"The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker" (Bloomberg)
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"The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker" (Bloomberg)

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BlackJackDegenOP
3mo ago

This is posted in the bot thread but I think it deserves a separate thread as its a good, well researched piece that is

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22 September 2024 at 11:37 AM
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BlackJackDegen
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PabloMoses
3mo ago

When I played on euro sites between 2008 and 2010, I played a ton of these bots. Before the first ban wave I remember counting 44 accounts playing between 2/4 and 10/20 on Everest Poker alone, and I remember also playing those on Party and Ipoker. I know from 2+2 they also played at least on Prima, 888 and even some on FTP. A couple 2+2 threads from that era (there were many more):

What has been fascinating to me ever since, is that today still, doing machine learning for a living since 2017, I have no idea how they programmed their bots. They exhibited playing patterns that simply no one else exhibited in these games at that time, so these behaviors just cannot be learned using supervised learning on a massive HH database like some suggested. To me it really looks like emergent behavior learned from self-play at a massive scale. I thought about the 2 most known kinds of self-play:

  • Deep Reinforcement Learning, but no one was doing this in 2008, the most popular training algos started appearing in 2013
  • "Old-school" evolutionary algorithms, like genetic algorithms, but I'm not sure if it's even feasible in terms of representing the game state in a detailed enough way, and considering the computing power available at that time

Another possibility, maybe the most likely(?), is that they implemented some kind of heavily-bucketized Pio-like software with CFR etc, but all points tend to 2012/2013 for the first private solvers, so they would have been wayyy ahead.

You have to understand that in 2008 already, these bots were doing things at the table that the regs from this era were mocking, but ended up actually being part of a GTO strategy years later when solvers appeared, including:

  • Implementing a balanced limping range in the small SB when absolutely no one else was doing this at these stakes
  • Having a very small cbet sizing on most flops when everyone was using at least 2/3rd pot 95% of the time
  • Having small overbets on the turn and big overbets on the river often, same thing, no one played like this

I wish these guys would come out and explain how they did it, it was 15 years ago, I guess no one cares anymore but it's been bugging me the whole time, this was an incredible feat of programming in my mind.

BlackJackDegen
3mo ago

This is posted in the bot thread but I think it deserves a separate thread as its a good, well researched piece that is very relevant to the current online landscape.

The tweet link should provide un-paywalled access but here is another just in case.

BlackJackDegen
3mo ago

There is a line that has stayed in my head since reading the article that the Bot makers said when interviewed. Something like, 'this is capitalism we just play in the system we are given;.

I think about how someone's morals stops them from using RTA online. Lets be honest here, that is really all it is, your not going to jail, the punishment is having an account closed (lol). It is literally some dumb internet game that is PvP anyway. On the other side of this you have people who at mass scale are taking probably hundreds of millions out of the ecosystem while saying its all part of the bigger system in which we live,.

We have aeroplane companies that believe its better to make planes cheaper and the stock price go up than keep them in the sky, corps that knowingly poisoning people, poker sites actively trying to make the games so player can't win . . . I could give such a long list of examples where no one seems to care anymore about doing the right thing.

We want some guy on the internet to hold himself to account while watching the world burn. Sorry this is a way off topic rant.

"it's all in the game"

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