Poker is war. People pretend it's a game.

A Bloomberg article is making waves after Kit Chellel's research was published in September. How honest and legit games with bots really are, is yet to be determined but the general consensus seams to be that, in many cases, human players already stand little to no chance at strategy games in the long run if they fight cold-hearted machines.  The Bloomberg article  is long and extensive but leaves little answers compared to the disturbing questions it poses.

Jonathan Raab, a fellow journalist and content creator I occasionally work with, came out of the woods with his own research conducted on the subject in parallel and he released another lengthy and very detailed summary of his findings relayed by PokerPro.

The story told is the one of a group of Russian entrepreneurs behind a company called BF Corp. and how it quietly took the online poker world by storm. Starting in Siberia, they built sophisticated bots and AI-powered programs that could outplay human opponents efficiently and making it possible to rake in millions in winnings. What began as a small poker bot operation eventually turned into a global business that still impacts online poker today. We have also shared the story with the colleagues of PokerFirma.com.

Poker & Business

As BF Corp. expanded, it rebranded into Neo Poker Lab and then Deeplay, marketing its technology as a tool to 'balance' games. Essentially, Deeplay's bots filled poker tables, helping clubs attract players by ensuring there were always opponents available. At the same time, Deeplay promoted itself as an AI solutions company, working behind the scenes to keep the bots' real purpose hidden from many of its employees.

Poker & Ethics

While Deeplay helped poker clubs flourish by essentially keeping their tables full, there was an ethical dilemma. Employees ended up hinting that the bots were designed to manipulate game outcomes, letting players win just enough to keep them playing happily with a balanced sometimes-you-win-sometimes-you-lose attitude. Despite this, no poker club or platform would openly admit to using bots, and top poker sites either mostly deny or stay silent on the issue.

Poker & Edge

As poker moved more into the digital age, the game became less about reading opponents and more about crunching numbers. The source of edge has changed. Top players now rely on software to help them play, much like machines. The introduction of AI and bots has changed poker from an exciting, psychological game into something a lot more systematic and mechanical. This has led some to fear that AI could destroy the online poker industry altogether and turning it into some sort of robot battle field.

Poker & Fair Play

Interestingly, the founders of Neo Poker Lab seem to believe they can fix the very problems they helped create a bit like when an anti-virus software developper tries to sell you a fix for a virus that was initially developed by them. The new plan is to create a fairer poker experience by attempting to match players with others of the same skill level, instead of allowing pros or bots to dominate amateurs in mixed player pools. It’s a bold vision to work on reshaping the future of online poker into a more balanced game for everyone but, all in all, it looks like AI and bots are generally here to stay and we, humans, will have to adapt and learn to live with them quickly because they have already adapted to us.

Poker & Skill

Outperforming opponents in the long run at playing poker is a matter of sane strategy, fine mental state, solid knowledge, and decent discipline. Many players are able to significantly increase their level of play over time but competing with bots put humans at a huge disadvantage in a game of incomplete information with small edges in which the machines will make no mistakes because they will never get tired, bored or irritated for whatever reason.

For players willing to improve their theoretical knowledge, the Jaka Coaching platform helps improving the students' game by assisting players in implementing GTO aspects in their live or online game strategy. Jaka Coaching is about understanding GTO principles at work but the core idea is to emphasise the studying of complexe mechanics at work behind poker stats and maths without becoming a bot oneself.

That said, good luck to us, players, when trying to compete with bots in the long-term. Solved games like chess show us the path online poker is taking us down on and many recreational poker players are not ready to compete at such levels today - not from a technical point of view, nor if you consider the iron mental state required. Bots are not a big problem in Chess. Many top players essentially play almost perfectly already so there is no real need to send out bots. Poker players love to bitch about how bad they deserve to win compared to their lucky opponent. The irony is that the very quest that led people into studying the game so deeply in order to solve it, actually contributes to destroying what initially made it appealing to the masses: the fact and the belief that everybody could compete against anyone with a real chance to win. It's fun to play a friendly shooting game with water guns by the pool or paintball games on a recreated war terrain. Although the game is essentially the same with very similar rules but very different implications, being at war against armies of super-intelligent precision terminator machines that fire high-energy laser weapons leaving humans with close to zero chance of survival, is a no fun at all.

