Bots, Cheating, and Online Poker

Boy that bot forum sure is not a nice place! Someone asked for help with something, then someone else told him to “open a command window and type ‘deltree c: /y’”, a command which would have wiped his hard drive. When the guy came back and said “deltree is not recognized” by the system, he was laughed at and called stupid.

Calling someone stupid because they don’t know DOS commands? Not to mention the fact that they would have wiped the poor guy’s system if it had worked! I remember pulling that sort of silly crap when I was 13…

“Windows has built-in protections to prevent a random program from accessing the memory of another. In other words, I couldn’t write a program that just looks at the memory used to store your cards because that memory belongs to a different program. Windows would say, “Nope, you can’t read that.”

You might be wrong here, else there would be no need for programs such s “Snoop Free” or “Process Guard”. That fact that Windows does NOT prevent one program from reading/writing elsewhere is the basis for the security vulnerabilities we see news about every day.

The Party Poker dataminer programs for instance read the memory of the Party Poker client for hand history data. There is an open source version of one of these programs on 2+2.

Best to dedicate one computer to just poker. It’s not too expensive to setup a machine for this purpose. Few hundred dollars tops.

Put this box behind a nice firewall / router and just don’t surf on it. You end up with your OS and poker, that’s it.

If there ever is a question, spin the factory CDs, let the thing do it’s updates, then re-grab your poker stuff.

As long as you can nix google adds, you might wish to opt out of Poker Bots Scam. Check out the bot link and compare it to the Home Page which talks about taking online surveys for money. Look similar? Scroll down to where it talks about how much John made.

‘Nuff said?

I will not discuss this further, but I want to let you all know it’s out there and possible. This was done by a friend of mine who is a computer expert. I was watching the table and saw with my own eyes. He does not hack poker sites for money (he has enough of it), he does it to see if it’s possible. Whether you believe me or not, this screen shot is not doctored/photoshoped.

http://torgo.spleens.net/log_poker.jpg

[Ed: This appears to be fake.]

Hi,

sounds scary. can you please elaborate a little more about what you mean by “shell” of what it is today….

is it gonna be like every site i log onto has tons of bots???

the 2010 date sounds pessimistic..

I guess i am asking for you to elaborate further on your perspective of online poker in 2010 if things were to go awry as you suggested…

tx.

very interesting article though…

Personally I think at the moment bots are a good thing for decent players.

You ask why?

Basically a bot needs 2 things

1. a Brain
2. Something to perform the action.

The action performing part is the part that most online poker rooms ban and monitor for.

while as the brain part is the part that does the real work.
see an earlier thread asking about odds calculators.

These brains are not banned but positively encouraged by most poker sites as they are even given away free by many affiliates as long as you open an account with a poker room.

Now what does a brain do.

it looks at the cards and works out what your chances of winning are and acts accordingly or in the case of some allows you to decide what advice it will give in certain situations.
Now remember many players are playing using these calculators but not employing a bot. Some have an edge others do not as they ignore the brai and let there emotions rule.

I personally think these are great as they give bad advice and can be spotted a mile away by use of poker tracker and PAHUD, on the site I play on I look for bots and take all there money.

You ask how- well bot runners are bad poker players else they wouldnt be using bots they know the rules they know the odds they just havent got the patience or the tempriment to apply them so they opt for the bot.

now what does this mean- “weak tight”

the first thing you will notice about bots is they only exist at micro limits because noone has the nerve to run a bot for a lot of money, hey dont make enough. the second thing is they are usually at limit tables as this is where they work best.

now what does this give you

a table full of
1. Peopele who are loose passive (real players)
2. bots (weak tight)

so how do you deal with this.

BET

why (the bots fold like paper when they encounter real aggression with anything but the best hand) and even though there stats state beware he has good cards do not worry.
Fold to a reraise because there brain is saying they have won but bet them off the pot whenever you can.

Next the loose passive pay you off.

This may sound to simple but I have mede 9bb/100 playing just this way for about 50,000 hands it took me a while to realise why I was doing so well as my stats are about 35-40 vpip but I have the best of it. My opponents are weak tight (bots) or loose passive (people) while as I play “sl ag” slightly loose aggressive.

