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VPP Poker Room News
| Full Tilt Poker Thwarts 'Poker Bots' - Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 23:17
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In the online poker news headlines this past week has been much discussion over the industries potentially impending downfall due to the artificial intelligence programs known as ‘poker bots’. While this is a serious concern for many online poker players, the most reputable operators, including Full Tilt Poker, have spent millions of dollars to ensure their members are not subject to competing with poker bots.
Poker bots are computer programs, developed with artificial intelligence to compete in online poker games. The poker bot is programmed to know the pot odds, expected values and everything else related to the mathematical strategies that poker players have spent years developing mentally. Some argue that when a poker bot is used to play compete against real live players at an online poker room, it is statistically probable that the bot will almost always win. However, this has never been shown to be the case as any poker playing bots that have been developed have turned out to be pretty bad poker players. A large number of online poker players have stated that they disagree with the ability of poker bots to take down the online poker industry because they simply can’t use intuition, nor can they recalculate an live player’s behavioral patterns when a situation changes – especially a player on tilt, who will normally bet on any hand with a minimal chip stack.
However, regardless of the actual results, it is understood that the public's perception that playing against a poker bot would decrease your odds of winning and could cause poker fans to leave the online poker community for live games if the problem becomes rampant.
A key factor in the use of poker bots, as pointed out by many bloggers last week, is that poker bots are coded. The most reputable online poker rooms have systems in place to detect such coding, and the penalty, if caught, is immediate suspension of the user’s account and holdings. FullTiltPoker.com and FullTiltPoker.net implements very strict policies, and will not tolerate the use of poker bots.
Dr. Darse Billings, head of the Polaris poker bot research team at the University of Alberta in Canada, responded to the numerous assumptions that poker bots would soon doom the online poker industry, calling it a “ridiculous conclusion”.
Billings stated that “it is not difficult to identify a known program. If you use the Fritz chess program to play chess on an online server, it will be obvious to everyone. The same applies for poker. Since using programs is against the poker site's terms of use, if you do it you will have your account closed permanently.
"I started the research into poker A.I. in 1992, and we have had a very large team of excellent researchers working on the problem for many years. We have made a lot of progress over the past 16 years, but I can assure you, the sky is not falling."
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