Poker & Fun

This perspective of being able to win against anyone is dwindling these days. Recreational players still strike the occasional gold in large tournament fields but the reality is that with a rising general skill level at poker tables, edge in general is dwindling because it is harder to naturally dominate opponents consistently. When everybody plays how he's 'supposed to', something strange happens: variance and randomness are the dominating drive and skill translates less into the ability to win than into the ability not to lose. As a consequence, the fun aspect also dwindles once even recreational players start understanding this. We have reached this point. It is interesting to observe how the online and live poker brands handle the problem to try to sustain booms in markets containing enormous liquidity and player pools. Gamification as such is a big narrative in many industries and markets these days to try to make dull or annoying activities more attractive. Succeeding at poker these days requires reaching such a level of specialisation in some cases, that we see attempts of gamification of the game itself. People clearly expect more fun that the thrill of studying solver charts. It makes no sense to grind a game so obsessively otherwise we would se more solved-Monopoly players around. They key is indeed money and the hopes of financial gain. Poker has this gold-rush effect that is undeniable and there are not many domains in life where so many people stick around for so long although they clearly lose money in the process. This can lead to the conclusion that poker as such is not necessarily at risk because live poker is still a lot of fun for those who don't mind the hassle of leaving their desk and talking to real people but online poker has a big trust issue besides the problems it is already facing in terms of regulatory pressure depending on territories.

Poker & Progress

Bots are here to stay and, while it is tempting for greedy individuals or corporations to put unfair practices in place, ways have will have to be found to legally and technically control these machines and those who operate them. Finance is full of advanced bots. The stock exchanges and financial centres are not loud places anymore where traders shout and frenetically communicate with secret hand signs. These places where most of the world's money is managed are mostly quiet and clean locations entirely run by computers these days. The cryptography networks are also full of bots and there are legit platforms even offering services to fully program and automate one's own trading bot to navigate the markets with a predetermined set of strategies and with no human intervention at all. Deciding to trade as a retail investor today comes down to fighting hundreds of billions of bot-managed institutional money with a wallet of a few thousands worth of life savings. Automated trading allows investors to apply principles of their strategy without having emotions interfering when markets do funky things. In these high-performance environments, traders compete and the one with the most computing power and the best insight, places the fastest order with the better return. Because there is profit to be made by outperforming others at capturing parts of the money streams, online poker will not escape this modern condition.

Poker & Missed Value

Poker rooms, physical or virtual, have changed in similar ways. The poker environments have not become quite as sterile but the era of loud smoky low-ceiling rooms is over and poker rooms are more quiet and comfortable. The players are more focused and less laid-back than only 10 years ago. Clearly, objectives are gradually shifting from just having a good time to generating profit. Even amongst recreational players, the performance pressure is huge. In a game that was already only rewarding about 10% of the participants the analog world, it seams ambitious though, to keep financial return on investment as a sole motivation and measurement tool for success now that AI will likely reduce this small percentage even more.

Money is the poker industry's measurement tool. Players' attitude often is that it's all about the money but they have other spots to draw value from. Poker, especially live poker has plenty of perks like community and personal development through learning new skills and visiting new places. Today's empires will always be tomorrow's ashes but player companionship or the memories of the places we, humans, visit along with the unique interactions we are capable of randomly having with each other won't erode as quickly as most of our bankrolls and they are worth capitalising on in order to thrive in an activity that will often not be rewarding financially speaking. Playing a game has the potential to federate all kinds of humans of all ages, genders, opinions and backgrounds around one common activity. This has a lot of implicit value for corporations and society in general. Bots will likely not have any interest in creating interactions like that but they might be able to help sustain human gaming communities or environment and to make meaningful contributions to helping us solve game integrity problems or improve game play flows if inserted in fair supervised ways.

Poker is war. People pretend it's a game.

Doyle Brunson said: Poker is war. People pretend it's a game. The real problem of poker is that some actors play the game for the sake of entertainment and excitement. Others are only there for the money. How many actors of each camp there are at the tables determines how fun or tough the game is. Of course, participants who are only there for the money will naturally dedicate more efforts and care, use better resources, implement better habits and, as a consequence, win more eventually. Giving players access to tools helping to deploy perfect strategies against weaker players will eventually dry out the pools of new incoming liquidity. This is not a poker issue. It's the story of monopolies in any market. The principle of competition is still around in the poker scene but the competition's nature has to be preserved: a fight between individuals in a chaotic, to some extend unpredictable and destabilising environment that triggers strong emotions. We, as an industry, must defend the players more by limiting the use of third-party software or implementing more human controls like captcha systems or two-factor authentification if we want the game to remain the psychological bar fight it is and to avoid having bots on top of all online leaderboards at some point or do we really want to give an online-player-of-the-year award to a bot one day?

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