[trader01]

Just thought I would add my $0.02 on this topic.

The first thing I have to say about bots is this: like them or hate them, they are NOT going to ever go away in online poker, for a few reasons:

1) Poker rooms have absolutely no incentive to get rid of these bot players. They most certainly have an incentive to ACT like they are getting rid of them successfully in order to convince most people (i.e. the fish) that their games are bot-free, but to say that a poker room TRULY wants to axe its most frequent and best customers (computer programs) is patently ridiculous. Even saying that they would want to do it to ensure that the supply of fish doesn't dry up is a flawed argument, for a couple of reasons:

(a) There is no concrete proof that an influx of bots would significantly dry up the market for new fish, or cause the industry to collapse as a result. This is just a supposition that some people have, but it has not actually happened yet. If you think about it, the bot population will tend to be self-regulating in a given room, much as the expert player population is self-regulating. If a room has too many expert players or bots, any one person's (or program's) consistent profits are going to dry up, and that person or program will leave (or be switched off) to search for greener pastures. This means that there is an upper limit to how many bots can truly be successful in the market, and that is limited to the number of fish out there. The fish won't go away if there are too many bots, the bots will go away if there are too many bots because they will stop making consistent money. I doubt the fish will even notice, they are too busy giving their money away to everyone under the sun. Besides that, there are more than enough compulsive gamblers out there who are content to sit in front of a one-armed bandit machine and literally throw money down a hole to make this industry ever go away. Online rooms might not make as much money in the future as they do now, but they WILL always make money. Many fish have no problem giving their hard-earned cash to a machine where the odds are 100% against them and impossible to change, so why would they have a problem playing against a few bots online? As long as online gaming rooms can convince people that MOST of the players online are real people, the fish won't mind too much in my opinion. Many of them are not even aware of this issue, and unless a major expose is done on it on TV they never will be... even then I wonder how much it would affect them.

(b) Even if the supply of fish was to dry up somewhat because of bots, I have yet to see a businessperson who would gladly sacrifice significant IMMEDIATE revenue for the possibility of POTENTIALLY lengthening their cash flow out into the future. 99.9% of business owners are going to choose to make a lot of money now, not put it off until later for the hope of making it last longer. (Especially in a marketplace that is so crowded and competitive.) Only at the point where it becomes painfully obvious that bots are significantly hurting online poker revenues (if that ever happens, which I highly doubt, since bots are making these guys a killing) are these people going to do anything about it. Right now the reverse is true, and that may never change.

2) Even if poker rooms WERE truly committed to getting rid of these programs, it is very difficult to do. There are infinitely many ways to get around whatever these rooms try to do to stop bots, and as with all other technological competition, it would become nothing more than an arms race if they ever got serious about it. See the music industry vs. online file sharers, virus writers vs. anti-virus companies, and software companies vs. pirates for examples of the above mentioned dynamic.

These points lead us to the inevitable conclusion that any serious attempts to get rid of bots are a complete waste of time, particularly since the people whose help you need (i.e. the online poker rooms) are really not at all interested in helping you.

So, where does that leave us as players? As the only ones who are really getting hurt in this situation from the influx of more experienced players (bots), it makes sense to try to adapt your play to go where the bots are not. Change your strategy. Adapt. That is what separates you from a stupid machine, and until true AI exists, always will.

Let me draw an analogy from the stock market as an example of what to do:

7-10 years ago in the internet boom, the stock market was exploding. Stocks were jumping on high volume all the time, in highly predictable patterns (to those who knew what they were doing), and for daytraders making money was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel (no pun intended :-)). Any idiot could log on and pick a random stock, and make cash out of it. Many idiots did. Then the market crashed, and daytrading volume over a period of 3-4 years afterwards dried up like the Sahara desert. All of a sudden there was no more volume, which meant that stocks were trading much more choppy because it took much less money to move them. Into this environment we can add things like the narrowing of spreads and the advent of many automated trading programs, and daytrading on a short time frame became almost impossible for a human (especially because trades happen in real-time, unlike poker hands!). Many people who were able to scalp stocks and make thousands of dollars a day started losing money, because all the sheep (the stock market equivalent of fish) were gone. Now the wolves only had each other to eat, and only the strongest ones survived the daytrading/scalping scene. Even then, many had to adapt and change their tactics somewhat (reading NASDAQ level II was no longer as useful as it used to be, for example).