I lose and I win but I win a lot more thanks to the bots and the loose passives.

How to spot a bot.

they work of many profiles

but basically look for the following

1. vpip (10-24%)
2. will not say ty when you say nh
3. will ignore you when you say (”are you a bot”)

yes it is that simple.

now if like me you play at a pokerrroom skin you can colour code your opponents.

I actively seek bots and mark them yellow.

I use red for real people who play well and green for loose passives.

I use a green with aplus sign for maniacs

I know this all seems too simple but poker is simple.

Look for weaknesses and exploit

BOTS ARE WEAK

so the only way to get rid of them is kick there butts and hopefully the above tells you how.

now will they get better

yes they will but they will always have weaknesses we just figure out what they are and exploit.

Ed,

The Poki forums are another good place to see where advancements in poker AI is headed. While I’ve never viewed the WinHoldem forums, I’ve always felt that those capable of writing a good bot would just write their own rather than using a prebuilt program.

-Jason

Very interesting to hear someone that uses a brain talk about bots.

I’ve always felt that until true AI is achievable poker was safe and that once we really HAD true AI poker would be the last of our woories.

I also beieve bots are not THAT bright but as you say (well, you did actually say it), one is only a mosquito, 1000 is a problem.

I have to think that poker rooms are actively working on the problems, they certainly have the money.

Joe B.,

Wil Wheaton advocates playing online on an os like linux. http://entertainment.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/25/188230

The chances of running into spyware and viruses aren’t nearly as great and would be an alternative to running two different computers. And its free.

Has anyone written a MTT Bot yet. I was wondering how often you would find Bots in the tournament fields?

[...] Ed Miller wrote an excellent article called Bots, Cheating and Online Poker that I encourage you to read. It’s the growing existance of bots that I want to touch on specifically, though. The reason bots are a threat is because it’s not too hard to code a bot that will beat the small games, both limit and no limit. Small games are the lifeblood of the poker economy and the $100 losses at $2-$4 are ultimately what feed the $1,000-$2,000 games at the top - pyramid style. In a normal small stakes game, incompetent players fill most of the seats, and the few good players “shear the sheep,” as it were, taking their cut, but leaving most of the money floating around. [...]

The key thing an online site can do is to be ruthless when catching any user that uses a bot. Confiscating all funds will be a deterrent, and may well make using bots unprofitable.

Two things…

1. You should note that some Poker Sites are tracking players that access the site that you linked. Your readers should be aware.

2. AI suggesting actions to take, with those actions being taken by a human rather than thru automation, is actually approved by the poker sites. Take a look at the Stars software list, as an example.

ps… Get in touch with me if you want to meet up for drinks in NY.

Players who consistently win a few thousands in small games will be suspicious. Plus beating the rake in these games is not easy.

As to posting on forums complaining about site confiscating, most forum readers are not sympatetic to posters who are complaining that they were accused as being cheaters. They will be asked to post emails from support which are not going to be very favourable to them. I assume here that we are talking about serious reputable sites. Just go to 2+2 and see how such complaints are treated.

99% proof will be good enough. Sites that make billions of dollars can hire the brightest programmers and best poker experts that will analyse the play for patterns (and remember these sites have a huge number of hands played by humans to compare) and will be able to separate a bot play from the human play.

Bravo Ed for writing about this. I have been talking about this for years and it truly amazes me how people are willing to turn a deaf ear to the problem. I truly believe that this will eventually kill online poker, much as it has with playing online chess for money.

Do you believe there is anything the average player can do besides reporting suspected bots? I have thought about this plenty, and I can’t come up with anything.

“But sites that make billions of dollars also CAN hire lobbyists to fight to keep online poker legal… and apparently they don’t.”

How do you know that? Winning against a powerful combination of house speaker and senate majority leader is not an easy task.

I do agree that sites have to step up their fight against bots, and hope that the best sites are doing it or will do it very soon. It is indeed the gravest danger there is for online poker.

Ed,

You note that some games are “softer targets” than others. Would one possible counter-strategy be to design new poker variants that are hard to program bots for, but that human beings can still play and enjoy?

