more eyes watching them.

I know that it is reasonably easy to buy a bot program that supposedly can beat those games for that kind of winrate, but it is extremely difficult to have 100 accounts running bots undetected.

You might be right, that is just what I hear, but it is unsubstantiated, although my son, who plays a lot of low limit games, claims that he plays against (supposed) bots all the time.

Maybe it was more of an issue a couple of years ago before some of the sites cracked down on them.  I agree that it is not that hard to identify a fully automatic bot and that the major issue is incentive by the various sites.