Bots in PartyPoker's 6-max Limit games?

[JackStrap]

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Problem is, that the poker room would not be able to buy the private BOT that is capable of winning at mid/high limits...they are not for sale!

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The sites don't need to know the poker logic that the bot uses. They need to know how the bot interfaces with the site.

Of course you don't need to purchase the product. A smart IT person should know all possible methods of interfacing and detection alluding that a bot is capable of.

Devising acceptable and effective methods for detection is the problem.

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Online site can't do much about the screen scrapping issues. Bot only need a screenshot and can have the complete game states, after they only move the mouse to buttons (i know algorithm that can emulate human mouvement very well). They can put the bot code on a remote cpu and use remote control to get screenshot and mouse control. Site can't do much about that!!

The Turning Test can help a little but i dont think it's really help keep online poker safe. You can just put a observator with no domain knowledge who assists bots and solve turning test when it's happen

But the real problem will be when AI will be world-class, we shoud expect that in 10 years

[NoMeansYes_]

If I had a winning bot and it became under threat from more common knowledge about bots I would be reading this thread to learn how to be more undetectable. Those posts saying "65 accounts locked" are also just poking fun.

[Arnfinn Madsen]

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If I had a winning bot and it became under threat from more common knowledge about bots I would be reading this thread to learn how to be more undetectable. Those posts saying "65 accounts locked" are also just poking fun.

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There are much better detection methods available than posted in this thread, so don't worry about that part. If the sites want to crack down on it they still have the opportunity, even to stop those who have read this thread.

[BiPolar_Nut]

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Online site can't do much about the screen scrapping issues.

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Absolutely incorrect. Browsing that other forum a week or so ago, everyone's Star's bots broke because PS dropped their cards down 4 pixels on the tables. From what I understand, if a bot can't scrape it's hole cards, it sits out. Randomly repositioning cards once every <x> hands will create massive scraping headaches.

Ranges of pixels can be analyzed for pattern matching (like AHK's built-in capability) but this adds a lot of CPU overhead if every single item scraped can be repositioned randomly at random intervals. Apparently, some bots require a lot of processing power to get through all their formulas, PT calls, player betting pattern analysis, etc. Having to search ranges +/- 10 pixels in any direction will significantly increase CPU power needed.

Furthermore, many bots apparently broke recently when a site went from ASCII to Unicode text in the chat window. Better yet for the sites would be to use graphic fonts for player actions to render trailing the text window useless.

There is much that can be done to thwart scraping. It's a cat-n-mouse game, and currently there are many many effective techniques sites haven't used yet to break the scrapers.

On the downside, anti-scraping will also break the "odds calculators" that fish use. Those are allowable at most sites, and get more fish to think they "have an edge" cause they know their odds/outs/draws/nut identification.

[JackStrap]

Hi Bipo, welcome to the 21th century

I must confess, I already coded a scraper for testing some of my algorithms over stars playmoney site a while ago, i never used craps or such scraper who is poorly coded and for cheaters not researchers.

Scraping is very easy to do, i created a 100% Java solution, the thing is simple, create fast and solid OCR algorithms (i used the ones on the SAKAI paper) and then just create DB with all the font (card + dealer windows character + stack and name font). put some offset to check position or "range" and you're done.

for cards the thing is pretty simple and do not demand too much CPU power b/c you only need to do once.

The most effective way to do screen scraping is to use the Dealer WIndows with 100% of information, where you can find 95% of the game state

here a comment for site owner , The first thing you can do is to get RID of the Dealer windows!!!

[TheScientist]

I think I'll chime in here. I am a reformed bot maker who programmed a homegrown bot by screen scraping. (A 2BB+/100 winning bot, albeit only at .25/.50 Full Ring Limit.) It would certainly have been a headache if the card pixels were repositioned by a few pixels randomly every 50 hands or so. Problem is, it would only have been a small nuisance. For a programmer, that's not a difficult workaround, and definitely not the area of my program that was taking the most resources. (not even close). To really disable bots, changes to the client would have to be made unpredictably, and often.

[michaelantoi]

Reformed bot-maker: You must know plenty of people within this industry still currently using bots.

Mind sharing this information with the rest of 2p2?

[TheScientist]

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Reformed bot-maker: You must know plenty of people within this industry still currently using bots.

Mind sharing this information with the rest of 2p2?

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It was purely a solo effort that took about a years worth of free time. Much of my work was based off of the ideas utilized by the Poker AI people at the University of Alberta. My level of poker knowledge at that time was fairly basic and my knowledge of programming is pretty weak. (no formal training). I can tell you that I noticed at least 2 other accounts at the levels I played at that mustave been bots themselves. (not that anyone is worried about the bots in .25/.50 I guess.)

[michaelantoi]

I think people should be 'worried' about bots at every level. These bots/accounts may have moved up and become more advanced and now killing NL400+ for all we know.

Do you know if they still play?

[derosnec]

decided to sit at some stars 6max limit tables today (been months since ive played limit)

same thing as from before - at least 2 russians at every table, all with similar stats (very TAG), and none respond to chat (come on, surely russians know some english)

i find this suspicious, because there are never any russians at NL (which is what i usually play)

whatever. maybe im paranoid.