Casual poker players who go online these days have likely played against a bot, even if unknowingly. And if so, they’ve likely lost their money to said bot. The problem, writes Kit Chellel at Bloomberg, is that these “hobbyists” are getting tired of losing money and are abandoning the game. “Without these players putting in money, the professionals wouldn’t earn a profit, the websites wouldn’t get a percentage of the action—the rake, in poker parlance—and the game’s economy would collapse,” writes Chellel. His deeply reported story covers the rise of the bots, who’s behind them, and how they’ve changed the game—even the best humans train with software to be more ruthlessly efficient. “The game is now less about psychology, spectacular bluffs or calls, and more about revealing as little as possible to opponents and grinding out the percentages,” writes Chellel.
“Machines have taught us to play better, more boring poker,” he adds. At one point—”deeply reported” is not an exaggeration—Chellel meets in Armenia with a group of young men, gifted in the “mathematical dark arts,” who are behind a Russian collective known as Bot Farm Corporation. The BF Corp. is “reviled as pariahs by the rest of the poker community” because of how they have changed the game with their A.I. bots. But the twist to the tale is that they, too, recognize that poker can’t afford to keep losing hobbyists. They tell Chellel they are working on a new machine model that would match players of similar skills against each other, which would make for more competitive action and likely keep the hobbyists coming back. “We need to make a new game,” says one of the men. (Read the full story for much, much more on the evolving game.)