This has been done to death already.

Poker is solved already bud don't waste your time

True for 1v1 scenarios but solving multi-way situations are far more complex.

From what I heard it seems convincing that it has been solved, so does it mean that bots are now playing online poker?

Has already been done. plurabis

Bots have been banned from online poker, else we would not stand a chance

Maybe OP is working on a new application?

6-Max. We are looking at 8-Max.

Not really wanting to contradict you, but how would they do that? The mere idea of detecting a poker playing bot seems much more complicated than detecting chess bots, and they're still having trouble over there. How'd you go about detecting bot play in a game with imperfect information, high variance and a very large decision state?

Is plurabis open source? I just remembered that I listened to Lex's podcast with the guy that worked on plurabis, really interesting story. Can't remember if they released the software or not...

Either you do game theory or machine learning for this...but using both at the same time is sorta dumb because you'll be making either approach less effective.

>The mere idea of detecting a poker playing bot seems much more complicated than detecting chess bots

It just takes more hands to detect but it's not that hard. You can look at extremely low frequency plays that hit exactly the right frequency where a human would use an always/never approach. If you see such plays in different spots then you can be fairly confident it's a bot

(Just like in chess. A human could make all perfect moves - but after some perfect moves it just becomes very unlikely)

What do you want to know?

You should look up counterfactual regret (CFR) minimization, it has been the technique that underlies all the expert poker bots.

Then, if you are interested in hold'em variants, look up DeepStack, Libratus, Pluribus, ReBeL, and Player of Games.

All of the competitive bots on the hold'em variants use some form of specialized search (based on CFR or Monte Carlo CFR) over the public belief state tree.

The card draw variants are mostly untouched because the public tree methods are not as easily applicable.

Anyway feel free to dm me if you want to know more.

So not before multiple people lose their money to it and the casino obvs never pays them back. Perfect lol

Casino might just redistribute the money from the locked account once they detect such activity and deem it "bot beyond reasonable doubt". They have the hand histories so they could do that quite easily (talking about online casinos, obviously. If you manage to have bot info funneled to you at a live casino things will get tricky...but in that case you'll probably get sued for damages because they have all your personal info and your face on camera)

On the other hand: the casino got paid (the casino isn't playing poker. The casino is playing a different game called "rake") ...so they have no loss if someone cheats that way.

Their only incentive is to avoid bad PR if it were to become public that their site is overrun by bots.

But yes: As a player who was taken before the bot got caught you're probably SOL (if it was caught after your money was already withdrawn). Just like in most other crimes if the criminal already managed to spend your money.

> You can look at extremely low frequency plays that hit exactly the right frequency where a human would use an always/never approach. If you see such plays in different spots then you can be fairly confident it's a bot

Do you do this against a median of other players, against GTO, or what?

And if you restrict your bot to ~3 bet-sizes and GTO + ICM for tournaments, how'd you detect that? It wouldn't necessarily be the best strategy, but it would probably get your bot in the money a majority of times. I've seen streamers playing 3-4 tables at once and playing pretty close to GTO with preset betting buttons as well. You'd detect those as bots as well?

What about making your own version of "spin the wheel" strategy where, depending on where you're at in the tournament ICM wise, you switch between strategies, adjust your opening hands, raising spots, etc. Sure you'd get away from Nash equilibrium, but you'd probably still rake in money.

The idea that you consider this easy to spot is pretty wild to me. I'd love to read some research in this area, if you have some sources on bot detection in online 6+ NLHE.

>Do you do this against a median of other players, against GTO, or what?

Against GTO. Against a median of other players would make no sense.

>'ve seen streamers playing 3-4 tables at once and playing pretty close to GTO

Since GTO doesn't even exist yet for many handed play...press 'x' to doubt. Human players are still pretty far from GTO. There were already challenges with best of the best heads-up players against GTO bots and they lost (mirror matches so it wasn't due to variance in hands). Someone playing 4 tables at the same time? No. Nowhere close to GTO. Maybe preflop with charts, but that's as good as it gets.

