Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.
Cash games in person are pretty bad too. Casinos need to make money and they only get it off rake, so they have lately turned a blind eye to collusion. The only safe poker (except among friends) is tournaments, in person, so they randomize the tables properly.
Collusion in live poker games in casinos is not a widespread problem. There is a problem with poker where people always think they are being cheated every time they lose. If you are playing in a casino in person it is very unlikely you are being cheated. If you are playing in a regulated website online that verifies the identities of the customers it is also unlikely you are being cheated.
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.
A regulated online casino that verifies identity wouldn’t stop a bot. You’d just sign up under your name and use it. If your bot isn’t colluding it would just look to the casino like you’re good at poker.
The best bots are from cheating rings where the bots are colluding, not from bots that play poker perfectly (which don't exist in any real sense for full ring poker).
Just fyi 6max bots were destroying online $5/$10 games on Party Poker (back then the biggest site) in 2009. That was before public solvers, other algorithmic advancements and huge hardware progress.
I used to play poker back in the 2000s. The online game was getting harder then and I can only imagine it's gotten worse? Also GTO solvers are a thing now? I don't know what stakes you are referring to but I feel like the overall quality of poker play has never been higher.
What's true is that people aren't making as obvious mistakes, especially preflop, so you can't make hundreds of thousands just by knowing that Ace King is a good hand that you can go all in with. Anyone can find preflop poker charts and fix part of their preflop game.
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 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?
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.
I've played for years, in locations all across the US, and know many other people who've played much more. This is basically not a thing. I encountered it once, decades ago, at Hawaiian Gardens in SoCal. If it's happening regularly it's very obvious, and the floor will quickly become aware of it. As far as making a living, it's easier to learn how to beat live low stakes than to successfully collude, and the latter would be unlikely to help much if you weren't already beating the games.
Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots.
It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.
I'm a software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I'm also a poker player that has a very deep understanding of the game. Writing a poker bot that can beat the game is absolutely not trivial. There are "solvers" that use counterfactual regret minimization to solve a constrained version of the game for specific scenarios. These are useful for understanding the principles of the game but they are not the cheat sheet people think they are.
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'm an ex online poker pro. You probably don't have the deep understanding of the game you think you have. Bots were already destroying the field up to mid-stakes 10 years ago.
I'm sure there is some, but it's standard practice to keep at database of all your hands.
I've sanity checked the winning regs (at my stakes) and they all make mistakes.
I think it helps that in the US all the sites are geography based. It makes it harder and less financially viable to run a bot ring.
I don't know what a reg is but I would assume the first thing you do after you get your bot working is to add some imperfect play so that you don't get banned by the most trivial heuristics.
Reg means regular, ie someone who plays a lot. Usually but not always it implies someone who is a winning or at least attempting to be a winning player
Yeah. Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. The hard part is making it look authentic and not emit any patterns or other signals that could be detected in the data.
It's exceedingly hard to play perfectly. Nobody knows how except in limited toy games, like heads up at 7BBs or less. And perfect play varies drastically from opponent to opponent, this isn't blackjack.
So it's a cat and mouse game like most things, except the spread between the cat and the mouse is quite high but is still (somewhat) in favour of the mouse as the online poker world currently stands?
I used to work for an online poker outfit. The boss wanted weak bots populating the tables so that we looked popular. Of course, he had a “crack team” of bot writers for playing on “other sites” to make money, too.
Might be another somewhat interesting perspective - not sure how filling in the details from my summary above could be big news. But sure, I’d write it up if it seems interesting enough to someone.
This was early in the online poker hype. I worked there for about a year, and they didn’t last long after I left the company. Forum posts from when they were still in business showed players suspected bot activity. The company wasn’t all that big, and I’m sure the lack of player trust did them in.
I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.
Given how awful LLM are at chess, I'd say GPT sucks at poker. Making a profitable bot using state of the art poker software, like stockfish for chess? That's already done.
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.
You just made up a whole different thing. Nobody is talking about writing code with an AI here, they’re talking about using it to interact with a poker website.
Bots mostly don't play fair. One strategy I've seen is having multiple bots play passively to minimize losses, unless at least 2 get placed in a single game. In that case the bots can share information bully the rest of the table by playing aggressively.
Online poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.
What I meant by "poker isn't solved the same way chess is" is that if you take a solver and follow all the actions it tells you are "best" you will not make the most money. It isn't like stockfish where by using solver outputs you will automatically make more money than the best pros in the world. 99% of poker is understanding the unique ways your opponents are bad and adjusting your strategy to profit the most from them. Even the best pros in the world still make mistakes.
The problem is specifically with unregulated sites that don't verify the identities of players. The bots aren't so much the problem as the fact that they can collude and share hole cards. But fyi, bots aren't actually good at playing poker outside of specific scenarios vs bad players or in scenarios where the decision tree is not large (ie short stack tournaments where the decisions are pre computed, you can imagine how massive your edge can be when you have a pair of 9s and you know there are already 3 dead aces and your decision is only all in or fold)
Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.
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.
I don’t believe it. There are just as many variables involved in writing a short story.
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.
You can feel all you want - there is no evidence this is happening.It would be massive news in the professional community. You’d need a comprehensive GTO strategy which doesn’t really exist, especially in multiway pots. Best we have right now are GTO (game theory optimal) solvers which need tons of assumptions plugged into them and require enormous amounts of memory and time to spit out results, and we still don’t really understand a lot about the underlying theory.
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.
Heads up no limit holdem bots crush the best players in the world even 200bbs deep. So kind of like the same situation as chess. Not solved but not beatable.
There haven’t been any real online NLHE heads up games online in at least a decade. so it’s kind of a moot point. Not sure which bots or players you are referring to - these games don’t exist online in any meaningful volume.