I've read the Pluribus paper but it assumes fixed stack sizes and more importantly, would be very hard to implement. There has to be a simpler approach.
Their papers are very well written. With enough determination someone could build a multi player bot.
I was also thinking about trying to build something simpler that works decently well. They published a paper a while back about a bot that only did real time search with no training. It performed better than older poker bots that used to require offline computation. I don't think you'd be able to beat pros with it, but it should do well vs amateurs.
Starting stack sizes were static, but I don't think it's something important. They varied during the course of play. If you're playing cash instead of tournament you'd just need to set each player's stack sizes when they join the table.
After https://www.deepstack.ai/ beat no-limit heads up, poker bots simply became better than humans.
I would think that a pretty naive bot would do fine at lower stakes since most people there are not that disciplined, so just sticking to a basic strategy and not making obvious mistakes would probably have positive EV.
Seems unlikely that anyone is going to publish a system that currently works though.
Hell, there’s a widespread issue of ransomware currently - certain governments overlook cyber gangs in all but the most (financially) extreme circumstances. There’s not a chance any political force would bother policing internet poker.
I think back in those days, the poker companies didn't care too much since they were happy collecting fees from bots passing chips back and forth. I'm assuming now days it's different. I also don't know how true it was, since it was a random drunk guy in a bar, but it passed my sniff-test and he was buying beers so I didn't care too much.
Oftentimes, especially when down to fewer tables, I would have a couple of other tables open where I was on the waiting list and thus I gathered some information from hands that went to showdown there as well.