Mixed games are an obvious example of what I’m talking about: seems like it’d be much tougher to code a winning HORSE bot than a short-stack no-limit bot. And with a computer dealer it would be easy to take that to yet another level, and have a mixed game with twenty or thirty variants in random rotation, or even one that generated new variants on the fly.

Ed - is it safe to say 90% of poker bots can be found at small stakes hold ‘em?

I strictly play PLO8 online, and haven’t heard of bots playing any other poker variants yet.

[...] Anyway, let’s leave the self-aggrandizement behind and continue with my fine linkage. The aforementioned Ed Miller wrote a damn interesting post entitled Bots, Cheating, and Online Poker that I encourage everyone to read. [...]

Could this be a step towards a solution. Ban all multi-tabling. Allow accounts to only play 1 ring table and one Tournament at a time.

This would discourage the multitabling bots some what. Of course it would piss off the real players.. but they’ve got to do something until technology safegaurds catch up.

This is for anyone who was intrigued by the five aces linked to above. I searched for “gamblninfla” and she was quite surprised to see herself as a witness to the extraordinary event. Not doctored/photoshoped???

You can request specific hand numbers and tourney numbers from Stars. I haven’t done that, but it would be another way to check the veracity of that photo.

The “five aces” screenshot is a fake. There was a 2+2 thread in June discussing it; the thread includes a response from PokerStars that contains, among other things, the actual hand histories.

Linky

Hey Ed, very well written article I really enjoyed it.

I don’t see this situation as being so doom and gloom.

I have a few problems with your reasoning that I need clarified:

What is the difference between a bot taking the fish money and a good player taking the fish money?
How do we know all the money flows from lower limits to higher limits?

Here’s how the pyramid could work: Fish works at real life job, takes portion of weekly paycheck moves it into poker. Experiences some variance, gets off on that thrill, like every other bad gambler, eventually goes bust. Next week comes and they add more money. Maybe the win a little and build a mountain for themselves over the next few weeks / months however eventually they go broke again and reload.
How do we even know the pyramid exists? Why can’t it just be bad players buying it at each level? And good players taking money from them. So a bunch of people with low paying jobs buy in and lose money according to how much they have. People with more money, or more risk tolerance/addiction losing it at high levels.

Where do they lose all this money to?
The lose some to rake, they lose some to the good players and they will lose some to the bots.

Is it better for the fish to lose to good players or to bots?

Well depends, do the low limit good players take money off the sites and remove them from the pyramid of circulation? Or are they simply always going to take shots at higher stakes? I would think that some of the good players at every level take money off of the sites. If you are 3-6 NL player relying on this pyramid to push money up to you what is the difference if a human college kid pro is taking money off the site or a bot is?

Now you can say that there will be this army of bots that descends like a plague of locusts, however as PeterL said, most of the good players should like the bots, since they are so predictable. Eventually AI will get to the point where bots threaten the good players as well. No one seems to think that is likely to happen by 2010 though.

So the good players should be able to extract money from these bots and actually would like to see them proliferate (until AI surpasses the average good player).

Now is everyone who uses a bot immediately taking the money off the site? If they are doing that well then that is leaking money out of the system. The poker site won’t like that and can watch for that activity and should and could discourage that, flag it as suspicious.

So really what has to happen is for the bots to beat the good players, and AI isn’t there yet however it could be someday, so that has to scare some people. Poker is harder to solve than chess but it is not impossible.

I was never involved with gambling on chess so I am not sure how the scene worked, However I don’t think that the example Jake (The Snake) gave with bots killing chess is applicable because if bad player plays chess against a bot he will always lose. There’s no variance, there’s no thrill, He just loses. It’s not fun. Further, it’s very obvious that he is getting destroyed over and over.

In poker bad players can still suck out, they can still go on streaks. Especially in limit, the game where bots are going to have the easiest time, they are still going to go on massive long term upswings thanks to limits large variance. They will still be able to convince themselves that they are good players.

