Pokerbots:  another reason why online poker playing has its problems

If you haven’t already heard about the recent advances in machine-versus-man poker battles that have been taking place you may want to check into it, especially if you play poker online. This growing phenomenon is creating a quiet little battle between some very skilled computer-code writers and the huge online poker gaming outfits who are trying to stop them: the result may have unforeseen impacts on the millions of online poker players who are oblivious to this unfolding drama.

What is a Pokerbot you ask? As with most software there is a large and ever growing variety of these applications which in short are designed to give the online poker player an advantage. Some of the more benign versions available today are simple applications that advise the less experienced online player what the current pot-odds and various probabilities are for any given poker hand you happen to have: such a program would look at the two hole cards you have been dealt in Texas Holdem and the current pot versus the immediate bet and advise the player what the payout odds might be as the flop, turn, and river cards are exposed. From this simple example you can extrapolate to the ultimate holy-grail of poker-playing software: a program that literally takes over all aspects of your online play and tries to make decisions as if it were one of the best players in the world. One of the more public examples of this is the work the University of Alberta has been busy at for over a decade (http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/) culminating recently in the Polaris-machine versus man heads up play against the likes of Phil Laak (aka The Unabomber) and Ali Eslami. When it comes to game theory and artificial intelligence, the Polaris software is rocket-science: poker with all its variables involved in changing betting styles and the unknowns of the hidden cards makes for an extremely challenging programming task for even simpler two-player heads-up Texas Holdem type of play.
The University of Alberta’s Polaris type software however is not nearly as big a threat to the average online player as the real-world Pokerbots emerging which rely less on artificial intelligence and more on cheating. Yes, I said cheating. How you ask? By now most online players have heard of the high profile debacle  of online poker cheating in which a person with internal system access to AbsolutePoker.com managed to literally see the hole cards of all opponents while playing, thus enabling the individual to rack upwards of $700,000 in winnings in a short time (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21381022/).  This is an obvious example of cheating, but it did not really involve a Pokerbot and is not the type of cheating I am referring to. What I am referring to is a form of cheating based on collusion.
Collusion, if you don’t already know, is when two or more players in a multi-player game cooperate in order to gain an advantage over the other players in the game. It is of course possible to have collusion in a live poker game in which players somehow cooperate (the simple example being some hidden gesture between them to let each other know when one of them likely has “the nuts” so to speak). In cyberspace, however, computers and databases can be linked in real-time to communicate exactly what each other’s hole cards are and come up with a joint attack on the other players that will maximize the likelihood of winning the most money. Adding on top of such unfair collusion is the fact that most poker sites online have hand-history type information that spews out for each player’s user-id  as the game unfolds: savvy database coders can use various methods to collect vast quantities of these hand histories for a given poker site and players’ user-IDs. A Pokerbot can tap into these databases in real-time when playing at an online table so that a given player’s history can be used in making decisions. There are ongoing debates as to where to draw the line on PokerBots and what constitutes cheating. When it comes to a debate however, there really is no debate when an offshore, online, poker website outfit, such as PokerStars.com,  decides a particular PokerBot software application has crossed the line (http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/prohibited/).  If you use a prohibited PokerBot and the online poker card room casino somehow detects you are doing so, you are going to get a stern warning in the least, and confiscation of your entire online bankroll at the most.

Detecting the use of prohibited PokerBot software by the big online poker websites has one very scary aspect to it that in this author’s opinion is at the crux of why online poker play just might not be worth it after you understand the facts.  Let me elaborate: most average home computer owners are nonchalant about the way they setup their user accounts on their machine, and I would estimate that the vast majority of them simply use the full Administrator type accounts when they logon to play on the internet (as opposed to setting up a Restricted Account on their machine). When a player sets up an account on one of the large power websites it generally downloads its own client software onto the user’s machine (assuming one allows it to by agreeing to such a download); when a download of this type occurs and a user is logged in with Administrator privileges at the time, then that poker website client software essentially has Admin privileges on your system: that client can now potentially see, read, write, and do virtually anything with Admin privileges itself.

The large online poker websites are training their client software to search for the known PokerBot software applications on the players’ computer systems, and potentially with Admin privileges gained as a result of the scenario described above, they will generally find it unless the computer user has taken extra measures to conceal the presence of the PokerBot software (such concealment generally involves running the PokerBot software on another computer which uses stealth software to hook into the online-play computer which has been purged of all traces of the PokerBot software). Well, you say, maybe that’s just fine for us online players who are not cheating with PokerBots; the online poker websites are just trying to protect us and their reputations for clean, fair, online poker play. With millions of online poker players and the potential of the majority of them having downloaded poker client software with Admin privileges to their entire computer systems it is just a matter of time before some breach of security like what happened at AbsolutePoker.com in 2007 occurs: in that event if you are one of the unfortunate users having exposed your system to such abuse, losing your online poker bankroll may be the least of your worries. This author is one who will stick with live poker play with other warm humans at a real table, thank you very much.
-David McCormick

14-SEP-2008

About the author: David McCormick works as a Director of Engineering for a local high-tech company in AnnArbor, Michigan. In his free time David enjoys practicing and improving his live poker play at various venues around Southeast Michigan, most notably with the free live-play poker outfit Panther Poker Leagues in the Ann Arbor – Ypsilanti area (inquiries can be emailed to: pantherpoker@comcast.net).