Two days ago, Bloomberg carried out a very extensive article on bots in poker. Journalists from the newsroom got in touch with a Russian group that makes, uses and sells artificial intelligence bots that have only one goal - to cheat you out of everything. In this article we will summarize only the highlights, if you are interested in the full article on Bloomberg you can find it HERE.

Before we get into the details, let's briefly talk about how such bots work. For many players, even today, it is still hard to believe that a computer could beat a human at poker. However, thanks to huge advances in computing power and the development of artificial intelligence, today we can confidently say that the best computer programs beat the best human players.

Welcome to 2024, a time when artificial intelligence is on the rise. Let's move to the chilly Russian city of Omsk, home to the Bot Farm Corporation. The company looks like a classic company, with different departments, employees and company parties. Supposedly, many employees have never encountered poker or cards at all.

A look into the history of

Let's go back for a moment to 1997, when a major milestone in the development of artificial intelligence took place. In that year, IBM's "Deep Blue" supercomputer defeated world chess champion and one of the best players in history, Gary Kasparov. It must be said here that winning at chess is easier for a computer than winning at poker, not least because poker is a game with incomplete information. This means that while in chess you know the exact position of your own and your opponent's pieces, in poker you don't know your opponent's cards. This fact makes determining the right strategy more challenging, but thanks to the aforementioned technological advances, this is no longer a problem either. Today, it's possible to have an app that even the best chess players in the world don't stand a chance against on your phone and a bot that will destroy your poker competition on your computer.

In 2015, heads up limit hold'em was practically solved. The poker bot Cepheus was able to play so close to optimal strategy that against an opponent who knew exactly what he was doing and played a maximally exploitative game, he would only lose one thousandth of the big blind on every hand.
In 2017, another poker bot Libratus managed to beat 4 top pros in no limit hold'em.

In 2019, poker bot Pluribus defeated 5 professional players in 6 max no limit hold'em. This bot had no theoretical knowledge of the game, but through the process of machine learning by playing millions of hands, against himself and other players, he was able to train his neural network. For example, he taught himself not to limp, or in which spots it is advantageous to "donk bet".

Artificial intelligence is therefore potentially very dangerous for online poker. In the recent past, we have seen several scandals in which bots have won millions of dollars. It is therefore very important that poker rooms work to detect them. What is even more shocking is the information that some, especially smaller poker rooms, are in turn exploiting them themselves.

Back to the present

Bot Farm Corporation, Neo Poker Lab, Deeplay or Impertsy, these are all company names, but behind all of them are the same group of people producing very intelligent bots. Do you say that bots are easy to detect because, for example, they always think the same time during the expression, or always do the same actions? Then you are mistaken. Their bots use sophisticated methods to avoid being guessed.

A few years ago, a conversation from the Bot Farm Corporation leaked to the public. Through it, we found out that the company was making $10 million a year, and they were investing some of that money to make their bots better and better. Their bots are so perfect that in tournaments, they've faced each other at the final tables and fought against each other.

How did they do it?

They collected a huge database of hundreds of millions of hands and pitted bot against bot. The bots played millions of hands together and learned from their own mistakes or successes, just like humans do, except the bots only took a fraction of the time.

Not everyone fights bots as they claim

Over time, the group behind these bots decided it was time to market their product. Either as a computer program or as a mobile app. As they themselves claim, their clients are the world's biggest online gaming sites, but also small gaming sites or clubs. And it's those small gambling halls and clubs that are supposedly full of their bots and are fleecing players out of money.

Why would gambling houses do that? The answer is simple

Nobody comes to play in a gaming room where nobody is playing and the tables are often empty. Let's also not forget that the gambling house has money from the rake. A gambling hall needs to have nonstop players on the tables to have the desire and opportunity to play. However, many times you don't even know that you are up against an artificial intelligence that is robbing you of money. The group behind the bots even said that they were able to make amateur players so frustrated that 80 percent of them didn't even play 1,000 hands and quit poker. They have more than 10,000 customers and among them are said to be various professional players. The skill level of the bots can also be lowered if necessary, so that you don't discover that a bot is playing against you.

Bloomberg editors asked the biggest online gaming sites to comment, and they wanted to know if they too were using these perfect bots to fleece players of their money. Some of the gaming sites said that they do not use anything like that, while others refused to comment.

Bloomberg has been conducting this investigation for many months and finally their editors got straight to the source. They met with the founding members of the Bot Farm Corporation. They told them that online poker is built on a lie and is doomed unless something changes. That's why they're supposedly already working on new bots that will compare players' abilities and adapt to them. In short, professional against professional, amateur against amateur. They want to create a new model of the game where there will be fair competition.

This article has also been circulated among various names in the poker world, and they have all spoken out in no uncertain terms - the information published by Bloomberg is incredible, shocking and very disturbing.

What a disturbing read

- TonyDunstTV (@tonydunsttv) September 21, 2024

Pretty huge - mainstream media coverage of our industry, and it's a bot exposé https://t.co/672vpZNiCd

- Alex Scott (@AlexScott72o) September 20, 2024

Source - Bloomberg, musement.com, poker-ai.org, blockchain-casino-games.com, roarcdn.fitting-solutions.at, greatbridgelinks.com, twitter (x)