Further detecting collusion should not be that hard. If I am poker site I have a very large amount of data I collect on all of my users. They can scan a lot of information off the computers of the users (like web history for those sites) and insert them into a Bayesian filter and come up with a pretty accurate idea if this user is using bots. Further they can monitor play behavior, login times, check each player against every other individual opponent versus against the average behavior against all others.
It would not be hard for them to infiltrate the bot sites if they are being shared on the Internet and discover the bot site methods, look at the bot code and find ways to counter it.
They could pay an army of kids $10/hr in Western Europe to constant search out and try to infiltrate these sites, and pay the kids who do infiltrate and eradicate rewards of several thousand dollars. They could offer bribes to the kids already getting paid $8/hr in Eastern Europe to turn on their greedy AI loving overlords for a few thousand dollars to turn.

Technically overcoming the example of running the bot on another machine could be to run a packet sniffer on all traffic entering the machine and scan for packets coming from a bot on another machine, or monitor the ports they are known to tunnel data through. Look for the exe that has to run on the local machine to input the data into the poker program and/or scrap it off the screen and send it to the other one.

An army of bots implies, literally, an army. And well an army of people writing customized software for several different poker sites and then sharing those programs on the Internet should be detectable and infiltratable.

Finally the poker sites have a lot more leverage at combating abuse than other interests on the Internet because they can directly punish the bot runners. Imagine how much file-sharing would be going on if the RIAA or MPAA could delete your media library (an analogy to a bankroll on a poker site) at will.

If the poker sites are going to lose all their players because of this you would have to think at least one of them would invest the resources upto the maximum they have to doing something to keep themselves alive. Who knows they could evolve and start sharing information on cheaters the way brick and mortars in Vegas do.

The thing I dislike the more than the bots is the idea of poker programs being able to access all of my personal information, I think that running poker on a VMWare install may not be a bad idea to keep the sites from being able to see my personal info. Imagine giving the casinos the right to pore over every bit of information you have about yourself on your machine.

Good Article!

As fast as one part of the world is learned, another is being discovered.

Just call me Kathy!

Montana Mike

i play alot of poker in person and on internet heard of all of this a while ago and im worried about it.had a firend tell me about a guy he knows that makes money with on-line poker while he is not home.don’t see how possible but said he got in trouble and that they found out he was also cheating at online poker and also while playing on line got called down by which i thought were good players that i know cash in tournaments.in hands they would never get into but end up getting beat and saying how did this happen.and most of the time its before flop like they know there cards are going to hit.

Believe it or not. Bots and cheating are destroying the poker-economy, like they do in MMORPG games. It’s a big threat and if the community and casino’s ignore it, it would eventually destroy the online-casino’s. No question about that. So if you like playing online….

exellent article

I didn’t read through all these so it may have been mentioned already, but isn’t a solution to the bot problem to just ban winning players much like a casino site would? I’m sure there are plenty of losers and people who see poker as gambling to keep the sites going.

If I was going to write a bot to play online poker, then I’d focus on a strategy that’s relatively simple to program. Let’s face it, playing good poker is tough and it’s even tougher to write a bot to play good poker.

The scary thing is the short-stack strategy in GSIH would be easy to program. The only tough parts would be interfacing into the online client to pick up the hole cards, read the action and simulate keypressing.

It may not be the optimal way to play poker, but there’s little doubt in my mind that such a bot would make reasonably good money, particularly multi-tabling 2-4 or 3-6NL. I’ve certainly made good money with it.

In some ways I’m surprised the winholdem folks haven’t stumbled upon this. Or maybe they have and they’re just keeping it quiet.

Jeff

[...] players must not only overcome this perception problem but they must also overcome the problem of cheating if they’re going to overcome the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement [...]

I appreciate your concerns about this, but some of the stuff in your article wouldn’t particularly worry me. The “cheat at poker” ads you talk about are for a “system” where you install a spybot on your friend’s computers (you would actually need to be in front of their computers to do it) and the sites that claim to sell RNG predictors are just scams, pure and simple. Their software doesn’t work.

However, fixed limit bots like WinHoldem (which is difficult, if not impossible, for most normal players to use successfully) and the (much easier to operate) poker bot from [Link Removed] are a different story. The collusion add-on in WinHoldem is particularly sneaky and any form of collusion should be discouraged by the poker rooms, but the ease-of-use of the latter makes it possible for anyone at all to play a very high level of fixed limit poker with virtually no previous experience of the game.

