Is poker really doable? I was under the impression that amateurs were being driven out and even professionals were having difficulty dealing with poker bots and collusion.
I hear that everywhere too. It’s a selection effect: most of the population aren’t smart and rational enough to be long-term winning players and it’s these people you hear complaining, while the good players go on quietly winning.
It’s definitely true that the games are getting tougher every year, because the community is learning to play better, so the threshold of ability you need to be a winning player is constantly increasing. But it’s not that high yet.
Now let’s talk about your two bugbears, bots and collusion.
1. Bots
You never ever have to worry about bots. The goal in poker is to seek out and play against bad players, while tolerating the presence of good players. It’s completely irrelevant whether these players are controlled by humans, machines, or some combination. (In practice, except possibly for heads-up limit hold’em, good players are still better than the best bots published in the academic literature anyway.)
2. Collusion
This is something you have to worry about, but in practice it’s not that big a deal, especially if you play at low limits, where it’s not going to be worth the bother for competent players to collude. There have been only a handful of times when I’ve suspected collusion online, in which case, the obvious response was to stop playing against those players. Sometimes collusion can be detected statistically, but if some collusion does go undetected, as long as you’re winning, what does it matter?
(In practice, except possibly for heads-up limit hold’em, good players are still better than the best bots published in the academic literature anyway.)
This is an interesting observation, but probably not that surprising: if you had a superior poker bot that was consistently profitable, why on earth would you publish it?
Generalizing, if someone working at a bank or hedge fund developed a superior theory of economics, and that theory could be used to make money through trading, why would they tell anyone else about it? Once the knowledge became public, it would no longer be profitable.
This made me think of a sports gambling database and strategy set that I read about in an ESPN magazine at a barber shop. I don’t remember the specifics but I recall that the database was shared by invitation only and had an intentional “barrier to entry” level buy in, which seemed high to me. The article claimed the database was in use by only 9 professional gamblers. I’d like to see some performance data on their bets.
If someone wants to do it, I btw could offer useful advice, including almost-finished algorithms on how the bot could play profitably.
Haven’t done it myself, but have looked into it. Stopped short of doing the boring stuff of coding some stuff up (I don’t really do programming), and of course there’s also the ethical question of whether I want to screw over pokersites. But it certainly can be done, and I think I’ve already done the parts that could be hard (mostly, coming up with a winning play style that is sufficiently algorithmic).
(BTW, even good bots currently don’t beat good or even mediocre players in most poker variations, but bots can make money playing against bad players, which are abundant.)
I think I’ve already done the parts that could be hard (mostly, coming up with a winning play style that is sufficiently algorithmic).
Have you checked with other people about what they think is hard? Why don’t you think it’s hard to evade detection, by the opponents, the resident software, and the server? (ETA: and were you looking into collusion? do you worry about the signature there?)
I have talked with people who are currently running bots. Most pokersites btw don’t actually really even bother much to detect bots, since driving them out isn’t in their interest unless human players start complaining.
I’m probably not going to publicly comment more than this on this topic.
Online poker has recently been getting tougher every year, but it’s not at all certain that this’ll continue.
There could actually be a significant softening period coming up. Especially because the U.S. is moving towards dropping certain legislation, leading to a renewed explosion of U.S. players. Asia could also see a poker boom in the near future.
In general, in recent years almost every bad thing that could conceivably happen to online poker has happened, and it still hasn’t actually been very bad, with the industry maintaining growth. It’s difficult for the amount of (non-difficult) difficulties to not drop.
There is some truth to the fact that online poker is getting tougher, but it is definitely exaggerated. I can assure you that it is still beatable and very profitable by competent players.
Also, don’t forget the option of playing live poker. With a little training and practice, I would bet that most readers of this blog (who aren’t prone to emotional instability, aka “tilt”) would easily dominate at least the low-stakes games.
Is poker really doable? I was under the impression that amateurs were being driven out and even professionals were having difficulty dealing with poker bots and collusion.
I hear that everywhere too. It’s a selection effect: most of the population aren’t smart and rational enough to be long-term winning players and it’s these people you hear complaining, while the good players go on quietly winning.
It’s definitely true that the games are getting tougher every year, because the community is learning to play better, so the threshold of ability you need to be a winning player is constantly increasing. But it’s not that high yet.
Now let’s talk about your two bugbears, bots and collusion.
1. Bots
You never ever have to worry about bots. The goal in poker is to seek out and play against bad players, while tolerating the presence of good players. It’s completely irrelevant whether these players are controlled by humans, machines, or some combination. (In practice, except possibly for heads-up limit hold’em, good players are still better than the best bots published in the academic literature anyway.)
2. Collusion
This is something you have to worry about, but in practice it’s not that big a deal, especially if you play at low limits, where it’s not going to be worth the bother for competent players to collude. There have been only a handful of times when I’ve suspected collusion online, in which case, the obvious response was to stop playing against those players. Sometimes collusion can be detected statistically, but if some collusion does go undetected, as long as you’re winning, what does it matter?
This is an interesting observation, but probably not that surprising: if you had a superior poker bot that was consistently profitable, why on earth would you publish it?
Generalizing, if someone working at a bank or hedge fund developed a superior theory of economics, and that theory could be used to make money through trading, why would they tell anyone else about it? Once the knowledge became public, it would no longer be profitable.
This is the evil corollary of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (that all publicly available information is instantly incorporated into market prices).
This made me think of a sports gambling database and strategy set that I read about in an ESPN magazine at a barber shop. I don’t remember the specifics but I recall that the database was shared by invitation only and had an intentional “barrier to entry” level buy in, which seemed high to me. The article claimed the database was in use by only 9 professional gamblers. I’d like to see some performance data on their bets.
Isn’t the obvious strategy then to create a set of colluding bots, and try to avoid detection?
Go ahead! But it’s hard.
If someone wants to do it, I btw could offer useful advice, including almost-finished algorithms on how the bot could play profitably.
Haven’t done it myself, but have looked into it. Stopped short of doing the boring stuff of coding some stuff up (I don’t really do programming), and of course there’s also the ethical question of whether I want to screw over pokersites. But it certainly can be done, and I think I’ve already done the parts that could be hard (mostly, coming up with a winning play style that is sufficiently algorithmic).
(BTW, even good bots currently don’t beat good or even mediocre players in most poker variations, but bots can make money playing against bad players, which are abundant.)
Have you checked with other people about what they think is hard?
Why don’t you think it’s hard to evade detection, by the opponents, the resident software, and the server? (ETA: and were you looking into collusion? do you worry about the signature there?)
I have talked with people who are currently running bots. Most pokersites btw don’t actually really even bother much to detect bots, since driving them out isn’t in their interest unless human players start complaining.
I’m probably not going to publicly comment more than this on this topic.
Online poker has recently been getting tougher every year, but it’s not at all certain that this’ll continue.
There could actually be a significant softening period coming up. Especially because the U.S. is moving towards dropping certain legislation, leading to a renewed explosion of U.S. players. Asia could also see a poker boom in the near future.
In general, in recent years almost every bad thing that could conceivably happen to online poker has happened, and it still hasn’t actually been very bad, with the industry maintaining growth. It’s difficult for the amount of (non-difficult) difficulties to not drop.
There is some truth to the fact that online poker is getting tougher, but it is definitely exaggerated. I can assure you that it is still beatable and very profitable by competent players.
Also, don’t forget the option of playing live poker. With a little training and practice, I would bet that most readers of this blog (who aren’t prone to emotional instability, aka “tilt”) would easily dominate at least the low-stakes games.