The Sky Is Falling

...on online poker. Andrew Smith wields the "gloom and doom" card about online poker rooms and online bots.

Why? Because there's no real way to tell a program from a person. Crooks will enter programs -- or poker bots --as people. Human players will consistently lose. Eventually, all but the stupidest humans will just stop playing."

Personally, I don't understand the whole fear of Bots playing poker. I welcome them, because I exploit them. Firstly, bots are written by humans, and we know we are fundamentally flawed, so thus are bots. Secondly, bots have patterns like anything else and once found can be exploited.

Andrew fails to state which poker game he is refering to: Limit, No Limit, Omaha, etc. All which bots fair different results. I let Darse Billings speak:

That is a ridiculous conclusion -- this is not a catastrophe for online poker.

First, Ian's program only plays heads-up Limit Hold'em, which is not a popular variant. Modern programs are not strong at No Limit or multi-player games.

Secondly, it is not difficult to identify a known program. If you use the Fritz chess program to play chess on an online server, it will be obvious to everyone. The same applies for poker. Since using programs is against the poker site's terms of use, if you do it you will have your account closed permanently.

I started the research into poker AI in 1992, and we have had a very large team of excellent researchers working on the problem for many years. We have made a lot of progress over the past 16 years, but i can assure you, the sky is not falling.

Andrew sums up with his little timid chicken-ass mentality: Personally, I've never understood why so many people are so willing to risk so much money gambling online. It's not gambling dude, but skill. Maybe Andrew, feels better hording up his money in a savings account (lol), or gambling in a 401K.