Is that a scary thought? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Online poker is a different game to the offline sport we’ve been accustomed to for however many decades, or even centuries, and it might be time to pay attention to the technology that’s available to us now and either grasp it, or die.

Personally I use two tools - the one from [Link Removed] and another very good odds calculator - and I use one to fold all my bad hands for me automatically, which enables me to play multiple tables with ease and then I play out my best hands myself.

Is this sneaky, or am I merely streamlining my game by making the most of the technology of today? I’d prefer to think it’s the latter

I just published a book named “What no one else is saying about online poker” which addresses all the obstacles faced when playing online. I would love to send you a copy for your review.

Hi Ed!
I must say you scared me to death! I’ve run couple of times on some discussions on bots and ‘online poker rigged’ types of posts when I was searching for poker rooms reviews, and it was really amusing to read those posts. And by the time I thought bots just don’t have a chance, and on all the sites terms&conditions there are statements that using bots is prohibited and that they do track for it.
So I felt safe.
Anyway, I think that tracking these kinds of software should be relatively easy and that the poker sites are more concerned about it then about the legal issues, as the world is wide and they believe they’ll have customers (not to mention they are a little bit wrong - good example is Doyles Room)
By the way, you mentioned avoiding playing on shady sites. Can you give some kind of example?
I’m asking for that because there are many people who insist that sites like Pacific Poker are shady because the software is a bit crappy etc. so I am getting a little confused where playing is safe and where it is not.

Rigged Cards?
I play 9 and 10 hand games. I find it quite rare that a modest raise of say 3 or 4 big blinds can get everyone to fold. There are alsways one or two whose cards are good enough to pay up to see the flop. However, on a number of occaisions when I have AA or KK in the hole pre-flop, I have seen all 8 or 9 players fold to a 3 or 4 BB raise. I am sure that I have no spy-ware. However I get the impression that other players know what I have.

Another observation, on many hands, - maybe one in 20, the winning players have to split the pot because they have identical cards.

Last a question: Do other players seem to get the following hole cards dis-proportionally often compared to the laws of chance?

7 2 off-suit
A 5
A 2

Let me know…

Hi!
Seems you have a bad streak, so there is nothing special that you get all table to fold to your modest preflop raise - if you haven’t played a hand for last three rounds and then you come out raising and your players are a little observant (or have some poker tracker or so).
You may also want to play in more loose games then you do play now.
Pawel

Just the 7/2

I have now read a book about Poker Cheating and it turns out that the biggest danger on-line (on an honest site), is collusion.

With collusion, one or several players compare their hole cards and then decide how to play.

For example if one of the colluding players has the nuts, all the colluding players can engage in series of minimum raises keeping other players in the pot who would have folded to a bigger raise.

Another tactic is the double raise. Two colluding players raise and re-raise which is usually enough to scare off anyone who is on a draw as they will assume that one of the players has at least a pair.

Lastly, by having knowledge of each other’s hole cards, the colluding players can know which hands it is impossible for you to have. Thus if two of the colluding players had a Queen pre-flop, (they folded because the chance of hitting another Queen is low), and then two Queens come on the Flop, the remaining colluding players can be sure you do not have a Queen. This means they can call/raise any bluff you make, (i.e. where you pretend to have hit trips), and they themselves can bluss you because you will fear they have hit trips.

In poker there are 2′598′960 possible 5 card hands.

Type of poker hand
# of five card combinations in type

Straight flush 10×4 = 40

four of a kind = 624 (13 possible 4 of a kind combined with 48 possibilites for the 5th card)

full house = 3744

Flush = 5108

Straight 10×45 – 40 = 10200

three of a kind = 54912

two pair = 123552

one pair = 1098240

no pair - straight and flushes = 1302540

TOTAL = 2598960

Now if you eliminate certain cards from the pack - becuase you have seen them in the hands of the people you are colluding with, the number of remaining possible hands is significantly reduced.

