I'll say this!: The bad side to all of this is, some AntiGamblers, believe they won't have to do much more cause, Sites, BOTS, and Cheater will close it down for them, be a sad day when I can't play online.
Looks like we made the news lol.
London Sunday Times Examines Online Poker Bots
By Earl Burton, Posted on March 04, 2009,
One thing that consistently beleaguers online poker players is the possibility that they could be taking on opponents that aren't human. These poker "bots" - which are for sale in many outlets on the internet - have reported varying degrees of success, but they are still blamed by players when they have a bad session. In a story that appeared in the London Times on Sunday, the newspaper examines the world of online poker bots.
According to the story in the Sunday Times, these bots can earn players who employ them over £50,000 per year, making them attractive for those who look to maximize their win rates. Although there are rules in many online sites' Terms and Conditions banning them, the story suggests that online poker rooms have little that they can employ in the way of defending themselves and their customers against them. For some in England, the bots seem to be the way for players to take advantage of the system.
In the story, a player is quoted as posting in the online forum Cardschat, "I use software that plays poker for me in six different rooms and I'm raking in the dough. Do you think that's evil or genius? The software does lose, but I've never seen any playing like it. Bottom line: not only does it work, but I'm entertained watching it."
While these programs exist, there are conflicting reports on how well they do in a full table surrounding. Where computerized players have done well in the past is heads-up. Because there is only one opponent to battle - versus the full table complement of nine or ten players - the computerized programs only have to figure out the
odds for that one opponent; once it gets beyond that, the programs have difficulties, as admitted by one of the foremost programmers who has been working on creating a poker playing robot.
In 2005, the first robot poker player took on professional player Phil "The Unabomber" Laak, with Laak able to defeat the robot within three hours. Then, the University of Alberta developed a robot called "Polaris" which proved to be a tremendous challenge, even for the top professionals in the world. In 2007, Laak and fellow pro Ali Eslami were barely able to edge out Polaris after several hundred hands of play.
The 2008 Man-Machine Poker Championship, which took place in July at the
world series of poker, featured an updated version of Polaris. The University of Alberta pitted the computer against three online professionals from Nick "Stoxtrader" Grudzien's website, with Polaris able to come away from the tables with the win over all three. While this is a significant achievement, it has to be noted that, in all of these situations, it was a heads-up match and not a full table, which even University developers said would create still insurmountable difficulties for a robot.
poker news Daily asked PokerStars security expert Michael Josem, who was featured on CBS News' "60 Minutes," for his reaction to the London Times article:
Poker News Daily: How
online poker sites have combated the use of bots?
Josem: PokerStars has a wide variety of measures that we use to combat bots. We cannot reveal the specifics of our detection methods because we do not want to educate users in how to evade them.
However, the proof of PokerStars’ effectiveness in stopping bots is in the reaction of many bot developers: Bot authors generally advise their purchasers to avoid using their programs at PokerStars because the risk of being caught on our site is so great.
One of the key deterrents is the ability of the sites to confiscate the funds when it’s proven that a user was employing bots, which combined with extensive detection methods and highly skillful game security team makes it extremely difficult for bot users to be profitable.
PND: Is this really a widespread problem?
Josem: Currently on PokerStars, it is not a widespread problem. It has the potential to be a problem if poker sites are not committed to detecting and catching bots. It is one challenge for a player to design a winning bot, even at the lowest limit games. It is altogether a harder challenge to design a bot that will evade a diligent poker site’s detection technology.
PND: What reaction do you have to the column?
Josem: The article contains some minor inaccuracies or misleading details. Among these is the concept of “thinking 20 moves ahead." It's more applicable to chess, a game of complete information, but not to poker, which is a game of incomplete information. Also, the University of Alberta bot Polaris did not beat a human opponent every time. It broke even and played only heads-up matches, which are significantly easier to program.
The article was written from a general industry perspective rather than about a specific site or sites. We at PokerStars cannot speculate on the effectiveness of any other site’s bot mitigation efforts, so we cannot say whether or not the article is true for the online poker industry as a whole. We believe the article does not represent the state of the games on PokerStars due to our dedication to bot eradication.
well i can't remember now if when i registered w/ FT if i had to recognize a code or not it's been awhile.