Entering an online poker game is a lot like playing a real game of poker. The table and the cards look the same, but since players are hiding behind screen names, oftentimes their opponents are bots. Many of these bots are coming from the same location: Russia. Groups of young men, well trained in probability statistics and gambling, run poker collectives out of their apartments. Unknowingly, players will join the games and keep losing to the software programs run by these students.
“It isn’t really a fair fight,” said Kit Chellel, a Bloomberg reporter who investigated the bots. “The way poker bots play now is kind of inhuman. It is beyond the level that even the very best professionals who have ever lived can play the game.”
Chellel spoke to “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about his findings. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kit Chellel: If you’ve ever played online poker in any capacity, for any stakes, you’ve probably played against a bot and not known it.
Kai Ryssdal: I am not a gambler, so I’ve never played online poker either, not even in getting ready for this interview. But it does seem to me that that’s a bit challenging. Yes, the scale of things means there has to be some bot involvement, I suppose, but it does lend itself, I would imagine, to all kinds of mischief.
Chellel: Yeah, I don’t think that it’s fair for a human being to play against, especially a modern-day bots. The way poker bots play now is kind of inhuman. It is beyond the level that even the very best professionals who have ever lived can play the game. They play sort of mathematically perfect poker, and they don’t make mistakes, so it isn’t really a fair fight. And, you know, they are probably going to take your money.
Ryssdal: Or in some cases, they’re like, programmed to lose a little bit. And, you know, the first one’s always free, right?
Chellel: Yeah, one of the things I discovered doing this story was that not all poker bots are sort of intruders who are unwelcome and have sort of snuck onto the websites. Some websites definitely have bots that have been invited there to keep the tables looking busy and to keep people playing longer, which is a strange thing to get your head around.
Ryssdal: Tell me about this company. It’s called Deep Play, I think.
Chellel: Yeah, so that’s one of their names. They they’ve actually been through a bunch of evolutions over the years, but it’s the same group of guys out of Siberia in Russia who have come up with this very clever poker technology and have used it in various different ways.
Ryssdal: Well, say more about that. I mean, how are we seeing this employed out there? If I sit down in front of my, you know, virtual felt table there, what’s it going to look like when these bots are playing?
Chellel: I think when you’re playing against a bot, it feels almost like you’re playing against someone who’s cheating. They just seem to be winning, and you don’t know how. And it happens slowly, and it feels very hopeless. I’ve spoken to professionals who have taken part in these tournaments against bots designed by AI researchers, and they describe this kind of hopeless feeling of just feeling like they never had a chance.
Ryssdal: How do the companies who run the online poker sites feel about these bots, because in some way, I’d imagine they kind of need them.
Chellel: Obviously, customers, the people who play online poker, don’t like having bots in the system. It’s not fun. It kind of takes the fun out of it. You want to play another human being. But the big poker websites and the big poker platforms online don’t have a lot to say about botting. And, you know, what they do say is that they’re opposed to the idea of it, but they’re not very transparent about how they keep bots off their systems and how many bots are out there. And one of the reasons for that is that there just aren’t commercial incentives to exclude all bot accounts, because they all make money. They all make money for the poker websites.
Ryssdal: But if I’m a newbie, want to get involved in poker, and I decide to start playing online to, you know, sort of learn how things go, and I keep losing all the time, I’m out, right? And that seems to me to be a business model problem.
Chellel: It is, yeah, that is a problem. There’s not an easy solution to that. There is definitely data showing that people who start playing poker online are very quickly put off by the standard of the games they’re playing in, and by how often they lose and by how hopeless it feels. And that’s one of the reasons why people who know about poker botting, the people who really know, will tell you this is the existential threat to the game. Chris Moneymaker told me — he’s arguably the most famous poker player in the modern era — he told me the game may not exist in a few years unless we get a handle on this. And it’s a new problem. I don’t think the game has really adapted to the new reality yet.
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