There's an interesting and pretty well-researched article on poker bots in this weekend's LA Times.

Gaming companies won't disclose all their secrets for sniffing out bots, but some of the techniques are simple. Any person playing three tables simultaneously for 48 hours without a bathroom break, for example, or invariably taking exactly one second to bet, is not a person.

Link

(Obviously they've never seen me in Vegas :)

A problem with online bot detection is that it's very easy against stupid bot programmers, and impossible against smart bot programmers. As with most bleeding edge industries, in the beginning there were not very many bot programmers, and most of them were stupid. But as cardrooms go after bot programmers and users and become more sophisticated in detection methods, they cause the bot-loving community to get more sophisticated at the same time as the bot community is growing exponentially.

That said, I'm fairly confident that bots do not pose a significant threat to online poker for the foreseeable future, for a few reasons. The community of human poker players should continue to be so much larger than the community of undetected bot players even if cardrooms don't get super-sophisticated with detection mechanisms. The obstacles to setting up a very large number of accounts to get paid in/out of on an online poker room alone are a significant deterrent to the kind of game-draining volume the bot community would have to produce -- the number of bot programmers who are able to successfully set up and play out of (and get paid back into) dozens of accounts on one site over significant periods of time should be relatively small due to barriers to entry.

Any person playing online needs to accept that there is a degree of collusion and bot-related activity that is 100% undetectable by casinos. That does not mean there are not good games. I'm not even sure it means there are less good games, certainly at least while online poker continues on a steep growth curve. So accept that bots exist, and accept that collusion exists, and accept that you can still become a profitable online poker player if that's what you wish to do.

Another reason I think bots will not kill online poker is that online poker as it is today is not what it will be in ten years. There is a tremendous amount of potential innovation in online poker that hasn't even had its surface scratched. What will online poker look like in ten years? I don't know, but I'd wager it will be light years ahead of, and different from, online poker today. There's certainly a lot of room for innovation in the games that can be played. There is a whole wealth of games that are impractical or impossible to play in person that become possible online. One of the trends with most online game-related activities that are based on "in-the-flesh" games is how much inertia the playing communities have to innovation in the early stages of growth. Focusing on creating sites where people can play poker like they do in a home game or casino game is a great concept but it's too narrow.

The types of things I'm thinking of for poker-related games would be things like EV-based pots, where you get paid not on whether you actually won but on the EV of the bets you made; crazy variations like 20-person three-deck hold'em and five-board hold'em; dynamic rule poker where each game's rules are randomly generated; derivatives of poker that have nothing to do with the concept of a 52-card deck, etc.

In the meantime, online poker rooms are set up almost exactly like brick-and-mortar rooms. There have been a few notable innovations, like speed games and max 5 tables, but for the most part looking around an online cardroom feels like you're looking at the game slate for a massive casino.

The type of change I'm thinking of is similar to the changes that computer war games went through during the 80's and 90's, when the real-time strategy game (RTS) genre was pioneered.

Initially, most computer war games were direct ports of hard core, grognard-type board games -- these were accessible to someone who knew and loved such board games, but offered almost nothing more than the board game version other than automated housekeeping chores like dice rolling, piece moving, rule enforcement, etc. Even if the rules were automatically enforced, the players still had to be aware of a ton of rules, the games were still mostly turn-based, and played very much like their physical counterparts. They may have been fun, but they didn't really tap the power of the computer to change the game. They were simply computer-enhanced ways to play a physical board game, much like online poker is today.

The first genuine real-time strategy game was Herzog Zwei, which was introduced in 1989 -- thirty-seven years after the first computer game was created. Even then, Herzog Zwei was a Sega Genesis game, and it took another three years for the RTS genre to make it to the PC in the form of Dune II, and then another two years after that for the first blockbuster RTS games, Warcraft and Command & Conquer, released in 1994/1995. They revolutionized the computer war game genre, and pretty much sounded the death knell for board game-style computer war games for the mainstream market. (See here for an excellent full history of RTS games.)

Real-time strategy computer games illustrate the level of innovation I expect to see in online poker in the next decade or two. Today's real-time strategy game is absolutely light years ahead of anything you can enjoyably play in board game form. They have thousands more rules, but the rules are less conspicuous to the player than playing the most basic board-based war game; they have magnitudes more units, pieces, and variations of pieces, which the player learns during gameplay; they support many more players than the average board game and at the top end can scale to hundreds of thousands of consecutive players; they have immersive experiences with sound and video; and unlike any complex board game, they have virtually zero "downtime" and the player is engaged in action and decision-making every second of the game.

If you asked a computer game player in 1987 what they thought the future of computer war games was, they probably couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams the level of sophistication, gameplay, and pure fun that real-time strategy games got to during the 90's; the paradigm shift was swift and dramatic. It also brought accessibility of these games to massive segments of the population who had never even seen a sophisticated board wargame let alone played one.

Despite the massive challenges in online poker, I think the future is a bright and rosy one. I especially look forward to the day where online poker innovations make it something as completely unique and different as RTS games are to board games. I find online poker to be fairly boring and tedious, but there's no reason it should be. It's like that right now because moving the physical game of poker onto computers has removed more from the game than it has added. The possibilities of the new platform haven't even really been considered yet.

My point is that despite what you may read or think about bots, collusion, and the like, online poker is not on a downward spiral, it's at the very beginning of a massive upward spiral. It took 37 years of computer game industry evolution to realize the first successful real-time strategy game, and then another 5 to produce a massive hit. Huge innovations don't happen overnight, but I think online poker has a long way to evolve.

Interesting post, an exected value based game? While I would love to find such a game(no bad beats) it is fundementally flawed becuase all the good players would suck the money out of the game too fast. The fish keep coming back because sometimes they win.

Posted by: Madroxxx on June 14, 2005 07:48 PM

I live in a small college town in North Central Florida with an inordinant amount of programmers, and a fairly large poker community. Through the grapevine, I know a number of people who are employing bots or actively developing them. The one thing I notice about all of them is their complete lack of information about what's going on in the industry. They just don't read. Perhaps that's another reason why they will ultimately fail.

Posted by: gracie on June 15, 2005 10:47 PM

Madroxxx -- I'm planning on posting more on that concept soon since I think it has genuine potential, and may actually be a harder game for sharks to extract all the money out of newbies at quickly, at least compared to NLH.

gracie -- I actually don't think the bot community will fail; there is a small and continuously evolving group of people who are, and will continue to be, very successful with poker bots. They will always be in the minority of the bot community, but it doesn't take eradication and 100% prevention to prevent bots from heavily impacting the well-being of the online poker community. It's just like fraud has not brought down credit card companies, even though it happens daily in very large quantities. The key is keeping the detrimental activity below a manageable threshold, which is something I think online cardrooms can do.

Posted by: jeremy on June 16, 2005 12:51 AM

I'm not convinced these bots are a real threat to the poker community. Just look at how much money goes into making PC games realistic and yet many people manage to win ...

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