alt Hacker NewsI have to imagine bots have made online poker unwinnable by now, right?
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Surprisingly, no. Most sites do a good job of finding and banning bots. It's also fairly easy to spot a bot. They will make odd sized bets at times. You check to see if that betting line is taken in a solver.
You can still "win" by taking money from the other human players and minimizing EV loss against bots.
The major poker sites claim that they have really good (and very top secret) bot detection. I'm skeptical.
Online poker is very much beatable. Poker isn't solved in the same way chess is. It also depends on the site and the rake. Some unregulated sites don't do KYC so collusion is possible.
I'm curious if it's possible to make a profitable GPT Poker bot, I have seen a few GitHub repos but not experimented with it. Obviously legal/ethical concerns there aside. In my experience you see a lot of the same names when playing and they could be bots. But you can interact with people in the game by chat or "throwing" objects at them in the game like a horseshoe or cards. And when they react back maybe that's a sign they're not bots. Regardless you want to avoid playing with the good people and seek out the bad players aka fish so you can play against them instead. Table selection is key.
I've heard (second-hand) that bots were instrumental in the decline of online poker popularity.
Not really. Maybe in very specific applications of limit (fixed bet size) hold'em, but no limit texas hold'em, the most popular variant online, is very much unsolved, especially in multi-way pots. There are simply too many variables and strategies involved to calculate quickly enough on the fly. For games like omaha, which uses 4 hole cards, this is even harder.
Due to advancement of theory and study and popularity over the last ~20 years though, it's definitely much harder to be successful than it used to be.
I dono. You can hit and run pretty damn easily.
Depends how good your bot is.
Yes, but it's worse than you'd think, from what I understand. The bots will try to get more than one seat at a table and share information, so that it's even MORE unfair.