The revelation sparked one of the longest threads in the history of poker forum www.twoplustwo.com, demonstrating how controversial a topic bots are in the online poker scene. The disgust seemed to boil down to one fact: poker players felt comfortable playing other human beings.
Introduce the possibility that an opponent might be poker’s answer to Deep Blue and the whole game comes falling down like a pack of cards. But in the melee, poker players might have overlooked one thing: are poker players becoming bots themselves?
Are poker players bots anyway?
Today, with scores of poker sites and tens of millions of players, the online poker landscape is a constantly escalating arms race of information. Players who take the game seriously have at their disposal a dizzying arsenal of software tools to give them a winning edge.
It’s a rare poker player who sits down at an online poker table without first firing up various heads-up displays and popup windows – add-on tools that calculate odds, screenscrape facts and crunch moves made by opponents in previous games to calculate ‘hand ranges’ – a best estimate of what any given player might be holding.
While poker sites forbid software that plays for you (bots, in other words) other tools are generally fair game. And then there are websites – such as SharkScope, ThePokerDB and Official Poker Rankings – that act as repositories, selling screen-scraped data on every online poker player who’s ever played a hand.
Poker players use so many tools and add-ons, that if you could peer over their shoulder you might think for a minute that they were playing the stock market rather than having a game of cards.
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“Whenever I play a tournament, I use SharkScope to look up the other players’ history,” says Dan Carter, who has won over £120,000 in live poker tournaments and hundreds of thousands more online.
“There’s no point playing somebody who’s doing really well – I want to play people who are down a lot of money. It’s made me a lot better over the last few years. It’s had a really big impact.”
It seems that in modern online poker, if you can’t beat the bots, the only option is to join them.
London poker player and journalist, Victoria Coren, who won £500,000 in one game in 2007, puts it best: “Poker players are worried about bots. But it’s becoming harder to tell the difference between man and machine.”