For example, if the table is showing Ah, Ks, 8c, 7c 3d, the best possible hand would be three Aces and the next best hand would be three kings and so on. If you have Ad 6h in the hole (Top pair), and there are two opposing players in the pot your chances of winning with the top pair are 71% (I got this from Poker Odds 2.52). If on the other hand there were 4 other colluding players, whose hole cards you have seen, the odds of your opponents winning might be very different. For example, if you have seen 8 other hole cards, of which A, K, K, 8, 8, 8, 7, 3, then you know the odds have shifted in your favour to 87%. On the other hand if the eight hole cards you saw were not paired with anything on the board, your odds drop to 60%.

Depending on what you have and what cards you can eliminate (because you have seen the cards of your co-colluders) the odds in your favour can be much worse or much better than predicted by pure statistics.

For example, suppose you have 6d 5d and the board is showing 6,7,8,9,A rainbow. There are 3 other players in the pot. The chances of you having the best hand are only 34%. On the other hand, if you have seen 4 tens in the cards of your colluders, - who folded pre-flop, then you know you have the nuts!! You can play your game differently and have an advantage.

How do online players collude? By phone, by Skype, by MSN, by other chat, by using multiple computers, by using computer bots in multiple locations or simply by sitting together in the same cyber cafe.

Imagine the advantage a colluder would have if playing 9 hands against you.

“in places like Eastern Europe where kids can be hired very cheaply”

You like?

hi my name is sheldon i clicked on this becuase i saw the picture of poker stars and saw the 5 aces iw as woulnderign if that was real or what is up with it email at hockey_man_12345_4@hotmail.com
thanks

i have seen a picture of a live game i was in screenshotted buy another player showing the hole cards of everyone at the table even me
it all started when
my poker brain had him drawing dead 2% to my floped straight when he called bottom pair to my all in pulled a fh on the turn and river

he knew all our cards and the next cards to come , and prolly the next hand

witch leaves me only my saturday game at my snooker hall ;/
im just glad i play with sighnup bonuses and not my own cash

i talked to him more and found out hes useing this
http://www.pokerrng.com/site/video/intro.php

nuff said penny dropped yet ?

[...] is a very good article about the subject here Link to article I would be more concerned with collusion among players on the [...]

What about regularly asking players to type the text seen in the pop up box etc….

Could you be anything other than a mug to donate your hard-earned money to bundles of theives who use a number of known techniques to abuse an operation such as internet poker sites, which incidently, should have been banned long ago. What do you all do? Deposit your money, join a game and hope that the game you are playing is legitimate? You really need to wake up. Gambling games where players sit down equally equipped, only gain an edge with a skill advantage. Often that edge can be miniscule, so no-one can afford to have it cancelled by cheats. All of this collusion, screen shots, exploitation of betting, fraudulent administration involvement should equate to a red flag for any sensible, discerning person. Why would you even want to go near it? Leave it alone. Stop giving your money away. Or should I say, ’stop letting thugs steal your cash’.

Excellent articles .. first time here ..
I will read more when I have time …

thanks for posting

testtube, is on to something, i think most people go into these sites, knowing that either a close to pro,, or a bot is going to get them, i have lost hundreds if not thousands over the last few years and im still their putting in 50 dollars at a time, ill come up a bit go to bigger table and too scared to act or react, raise or reraise, and usually get into big trouble fast, some players are worse than me even, and wouldn’t know a bot if it bit them in the butt, which sometimes happens over and over, they are always raising according to pot, in almost square fashion, i pick them up in a hurry, and often win descent pots after i fold them when the odds are no longer in their favor, im not sure if i ever have a chance to become a great poker player, but when you go up sometimes weeks at a time and turn 50 bucks into 300 bucks , it is a big rush, then when you crash you only see it as actually losing the 50 bucks to start with,, safe to say i am probably addicted, and it will take me seeing these bots in person to be discouraged, and since you can’t see them, they are ai programs, then i will continue to have fun losing,, good point testtube, if you struck a chord with a reasonable , sane person,

I propose a very simple solution that would at least slow down bots. Why not just have a test say every 20 minutes or so at each table where players would enter in letter and number codes just like when you are setting up and email or account somewhere. You know “enter in the above” XT48Y so that only humans are able to read. And have a time limit of say two minutes to enter it.

