So, is this the end of online poker?
Will it just become increasingly sophisticated bots playing each other online?
Will it just become increasingly sophisticated bots playing each other online?
The fact that there's a published recipe for a superhuman bot that can be trained for $150 and run on any desktop computer sounds like an existential threat to their business.
The main mitigating factor I can think of is that you'd need to also adversarially train it so it isn't distinguishable from a skilled human. But that doesn't seem like it would be too difficult.
I'm sure the sites have been crawling with bots as long as they've been around, some better than others. As long as it doesn't drive away too many customers I doubt the sites care. They still take a rake on bot games. However better AI could change that as the "dumb money" slowly dries up.
There are a bunch of such threads over the years where through statistical analysis, users have identified groups of dozens of bots.
While years ago many of the pros could theoretically beat these bots, it may not have been by enough of a factor to overcome the rake. Of course if the bots are practicing any game selection they can take money out of the economy even if they can't beat pros.
Anti-bot measures is an arms race and the sites aren't always ahead of the game.
Thinking about online poker again gives me ideas now that I actually know how to program. I actually thought up and wrote out a good way to subtly steal money from people, but I'm deleting it because I don't want someone else to do it. (And I wouldn't do it myself because I have ethics.)