A current Two Plus Two poll asks whether poker botters should be banned from the forums:
The poll appears in a thread accusing our friends over at pokerai.org of disseminating botting-related information/advertising on Two Plus Two (which has a long-standing policy, formal or informal, against the promotion of botting-related content on its forums.)
Internet polls are mostly worthless, and small-sample Internet polls are even more worthless, but we can infer from this poll that yes, poker botting still scares the bejesus out of some people. Of course, we already knew that. Online poker has been characterized by a (somewhat irrational) fear of bots since before the millenium.
Witness PokerStove author Andrew Prock's prophetic year 2000 statement in rec.gambling.poker:
Just out of curiosity, how are the robots supposed to interface with the server? It's not like there are open standards. Of course it can be done, but it really does require a pretty darn high level of programming competence. This is actually one of the biggest problems online poker is going to face in the future.
Automated poker players which can pass this form of "Turing test" are going to be hard to spot, and even harder to beat. That is if someone has the sophistocation to "break" the communication standard, they'll be able to write a winning bot which can pass the Turing test well enough to get away with this for quite a while.
What's more disturbing is the popularity of the (usually false) blanket assertion that "botting is cheating". Upwards of 70% of people who took the poll included this among their responses. Yet poker botting can really only be considered cheating if it involves...
- Collusion
- Hacking the serves for sensitive information (e.g., opponent hole cards) not otherwise available to the player.
The application of artificial intelligence to a real-money game of skill does not, in and of itself, constitute cheating. But if you give a typical player a button that says "poker botting is cheating", of course he's going to press it. A monkey would press it too.
Do we need a poll to tell us this?
No, if you want to get to the bottom of the poker botting vs. poker cheating issue, you have to ask the right questions.
- Would you consider it cheating to have a friend sit with you at the computer while you play, so you get the benefit of two brains on every hand?
- Would you consider it cheating to run a poker bot that a) loses money b) doesn't collude c) doesn't hack the servers d) doesn't even have access to one human brain, let alone two?
- Would you play on a site which openly allowed poker bots, provided you were 100% certain that the vast majority of those bots lost money or broke even in the long run? That each bot was, in essence, a piggy bank?
Because when it comes to polls, phrasing is everything.
Anyway, for all that Two Plus Two almost single-handedly ushered in the poker Renaissance, when it comes to poker automation, most players are still living in the Dark Ages. So gather round the fire, ye superstitious cavemen and nomads, while I spin tales of the poker botting Jabberwocky and other things that go bump in the night...
Posted by James Devlin 29 comment(s)