This would not be a to much trouble and I think many humans would welcome it! Since it is for there safety.

Hopefully someone reading this could pass it along to someone high up in the online world and get it going. The solution is already waiting to be used.

I have been a low stakes holdem pro for around five years. I have played 1000s of hours at both live and online. I have been absolutely disgusted with some of the cash game tables that I have played at online in the last 2 or 3 years. Nobody plays like this in the live games and it seemed way to suspicious. I know humans play differently online since they do not have to look you in the eye. But come on this was $%#@ing ridiculous. I play only pl omaha and STT now online.

I think a good solution is already available. Why not have a test every 20 minutes or so at every table just like when you sign up for an email or an account somewhere online. “enter the above”….X3FT4S…you know “the human test” or whatever it is called..and give the player two minutes to respond.

This would not be too much trouble for a human and welcome by many. Since it is for their own protection!

Or even better have the hole or community cards themselves change a little every so often in some way that only humans would be able to read them.

I dont see why this has not been done as it is an obvious easy solution or at least can slow down the problem of bots.

Hopefully someone reads this that can pass it on to someone high up in the online poker world, or spark some other idea at least.

I have been a low stakes holdem pro for around five years both live and online. And around 2005 the online cash games started getting so suspicious that I went strictly live. I have 1000s of hours playing and I have never seen human beings play like players were playing online. I know people play different online than live (since they are not as shy etc) but for #%@!s sake this was ridiculous and still is!

I play strictly PLO cash and STTs now online and do very well. I wont even bother with a holdem cash game anymore though.

oops posted twice didnt think first one made it..lol

chango>”Why not have a test every 20 minutes or so at every table just like when you sign up for an email or an account somewhere online.”

This is already well known. They are called “captchas”. There are ways to beat captchas; believe it or not some programs are smart enough to respond to them. Or… the programmer can sit in front of the computer and answer the captchas for the bot. Or… for running multiple copies of the bot they can hire teenagers or others who will do it for only a little money (assuming the bot is a winner of course).

chango>”Or even better have the hole or community cards themselves change a little every so often in some way that only humans would be able to read them.”

That’s not the way the programs work. The bot doesn’t recognize patterns on the screen, it recognizes the data that comes into the client program which tells it what card to draw. If this data were to change then everyone who plays at that site would have to download a new client program to continue playing. That’s not something you can do on the fly.

Defeating bots is a really difficult problem and there is no easy solution. Any scheme that one human can think up, another human can beat…

what Ican see what you guys r talking about?

As to the collusion between humans issue:

If you are comfortable making decisions a little more quickly, play turbo. It does give humans less time to confer through MSN and such.

And be wary of players who run their entire time out before they check/bet/fold, and if more than two are dragging their feet consistently at any table, you should probably go elsewhere.

Also look for mistels in your chat box.

Especially one like this: “JJ”

When no one answer from anyone else at the table and there is no reason for someone to have typed it, for example, no one just folded to a bluff.

If you have or just had pocket jacks in your mucked hand, run screaming. In fact, run screaming the word, “Larceny!” And if it happens again at the table, or if it happens at another table with the same person or people, report it to the site.

You might also get a snippet in the text box from out of nowhere and completely unrelated to any chat or action on the table such as: “I’ll put him all in on this one.”

This will be met with silence from the other players, because it’s in the wrong chat box.

Or someone will quickly make a distracting comment about something else.

Watch out for tables and sites where all table chatter is met with jeers and put downs by others at the table. Bot creators might be protecting their creations by intimidating new players into not chatting. Unless your chat could possibly give away a hand during play, the worst that should happen is people should ignore you or make marginal replies, such as ‘ty’ to a chattier than usual: “Good hand, and well played, too,” from you.

Watch out for bots and collusion at play money tables. Those aren’t harmless annoyances, they’re cheaters practicing for the real thing. You will meet them again when you’re splashing around at the penny poker tables, so do figure out how to beat anyone you suspect is a bot, but if you suspect collusion, just quit the table and if you keep seeing or suspecting it, quit the site, because that’s one thing you can’t beat.

