Bots in PartyPoker's 6-max Limit games?

[matrix]

[ QUOTE ]
The term "my friends" has a similar meaning where I live. That's not why it's highlighted. I don't think he actually has friends at neteller.

Assuming he's telling the truth, I can't see any way to create 14 accounts, given neteller's supposedly strict ID verification system and phone confirmation of identity. I'm wondering if there's a security hole/lack of account checks here that neteller needs to work on.

[/ QUOTE ]

there are security holes in everything.

A determined person can open 100 Party/NT a/c if they so choose although it's probably quite difficult to actually do.

I suspect fixing this security hole on NT part would involve making obtaining NT a/c's for an ordinary honest person quite a long and drawn out process.

as far as forwarding all the relevant posts to Party from the cheaters website you might as well just send them links to the entire board.

I would hope that for a bot platform thats so widely known and used that Poker sites already have people on staff to monitor sites like this - you'd also hope that they have some way of getting into the private areas of said site (maybe an undercover staff member or something like that) to keep more up to date with what these cheaters are doing.

It does seem from reading lots of the cheaters website over the past few days that there are a hardcore of users (maybe as many as 40 or so) that run teams of winning bots that make mediocre amounts (in the region of 2PTBB/100) a good few hundred other users who have losing bots, and perhaps several people that have now developed very good bots.

Also from thepokerforum thread that I linked to earlier...

When a client changes their interface (table) ot normally breaks some part of a bots scrape, which then has to be re-programmed.


A few months back UB somehow changed the graphic presented when there was no small blind posted for a hand.

Every time this occurred the ******** bot would sleep as it couldnt understand what it saw.

While we were attempting to debug this we would be observing the bot playaing.

We could be at a 0.50/1.00 table and see the situation occur , next hand 5-6 players would be sitting out , this occured very time the small blind was not posted and across all tables and limits.

So yes i can back up what I say about the % of bots playing UB.


(this guy claims in that previous post that up to 50% of the players at low stakes Limit games on UB are bots of one sort or another - and the most popular/widely used bot is presently the bot that Ray is pushing on his site.)

anyone out there witnessed this happening?

anyone with an UB db that has hands where this happened??

if you do check the SN's of those "timing out" players with SN's of current players and you might well discover a good number of these cheating bot scum - I don't play UB or Limit or I'd have looked myself already.

it also suggests that to defeat most of the bots out there you just need to defeat the screenscrape technology on a regular basis (as this is what most likely happened with the recent Party update and change in table layout) this might well be harder to do in practice tho.

[Arnfinn Madsen]

Re: Screenscraping: As discussed here before, if the sites put effort into stopping this they would manage. It is the same as for many of the other "holes" they use, if the sites would hire some good programmers and security experts they would stop them. Of course then the best botters would develop work arounds and the fight would toughen, but that i.e. Party keep losing the first rounds when it is at kindergarden level which they should be winning deceisively is disappointing. There is no valid excuse for that.

[Phil153]

matrix - I agree.

I'd add that you need to be fairly intelligent and do a lot of tedious work to build a winning bot, and it's even more difficult to make it undetectable and play enough accounts to make it worthwhile. The time and money EV of building a winning bot for someone with the skill to do so is probably less than they could get from playing the game straight up, especially given the presence of higher stakes games. For the few that are winners, no one seems to be willing to sell it either.

After going through the evidence, Ray is definitely wrong about bots taking over online poker. At least for the next few years. As long as players like the OP keep their eyes open, and demand strong anti-bot measures and penalties from the sites, the ratio of humans to bots will stay very high. Which is probably the best we can hope for.

-----

Arnfinn - sites can definitely make it a very difficult, time consuming, pain in the butt process to run a bot. It looks like Party Poker are taking a step in that direction (they've always been way ahead on this issue anyway), but it's not that well implemented. I wish other sites would step up as well and take a lead on this issue. The one that does will get a large share of my business and a good name.

[Arnfinn Madsen]

Yes, I agree Phil, but hopefully the sites will start to make the security measures better so that the cost of surpassing them (many botters will need to hire people to do this) will contribute to reducing the profitability. If they make it hard enough to cheat, the people knowledgable enough to be able to cheat will simply not do it since those people can make tons of money in legit it-business anyway.

EDIT: Saw your edit after writing. We agree, not possible to stop every bot, if some guru decides to make one he will be able so they can never be totally stopped but the problem can be kept in check.

[roblin]

i disagree. a bot-owner with 50bots making 1.4BB/100hands at 10/20+ still makes many times more than most limit pros.

the sites need to hire someone who can write bot-detection algorithms which constantly is only 1step behind the botters so they can confiscate funds faster than the bots earn them.

[Arnfinn Madsen]

To write a bot that beats 10/20 by 1.4BB/100 with today's bot writing methods you have to be much better than beating 10/20 at 1.4BB/100, I would think that the input would have to come from a 1-2BB/100-winner at 30/60 and he would have to spend hundreds of hours in the development process, bots' decision processes are still only a bad copy of human rationale (this will change when AI improves of course).

[matrix]

[ QUOTE ]
i disagree. a bot-owner with 50bots making 1.4BB/100hands at 10/20+ still makes many times more than most limit pros.

[/ QUOTE ]

in order to run 50 bots you basically need 50 accounts at the poker site you are running them on - plus some way of getting funds out of the site - and usually a box to run each bot on (you can't just fire up your bot s/w 50 times on one box - things like IP and MAC addresses need to get sorted for each one)


You are correct in that for someone who goes to all this trouble then yes they stand to make bank. mostly as the bots can play 24/7.

I read recently that some guy who runs half a dozen bots from a warehouse somewhere is making $50K a year.

Would players complain if a site limited each player to a max of x hours playing time a day? - once your x hours are up then you get kicked off any cash tables and aren't permitted to open new tournaments - to get your playing time limit lifted you would need to go through a pretty hefty ID process and interview.

[Sciolist]

[ QUOTE ]
Would players complain if a site limited each player to a max of x hours playing time a day? - once your x hours are up then you get kicked off any cash tables and aren't permitted to open new tournaments - to get your playing time limit lifted you would need to go through a pretty hefty ID process and interview.

[/ QUOTE ]
That would annoy me. Greatly.

It's also trivial to get around - run a bot for 8 hours, log it off, log in another, round we go.

[DING-DONG YO]

[ QUOTE ]
I read recently that some guy who runs half a dozen bots from a warehouse somewhere is making $50K a year.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL, I make that much playing 5/10 LHE for 1.5 hours each night SINGLE-tabling and I don't have the overhead of multiple machines and warehouse expenses.

If that's the best the botters can do, we have nothing to worry about.

[Dennisa]

How hard would it be to create 14 different Bank accounts and use IGM pay for funding, withdrawing? Not to mention, they still accept firepay, moneybookers, western union and many other methods of account funding.