bots soon to high card humans

Bots Soon to High-Card Humans

The online poker rooms are flourishing in what seems to be the

Eldorado of our time. But not for long. Around the corner lurk the

bots, or computer programs designed for playing poker, currently in

hard training to win your hard-earned cash.

Ten years ago I was an avid poker player, constantly on the lookout

for new games. Most of my friends that I used to play for nickels and

dimes are still playing today. They have taken their chip stacks

online, and the limits have increased, but from the look of it they

are doing well financially. Online poker ten years back consisted of a

yearly e-mail tournament and games played over Internet Relay Chat

(IRC), including first-generation bots. Online discussions took place

on a spam-filled USENET newsgroup; in short, the situation wasn't very

exciting. Today, you can hardly enter any web site without seeing

advertising for online poker, with poker sites and fora mushrooming.

According to Party Gaming, online poker generated $2.6 billion in

gross gaming yield and represented 20% of global online gaming revenue

during 2005. To call the development during these ten years an

explosion would be an understatement.

But artificial intelligence is about to take over the tables. We have

already seen it happen in chess, Deep Blue beat world champion Gary

Kasparov in 1997; in checkers; and in backgammon. In these games it is

believed that the best software program is superior to, or at least on

par with, the world's best human players. Poker is somewhat different

than chess and backgammon, but they do share a lot of common ground.

In poker the cards decide the outcome of a single hand, and in

backgammon the dice decide the outcome of a single game. But in the

long run the winner is the one who makes the best choices. The skill

level of the computer players are steadily improving, but it is not

only smart algorithms that make them a tough opponent for a human.

Poker players are notorious for playing long sessions and in the wee

hours, the quality of play is decreasing at the same rate as the

players' eyelids are closing. Poker bots don't have this problem, nor

are they affected by the other major shortcoming of a human poker

player: being on tilt, or playing suboptimal out of anger from losing

a recent pot.

The game of online poker, with its huge revenue, is an attractive

market for bot writers. Sure, online poker rooms prohibit bots; but in

reality, there are a lot of poker bots that go undetected. With

software dominating the world of chess, checkers and backgammon; poker

is the next game. Online poker is not the same lucrative business it

was a few years ago, the competition has stiffened and I am convinced

that bots already have started to take a piece of the action. I

predict that in just a few years a majority of the big money winners

in online poker are bots. When that situation occurs it is

questionable if online poker can survive at the same level as we see

today. With more poker bots getting closer and closer to an optimal

game, the playing field will be more even, and the earnings will not

be enough to beat the poker rooms' fees, unless some unwary humans

will stick around to feed them.

Building a poker bot to play in an online poker room where its

participation is banned requires more than writing logic needed at the

poker table. The poker servers are fighting tooth and nail in a war

for their very existence. They are adopting multiple measures of

defense: spyware-like functionality that monitors running processes on

your computer, pop-up screens (a.k.a. bot challenges), playing

patterns, etc. This war between sites and bots is not fought in the

open, both sides prefer to keep a low profile here. The sites do not

want to scare away their human clientele, while the bots are fighting

detection. Because of their clandestine existence, it is difficult to

evaluate the exact state of poker bots today. Some universities are

doing research in the field and the University of Alberta seems to

lead the way.

It is exciting to know that my fellow finalist Daniel Crenna is

writing a framework for hooking up poker bots to play against each

other. I hope that his endeavor will help budding poker bot authors to

improve their software. It will be very exciting to see the final

results of this project! A similar commercial product, Poker Academy,

is also available on the market.