May 14, 2007
More Poker Bot Accusations on Full Tilt from Two Plus Two Forum Members
The $200-maximum-buyin no-limit hold'em games on Full Tilt Poker aren't the only games where players suspect bots are playing.
Posters to a thread on the Mid-High Stakes Shorthanded Limit Hold'em forum on TwoPlusTwo.com name a number of players whom they suspect to be bots that play in the heads-up (one-on-one) tables at limits ranging from $15-$30 to $200-$400. Once again the players named have remarkably similar Poker Tracker statistics. And they never seem to play each other, although they appear to be willing to play some of the players with strong reputations and winning track records.
The bot accusations come from Destroy the Poker Bots, a site that lists player handles on Ultimate Bet, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker. (There's a page for PokerStars, but the list is empty.) The site is run by a 2+2 user with the handle MrGatorade. MrGatorade does not currently explain his criteria for including a player on his lists.
Why should you care about possible bots playing at heads-up tables? Here's what 2+2er Gildwulf has to say:
The amount of money going into the Full Tilt HU economy is extremely limited. It doesn't matter if you can beat a bot for 0.25bb/100 if his "exploitable" strategy is raping the fish 100 hours a week for 2bb/100. One bot is annoying; a dozen bots and that is a significant amount of money taken out of an economy that is not big enough to handle that kind of fish farming.
NB: Heads-up poker is the form of the game where bots are the most formidable, in which mathematical analysis and game theory can make a programmed player's game virtually unassailable.
Posted by abostick at May 14, 2007 08:02 PMI've been dabbling in heads up these days myself, on the recommendation of a few friends who have done well at it. But I don't play my friends. I don't want to take money from my friends who are playing. And I suspect they feel likewise. We also talk a lot of strategy together. So our styles are likely to be very, very similar.
So I could easily see someone maybe one day thinking I am a bot. I don't play a number of players and play very similarly to them. But maybe I am a smart bot because I can somehow talk.
Reminds me of Sager on IRC. One woman was convinced he was truly a bot because of his handle, "Sagerbot." She was convinced of this even though he could chat with her and others at the table. A bot that could hold conversation would be very impressive indeed :-).
I suspect that while bots are out there - a large number of players have thought about the heads up game very seriously and done the math before or after reading Bill Chen's book and have drawn very similar conclusions.
Posted by: Sabyl at May 14, 2007 08:20 PM
