

Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer - matt1
http://www.mattmazur.com/category/poker-bot/

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jack7890
Matt, this is great stuff, I hope you continue this series of posts. This
topic loosely breaks into two domains--the technical details of programming
and running the bot and the theory that drives the bot's AI. Personally I
think there's already been a lot written about the former, so I'm more
interested in the latter. Would love to know how went about developing the
bot's decision algorithm.

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JacobAldridge
An interesting juxtaposition against the series being written at Coding the
Wheel.

Both are very clear about the difficulties involved - my suspicion is they
push the "eating glass" type analogies primarily so that they don't appear to
be encouraging further development. After all, the challenges involved appear
to be what motivates them (and many Hackers) in the first place.

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matt1
Somehow I never read Coding the Wheel until tonight.

My initial impression is that he made some things way more complicated than
they had to be and other things way simpler than they needed to be.

But who knows--there's definitely more than one way to do it.

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petercooper
_Once you’ve agreed on a time period and a way to count the results, how can
you be sure that the results weren’t a product of luck and variance instead of
skill?_

That should only matter if your motivation for developing a poker bot was to
develop a program that could demonstrate "skill" rather than one that could
produce the highest profits (such as if you were a computer scientist). If you
wanted to produce the highest profits, then your metric for comparing
implementations would be net profit over the long run.

It is okay to come up with some set of metrics to attempt to measure "skill"
in the short term while developing your algorithm, perhaps, but that's when
you're in "computer scientist" mode. Ultimately skill is irrelevant if your
goal is to make a profit over time, and if it were not, I suspect you would
not be working on such a project in the first place.

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mattmaroon
Net profit is a factor of many things that have nothing to do with the bot.
How good of a system you have for getting new accounts/ip addresses, how well
you can funnel money from one dummy account back to you, how well you avoid
detection, etc.

Still, you can easily determine the mathematical certainty for a given win
rate and sample size.

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matt1
Matt you hit the nail on the head.

People like to think that if you can build a winning bot you can easily run it
on a dozen computers and rake in millions of dollars. In reality, the
logistics of running such an operation are prohibitively difficult--at least
if you want to stay within the bounds of the law.

~~~
mattmaroon
Yeah, I've gone through much of the rest of the process before between bonus
abusing casinos, running a rakeback site, and my own poker play.

Once upon a time Party Poker offered a guaranteed 10% APR on all balances up
to $10k, paid out monthly given a certain relatively small level of pay. I
imagine their multiple account detection process back then was relatively
crude compared to what Stars has now, but it caused me some pain. And I know
Full Tilt is very good at it now.

~~~
matt1
Honestly I didn't even bother trying setting up multiple accounts.

The money was a nice, but it really wasn't the primary goal. Plus, in order to
maximize profits I would have had to tread in a lot of murky waters that I
didn't want to be near.

For example, say you have a roommate run the bot. How do you get the profits
from his poker account into your bank account? Not as easy as it might seem.

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mattmaroon
Pro-tip: the legal solution to the roommate dilemma is limited power of
attorney :)

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LargeWu
But since online poker winnings are technically illegal in the US, doesn't
that invalidate any legal standing over them, similar to how gambling debts
are unenforceable?

~~~
mattmaroon
Online poker winnings are not illegal in the US. Playing online poker (or any
form of gambling other than sports betting) is provably illegal only in a few
states.

But in those states, perhaps. I never had to pay an attorney to review that :)

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JeremyBanks
Reminds me of [http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-
working...](http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-
poker-bot)

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worldhello
I noticed in the article that PokerStars ensured screenshots were being
blocked? How is this possible?

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matt1
Great observation. I assume you mean because of the Screen Shot button on the
bot software. I had to do that because when I tried taking screen shots of the
few CAPTCHAs I saw, I wasn't able to paste it into MS Paint, so I built my own
screen shot procedure. Not sure how they did it.

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TweedHeads
Everything casino related should be considered spam, unless there is
absolutely no mention of a real casino website.

They are masters of deception and even if the post is tech related it should
be watched closely.

I know them for I've been inside the beast.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
How you managed to amass 500+ karma points, I'll never know. I routinely see
your comments voted down into oblivion. Kudos for persistence, I guess.

~~~
Hexstream
Oblivion used to be much deeper than -8. It must help.

