
Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine - jonbaer
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/16861/poker-bots-risk-gambling-big-data-adam-kucharski/
======
jaaames
Former professional poker player here, no limit holdem cash games, mid stakes.
NLHE cash games are considered the hardest to solve given the depth of the
decision trees. Other formats like sit and gos, spin and gos, and tournaments
can be modeled and solved in a more simplistic way.

A group of us (cash game pros) discovered a group of players on the Ongame
network around 2010. We combined our databases and found a few dozen players
that all shared an unconventional style and had outstanding winrates.

They made very annoying, aggressive plays that were difficult to counter, not
taught anywhere in professional videos, forums or training sites, and we're
winning at a world class winrate.

All the regular pros talk and knew each other, and no-one knew who these
players were.

Combined they took millions in winnings out of the network. We presented our
collaborative research and investigation to Ongame and they didn't do a thing
about it.

In more recent years players on Pokerstars have received refunds when their
security teams have deemed them to have lost to bots.

Pokersnowie is the most advanced commercially available bot and they even have
an API now.

I quit playing in 2011 and would strongly advise people staying away from
online poker. It's a scummy world, the games are tougher than ever, the sites
are shadier in their operation, run higher margins, and with the current
progress in the AI/ML domains you're on a hiding to nowhere.

I was skeptical but saw this evidence first hand and lost thousands
personally, and this was 5 years ago. Anyone playing online in 2016 that
doesn't believe they're up against super sophisticated bots are deluded.

Happy to share more if people are interested.

~~~
ketralnis
What made you think that these groups of players were associated with each
other? What made you think that they were bots, beyond just winning often?

~~~
samsonradu
There are software tools which aggregate huge amounts of data (hands) from
Poker platforms, like Holdem Manager. That's where you can see player stats
like pre-flop, turn, river actions, percentages and so on. Once you have 2
players who played a lot of hands (+10k) and have the exact same stats numbers
you should be a bit suspicious.

~~~
jaaames
Yeah this. Dozen's of them with this weird strategy with a few very
identifying features.

Edit: I can't recall the exact figure, but we had a few million hands
combined.

------
lordnacho
I know a guy who was talking about the roulette prediction thing. He was an
MIT guy, but a few years ago smartphones weren't that sophisticated and
besides you'd have issues using them at a casino.

Rough plan:

\- You can identify both the ring of the roulette table (transforms into an
ellipse), the ball (shiny), and the green zero on the spinner (it's different
from red and black).

\- You can use a Kalman filter to guess the current location of the ball while
updating your guesses, especially when the ball goes out of view. Same for the
spinner phase.

\- You can calibrate how fast the ball's orbit descends from a given speed.

\- You know where the diamond shaped thangs (the things that perturb the path
of ball right before it falls onto the spinner) are. There's a fixed number of
them, evenly spaced. From the orbit decay you know which one it will strike.

\- From the speed of the spinner, you know roughly where the ball will be when
it arrives on the numbers.

\- From experiments, you have a rough probability distribution of where the
thang will distribute the ball.

\- You don't need to be right every time. There's 33/34 numbers, and the
house's margin is only one or two of those numbers (there's variants of
roulette tables). Being able to rule out an equivalent amount of numbers tips
you over the margin.

\- Use Kelly criterion to maximise your equity. With finance you'd be crazy to
use full Kelly, but I guess a roulette table doesn't have regime changes.

~~~
DanBC
The Newtonian Casino talks about some students who designed a predicting
computer, and smuggled it into a casino in their shoe. It was published in
1985, so anything they built would have been considerably less powerful than a
smart phone, even one that several years old.

(It's a great book, and probably available).

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-
Scie...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-
Science/dp/0140145931/)

One interesting part of the book was that croupiers knew the wheels so well
that they were able to spin them, and throw the ball to land predictably.

EDIT: In the US it's called "The Eudaemonic Pie"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie)

> The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics
> graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early
> 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially
> modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino
> roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of
> Shannon and Thorp,[1][2] that roulette wheels obey Newtonian physics, and
> that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account
> peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase
> their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over
> the casinos.[3]

~~~
tdiggity
Here's the TV episode from "Cheating Vegas" on them:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWHcpU6snM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWHcpU6snM)
. This show was pretty interesting if you're into finding out how people tried
to get an advantage on the casinos.

------
doug1001
i worked in anti-fraud for a large online gaming house for about six years
from 2003 to 2009 so my information is not current. At that time, there were
no bots (whether in the wild or in academic, eg, University of Alberta) that
could competitively play no-limit, likewise for tournaments (which account for
a large portion of the total hands played in online poker Sites). Anyone know
if this has changed?

