[Brewmeister B]

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Hey Sniper, I consider myself an expert in certain fields, but computer assisted poker is not one of them.

I appreciate your reply, but quite honestly I, and I suspect many other non-experts, want to know if the "hypothetical scenario" with your improvements is reasonable? Or possible? Or even most or least likely?

It seems some still insist it must have been bots ... So I want someone to address my guess as to the truth specifcally. It is, essentially, my "reasonable doubt" in this situation.

Skallagrim

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I believe your scenario is very likely given the facts:

-Long time to make trivial actions - a bot would most likely take less time to act unless specifically programmed to "think" for a while.

-The players never improved their strategy over time - nlnut admitted that they didn't want to change their system as it was making them enough money as is. Sounds like BS since if they are making some money with this system with known flaws, then more money by improving it would be better. That is unless they have a simple system programmed into a script and modifying it to increase the win rate would cause too much complexity or they do not have the technical knowhow to program more than just a basic system.

-The win rate is fairly low - some people have argued that NL is too complex to program because of the almost infinite possiblities of situations. This is true if they wanted to win big, but if they are willing to live with a low win rate, programming a tight playing system that generalizes many similar post flop situations will do exactly that. It will clobber the fish and get exploited by the sharks that figure it out, providing a small +EV.

-Low variance in pre AND post flop stats - some have argued that this is a case of bots preflop with human interaction post flop, again because NL is too complex to program. If this were the case, then the postflop play would have much more variance than the preflop play.