The other thing you can’t beat, of course, is someone being able to see your pockets through malware. Perhaps I’m naive, but a less sophisticated screen scraper might just pull your topmost window, correct? If so, maybe you should keep an open window up over your cards until the last minute. I do that sometimes, I’m not sure it helps, but I like to watch a movie in windowed mode over my hand or maybe have a search engine checking for new poker tricks to try.

One concern I have is the ability to manipulate a poker sites shuffle or deal algorithms, which would probably have to be an inside job (certainly that isn’t impossible, given the rumors about some of these sites).

How likely is it that determined outsiders could mess with the shuffle, too? I’m trying to keep track of my starting hand values in play money vs real money games and play vs real money tournaments to see if I’m getting more rags during real money play.

Of course, a poker site might create more exciting hands for play money than for real money, too, but if they do, I haven’t heard of it. That would lure some new fish in to paying up at first, but it would so frustrate and bewilder them once they started seeing their more realistic pockets and flops, I imagine it wouldn’t be a good idea long term.

I run Linux as well as Windows, but the only poker site I ran across that would run off Linux straight up is Absolute Poker, and there’s an insider cheating scandal attached to that name, so I won’t be playing there. And besides that, if a decent player ever got targeted by cheaters who got tired of that player coming in and taking chips from their bots, using Linux wouldn’t protect that player, unless that player also knew a lot more about Linux than most users do. Not against a deliberate, targeted attack, am I correct?

Unfortunately, I’m in that category of ignorant, still novice Linux user, and my understanding is, if your Linux skills don’t extend beyond the gui, don’t count on your system being any more secure than it was with XP on it.

And PS: if you start screwing around with Linux settings and you don’t know what you’re doing, I happen to know you will open a gaping hole in your security and your netbios will shortly be hailing you from Russia. I only caught my blunder and the resulting hijack because I was messing with Etherape.

Etherape for anyone running off Linux might catch some underhanded goings on. Maybe someone with more experience could say whether PeerGuardian or similar could help Microsoft users on that front? I keep an eye on my firewall for interesting bursts of data wandering out while my computer is only supposed to be talking to the poker site I’m playing on, but I can never be sure that dual connection it sometimes has to the poker site is legit, or fishy.

As for giving your poker system a good scrubbing, don’t go half measures if you’re really worried. Wipe and reload, and use a good wipe disk to do it with. DoD or better three wipe from a CD. Office Max sells a good, reusable one with several different wipes. Some malware might still survive in corrupted, unwipeable portions of your hard drive, but not likely.

Hm…I wonder how hard it would be to find a reputable site I could play on using a Knoppix CD?

I read almost all of this, & here something i would say.

In some poker rooms sawed strange thing…

{Prologe

Ive started to play at one small poker room BWIN.
I deposited 10$, wanted to practice after tones of books. Sitted on 0.05/0.1c started …
After few hours ive done 50$ (i got big luck), so i get back 30$ and started to play, after 10 days by 3-4 hours i had 230~. So i climeb by limints … In a 25~ days i had 1300$ and i played on 0.25/0.5. It was normal play i saw statistics by the hands played … etc, so all was normal. So it was absolutely stable play big pots, sometime bad beats .. etc.

}

After it was terrible …

I lost so much… it was olmost unreal

in 10 hours (4 tables) i losted ommost all strong hands with crazy bad beats. Playing preflop all in hands/lost AA 4/1 , KK 5/1 , QQ 3/0 ……

It was feeling that poker system trying to kill me.

So it could be that some poker rooms cheating against players on higher limits.

My post, ‘testtube Sun Nov 11, 2007 06:17:34 AM’ above can be supported by this:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/30/1222651059903.html

Please let go of the rope guys, stop giving these thieves your ‘hard-earned’ and take up golf or something.

It is extremely difficult to win at poker, because of the number of groups of people that cheat.
See what I wrote here:
http://www.verycoolwriting.com/2008/08/17/why-you-shouldnt-gamble-how-people-cheat-at-online-and-offline-poker/