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Message: [QUOTE="quads, post: 608452, member: 18369"] To me, the most direct threat to online poker is colluding bots. By themselves, bots are a major threat to online poker. Bot software is now available to the public at a very affordable price. Enough people already know about and use these bots. The reason bots are a threat is because it’s not too hard to code a bot that will beat the small games, both limit and no limit. Small games are the lifeblood of the poker economy and the $100 losses at $2-$4 are ultimately what feed the $1,000-$2,000 games at the top - pyramid style. In a normal small stakes game, incompetent players fill most of the seats, and the few good players “shear the sheep,” as it were, taking their cut, but leaving most of the money floating around. Bots, however, have the capability to be in hundreds of games simultaneously. Eventually they will “skin the sheep.” They will continue to expand and fill seats until someone stops them, or until it’s no longer profitable. If the bots are making no money, then it means the cardroom is getting its rake, the good players are getting a tiny bit, and the bad players are getting slaughtered. They’ll quit. And without their money, the whole online poker pyramid will collapse. Bots are quite literally the cancer of online poker. They will multiply until they have killed their victim or until someone contains them. Bot software allows users to create their own AI and plug it into the bot framework. Hundreds of great poker minds are working right now to develop better AIs. More threatening still is colluding bots. Bots can communicate with other bots and share hole cards. Say someone writes a colluding bot and sits it in three seats of a game. The bots share hole cards with each other and instantly adjust their strategies based on the extra knowledge. A well-coded bot of this type would be extremely formidable even to strong players. If poker sites want to survive and keep their pot-o-gold running into the next decade, they need to tackle the bot problem head on. They have adopted some counter-measures. There’s no iron-clad solution. Bots can run remotely so the bot software is entirely undetectable on the client machine. Poker clients would have to ban the use of all sorts of macroing and other automated input programs to stop it, but the “bleeding edge” botters will always be one step ahead. In fact, the botters could reduce their footprint on the client machine to nearly zero. They could run the bot on a separate computer. The bot could simply suggest plays (informed with the hole cards of other bots) on that computer, and a hired person could execute the plays in real time on the client machine. The hired player could respond to chat, enter captchas, and otherwise appear like a completely normal player. This could be done in workshop-style offices on a large scale in places like Eastern Europe where kids can be hired very cheaply. The only recourse the cardrooms would have is the labor-intensive collusion detection available to them. If the botters collude “smartly,” (they don’t collude every hand, but “mix it up” to use poker terms), they could escape detection for quite a while. Lest you think this is far-fetched, such workshops already exist in China to play online computer games and sell virtual property. Every honest poker player, should know what the threats are and exactly what you might be up against when you play online poker. Professional collusion teams another topic for another thread. [/QUOTE]

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