~~~
skizm
As someone who works in anti-fraud, would you be able to detect someone who
was playing manually, but had a bot set up to tell them what to do (and then
they would manually input the move)? Is that even illegal or against the
rules?

~~~
lettergram
You should be able to tell. It's fairly straight forward outlier detection; if
someone is doing 20% better than anyone you've seen before you monitor them.
If they continue to do better constantly you manually look, then you can
either make a choice manually or have a system auto remove them. They may even
remove you just because you are costing them too much money (depending how the
game is setup).

~~~
frgewut
It should be easy to artificially lower bot's advantage to 1-5%. It still
would be profitable, but wouldn't stand out among other players.

------
joe_the_user
_In the book you call gamblers the godfathers of probability theory, noting
that it’s a newer area of mathematics than we might expect._

Well, Cardano was a bit than a physcian who happened to be a gambler ("Often
considered to be the greatest mathematician of the Renaissance, Cardano was
one of the key figures in the foundation of probability and the earliest
introducer of the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the
western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science."). [1]

It is still interesting that probability is newer than other branches of math.
But it still dates back to the 15th century. It's more interesting that
statistics is far newer, becoming codified in the early 20th century.

It's worth noting that most of mathematics was put on rigorous basis between
the late 19th century (Cantor and Hilbert) and the early 20th century (Goedel,
etc) but probability had to wait for Kolmogorov and friends a few years later.

And statistics as it exists now is not considered a branch of mathematics but
its own science. Whether statistics has a rigorous basis or is inherently a
series of "rules of thumb" is an open debate (often between Bayesians and
Frequentests, for example).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano)

------
arisAlexis
Maybe interesting I have built a backgammon bot in the past detailed history
here [https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-money-machine-
dream-e4ab5...](https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-money-machine-
dream-e4ab534d0fdb)

~~~
zen_boy
Here's a backgammon bot implemented in practise
[https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-
Library](https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-Library) for anybody interested.

It also contains highly optimised Blackjack bot. PartyPoker had a beatable
blackjack due to bonus incentives they gave out (they've fixed it since).

~~~
mod
Nearly everyone had a beatable blackjack, counting deposit bonuses, back in
the day. They called it "Casino Whoring" or "Bonus Whoring." I started my
poker bankroll that way and later moved into professional poker (HUSNGs).

I turned $100 into approximately $3500 with the whoring. My expected value was
something like 2900--I got lucky enough to beat the table in addition to
earning the bonus.

Many of them were something like "deposit $200, get $200 bonus, have to bet
$xxxx before you can withdrawal" with approximately a $190 expected value if
playing $1/hand blackjack, perfect play.

I didn't think it was any surprise to the casinos that they were beatable--I
assumed they just relied on them as a loss leader.

------
arisAlexis
Also university of alberta has a fixed limit heads up bot that can beat almost
anyone. I dont particularly find the article novel or well informed.

------
arisAlexis
There was a big scandal 3-4 years ago with heads up nl chinese bot ring that
got 1.5m approximately before getting shutdown.

~~~
stevoski
That was on PokerStars' single table "double or nothing" sit&goes if I recall.
As a consequence , PokerStars has changed the pay-out on such tournaments.
Instead of all five winners getting the same amount, the prize pool is split
between the last five remaining players based on their stack size (number of
chips) when the sixth placed person is knocked out.

------
deepnet
Are there any public datasets of poker games ?

~~~
doug1001
yep, from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository
([http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Poker+Hand);](http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Poker+Hand\);)
a vetted data set of just over one million Texas Hold'em hands, 11 attributes
per hand (suit and rank of each of the five cards plus the hand "value", eg,
"full house")

~~~
hanasu
Quick note for anyone trying to get to this link: remove the extra two
characters from the end.

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xivzgrev
it was an interesting article but one of the worst sites ive seen for ad
experience on mobile. I got sent to the top of the article 4 times for a new
ad to load. Did anyone else experience this?