Some daytraders realized that the intraday noise was just too high to scalp stocks now, so they changed their strategies, lengthening the time frame of their holds, and started position trading (holding for hours/days) instead of daytrading (holding for seconds/minutes). Those that adapted can still make money (although it's not as good as it was). Those that didn't died.

This same thing is happening in poker rooms. As a human trader, you have to realize what is going on, and instead of fighting the inevitable tide, shift and go with it. That means playing where the bots are not playing, and playing during times where there are likely to be more fish.

Here are some suggestions:

(1) I was logged on to a poker room this afternoon, and noticed that the play during the middle of the day was extremely tight, but got progressively looser between 5 and 7 PM across the 3 tables I was playing (low-limit hold-em). That probably corresponds to normal people somewhere getting off of work and logging on to their machines to play a couple of hours. Expert players and bots are going to be more prevalent during off-peak hours, right? So there's one thing you can do - try to maximize your playing time for when the fish are swimming more.

(2) Try different sites. The larger sites are going to be infested with bots, if you think about it... there are more people playing there, therefore if you write a successful program you can run more copies of it and make more money. Also, who wants to waste time and effort writing a custom program that only works on a small site with fewer players? So as an individual, try to find those smaller sites that are less bot-infested.

(3) Play only no-limit games. Those are infinitely harder to program appropriately, and a bot is 10 times easier to spot on there. This is analogous to realizing that limit games may be the poker equivalent of scalping stocks - it's a game/technique that used to make you money, but may not any more. Adapt.

(4) Once you detect a bot on a no-limit game, mark it down and instead of reporting it to the authorities (a waste of time, IMHO), try to figure out its strategy. It's just a computer program following a set of rules. Once you know that and analyze it, you should be able to either beat it or at least avoid getting hurt by it yourself. If there are too many of them, leave the room. (Just like if there are too many good players, leave.)

As a final note, I would like to add my opinion on the morality of using bots:

From the perspective of a single bot playing online and not colluding secretly with other bot programs, I have no problem with it in principle. A bot program is essentially going to be nothing more than a set of rules devised by a good player, minus that player's ability to adapt and bluff based the subtle analysis of other players (which is a serious weakness). In other words, you don't need to worry about them any more than any other good player, perhaps less so. They may proliferate and make limit games harder to win at (in fact I would contend that has already happened on some sites), but then fish don't win anywhere so it's not really hurting them, and as a wolf who hunts sheep you really shouldn't start complaining about how other wolves are hurting you. I see nothing morally wrong with a bot that plays on its own, and in fact many poker rooms even have deals with companies that produce software which can give you simple call/raise/fold suggestions. There is no difference between a human player playing with that software and following it's advice and a bot doing the same thing, and those are most certainly legal at a number of rooms.

From the perspective of a bot secretly collaborating with other bots on the same table, this is HIGHLY immoral, in my opinion. That is circumventing the rules and spirit of the game, and is flat-out cheating. It is no different than co-ordinating secret hand signals with another player at the same physical table. The gentleman who stated that you can't tell for sure that other people aren't doing this, and that therefore you should be allowed to do it, is using flawed logic at best. I can't prove that my neighbour isn't stealing from me, but that doesn't give me the moral right to steal from him. I can't prove that the player across from me at the table isn't giving secret signals to some partner of his at the same table, but that doesn't give me the moral right to engage in the activity myself. If not having a 100% guarantee that someone else isn't cheating bothers you, then don't play the game. Walk away and do something else - but don't think that cheating is justified just because you can't prove that others aren't doing it.

Anyways, that's my opinion, for the $0.02 blind that it's worth. :-)