Cheaters
September 21, 2007
So it seems like someone might have managed to hack Absolute Poker, probably in the same way Planet Poker was compromised back in the online poker industry’s dark ages. No big surprise. They’ve been a giant steaming pile since day one. If you’d told me that someone managed to hack a poker site’s shuffling algorithm and made me guess which site, they would have been my first choice.
There are also rumors abounding of bots being caught on various poker sites. To a lot of people, this may look like the beginning of the end of online poker. I’m not buying it.
For one thing, I would guess that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of people who play online poker honestly believe it’s rigged. And they play anyway. If thinking the game is explicitly designed to steal their money doesn’t stop them, why should the threat of a bot? I suppose there’s a big difference between believing something is rigged and having “proof” (I use quotations because the evidence in question is a 2+2 thread, albeit a convincing one). But there’s also a big difference between Absolute Poker (which appears to have been programmed by juvenile chimpanzees) and the other major sites. I’ve little fear of Stars being similarly compromised.
And for another, online poker has been an endangered species since day one, but the apocalypse is still a good distance away. Anyone who knows anything about computers understands that one day they will be better at poker than we are. It’s just a question of when. Most people involved in AI seem to agree that we have quite a bit of time, but then, this is in an industry where 20 years is basically forever. My largely uneducated guess is 5.
Once that day comes though, online poker will be unplayable. There’s nothing you’ll be able to do to separate humans from machines. Poker sites might throw out CAPTCHAs to make you feel safe, but they’ll be just like toiletry procedures in airports, an easily circumventable sham of a procedure that does nothing but inconvenience innocent people.
Let’s suppose bots can make $10 per hour at the tables, a pittance by poker standards and something I could train any reasonably intelligent person to do in a month or two. Suppose someone has a large network of them. Poker sites can only send so many CAPTCHAs to each player without risking alienating all humans. No actual person is going to fill out one every time they want to bet, the game would be slowed to unplayability.
That limitation will make it such that our bot network operator could simply pay some Chinese people $1 an hour to fill out the forms. Every time the bot encounters a CAPTCHA, or an audio file, or whatever other lame protection measures the sites may try to invent, the bot simply copies it and sends it instantly to the Chinese call center, where it is filled out right away, sent back, and entered by the bot into the poker site. Assuming one operator could handle the CAPTCHAs for 10 bots (and I suspect it would be a lot more) each of which makes $10 per hour the bot masters could even afford to pay Americans with MBAs to do it if they wanted. The economics are beyond feasible, they’re trivial.
So online poker is in serious danger. There’s no way to stop the bots from overrunning it. As AI gets better, and that dollar per hour rate goes up, more people will jump into the fray. The law of accelerating returns will take effect, and soon the online poker world will be entirely uninhabitable. It will essentially be rigged, though not by the house, and bots will compete against each other for the money.
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