Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer

http://www.mattmazur.com/category/poker-bot/

by matt1 • 17 years ago

84 27 17 years ago

mattmazur.com

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Everything casino related should be considered spam, unless there is absolutely no mention of a real casino website.

They are masters of deception and even if the post is tech related it should be watched closely.

I know them for I've been inside the beast.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

How you managed to amass 500+ karma points, I'll never know. I routinely see your comments voted down into oblivion. Kudos for persistence, I guess.

Hexstream• 17 years ago

Oblivion used to be much deeper than -8. It must help.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

An interesting juxtaposition against the series being written at Coding the Wheel.

Both are very clear about the difficulties involved - my suspicion is they push the "eating glass" type analogies primarily so that they don't appear to be encouraging further development. After all, the challenges involved appear to be what motivates them (and many Hackers) in the first place.

matt16• 17 years ago

Somehow I never read Coding the Wheel until tonight.

My initial impression is that he made some things way more complicated than they had to be and other things way simpler than they needed to be.

But who knows--there's definitely more than one way to do it.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Once you’ve agreed on a time period and a way to count the results, how can you be sure that the results weren’t a product of luck and variance instead of skill?

That should only matter if your motivation for developing a poker bot was to develop a program that could demonstrate "skill" rather than one that could produce the highest profits (such as if you were a computer scientist). If you wanted to produce the highest profits, then your metric for comparing implementations would be net profit over the long run.

It is okay to come up with some set of metrics to attempt to measure "skill" in the short term while developing your algorithm, perhaps, but that's when you're in "computer scientist" mode. Ultimately skill is irrelevant if your goal is to make a profit over time, and if it were not, I suspect you would not be working on such a project in the first place.

mattmaroon5• 17 years ago

Net profit is a factor of many things that have nothing to do with the bot. How good of a system you have for getting new accounts/ip addresses, how well you can funnel money from one dummy account back to you, how well you avoid detection, etc.

Still, you can easily determine the mathematical certainty for a given win rate and sample size.

matt16• 17 years ago

Matt you hit the nail on the head.

People like to think that if you can build a winning bot you can easily run it on a dozen computers and rake in millions of dollars. In reality, the logistics of running such an operation are prohibitively difficult--at least if you want to stay within the bounds of the law.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Those are ancillary factors that have an effect on net profit. They are not metrics. Taking the story from the post, if my "friends and family" were asking me about the "success" of a poker bot, I'd still point to net profit as the best metric with which to define success (unless you're doing it for CS/math reasons).

It's a bit like if I'm a professional, regular poker player and family members ask me how I'm doing. I'd tell them how much money I've won (or lost), not the intricate details of how I play.

jack78902• 17 years ago

This misses the point. The signal-to-noise ratio of poker is relatively low, especially when you're dealing with win rates that are only slightly above zero (as is normally the case with poker bots). A hypothetical player whose "true" winrate is -0.5 BB/100 could easily play 30,000 hands and win more than 100BB, due to randomness. So you need a vast number of hands to determine if you're actually employing a winning strategy.

jack78902• 17 years ago

Matt, this is great stuff, I hope you continue this series of posts. This topic loosely breaks into two domains--the technical details of programming and running the bot and the theory that drives the bot's AI. Personally I think there's already been a lot written about the former, so I'm more interested in the latter. Would love to know how went about developing the bot's decision algorithm.

JeremyBanks• 17 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working...

worldhello• 17 years ago

I noticed in the article that PokerStars ensured screenshots were being blocked? How is this possible?

matt16• 17 years ago

Great observation. I assume you mean because of the Screen Shot button on the bot software. I had to do that because when I tried taking screen shots of the few CAPTCHAs I saw, I wasn't able to paste it into MS Paint, so I built my own screen shot procedure. Not sure how they did it.

Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer

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