(It would also be super stupid as a human to try and play only GTO if you knowy ou play against other humans. While GTO guarantees that you - on average - don't lose it is by FAR inferior to looking for exploitative spots. Trying to play GTO-ish is the baseline you go back to when you don't know what to do - not the default strat as a player)

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>What about making your own version of "spin the wheel" strategy where, depending on where you're at in the tournament ICM wise, you switch between strategies, adjust your opening hands, raising spots, etc. Sure you'd get away from Nash equilibrium, but you'd probably still rake in money.

Well then you have a bot that is going to be taken for a ride by other bots ;-)

If someone fields a bot he has to be aware that bots are a thing...implementing a losing strategy to another scammer is probably not something he'd put so much effort in.

> going to be taken for a ride by other bots

So.. bots are a thing? :)

What I'm trying to say is this: if being close to GTO is better than humans, your bot doesn't need to always play perfectly to not be detected. And if you say there's no GTO yet that means there's no standard yet.

To re-visit the chess analogy, in chess they compare each player's moves against top engines and come up with a score. Either centipawn loss or whatever else they do (chessdotcom doesn't comment on their measures, understandably so). What tools would a poker TO employ? Are there even such tools? And would your own bot even resemble that?

I'm still not convinced this is as easy as you said...

edit:

> It would also be super stupid as a human to try and play only GTO if you knowy ou play against other humans. While GTO guarantees that you - on average - don't lose it is by FAR inferior to looking for exploitative spots. Trying to play GTO-ish is the baseline you go back to when you don't know what to do - not the default strat as a player

Well ...

> Pluribus, a new AI bot we developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, has overcome this challenge and defeated elite human professional players in the most popular and widely played poker format in the world: six-player no-limit Texas Hold'em poker. Pluribus defeated pro players in both a “five AIs + one human player” format and a “one AI + five human players” format. If each chip was worth a dollar, Pluribus would have won an average of about $5 per hand and would have made about $1,000/hour playing against five human players. These results are considered a decisive margin of victory by poker professionals.

I don't have a quote handy, but I remember listening to a podcast with the creator of pluribus, and they didn't specifically code an "exploitative" strategy, AFAIK. Whatever their bot did, seemed to work tho... So not that stupid? :)

The botters or RTA users could deviate from the GTO line slightly to cover their tracks.

Sure. They will get smarter with time. And the algos to detect them will take longer. That's the nature of evolution (pruning the stupid bots by banning them leaves the smarter bots)

So maybe they will have deviate so much eventually that they get beatable. In which case they don't fulfill their purpose anymore.

Sorta reminds me of this xkcd comic:

https://xkcd.com/810/

>, your bot doesn't need to always play perfectly to not be detected

I'm pretty sure that current detection methods use a closeness metric (you can't use a "perfect GTO" metric because that would mean your observation horizon would have to be infinitely long)

> What tools would a poker TO employ?

Well, the simplest tool to start with would be preflop charts. And then solver charts for the usual betting sizes. At least that's where I would start if I were to implement such a system.

Bots are detected using a number of different methods, probably last of which is how they actually play their cards. Bots have consistent timing tells on actions, they always click the mouse button on the exact same pixel, they fail captcha's etc.

Bots are not really an issue, the bigger issue is assisted play for a human. So a programme tells the player the optimal move and the player executes it. That's much harder to catch.

No, this has been solved already for all stack sizes, look up MonkerSolver.

Where exactly does anyone play 8-max poker? I'll never understand why people solve for 8-max its so frustrating. Also antes at over 10%. Non poker players solving poker.

If you want to create a winning poker bot you need these few things.

OCR software to recognise stack sizes, position on table, cards, antes, blinds etc, all the variables.

Then it needs to translate this into something legible so that this spot can now be looked up in a GTO database.

DB gives the answer, voila you have solved poker.

Right, thanks for the distinction. I was using the term bot, but referring more to bot-assisted human play. I don't doubt automated inputs can usually be detected, I was more interested in the theoretical poker play stuff.