We put poker bots to the test...

COMPUTER programmers claim they can win every time at the online poker table by using robots - or bots - to play against humans. Could that be true? The Mail on Sunday's Live Night & Day decided there was only one way to really find out - and brought bot-runner 'Dave' into the office to show us.

He set up his two computers and had them wired together in about ten minutes. Then they simply crunched away. No fireworks, no razzmatazz; just the quiet, steady accumulation of cash. The program made £40 over the course of our office day.

Indeed, so conclusive are such demonstrations that even the most sceptical are fascinated. Darse Billings is the lead designer of the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta, and his team are designing programs to take on pros, much like Deep Blue took on chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Billings says, 'The WinHoldEm bot is basically doomed in any game where the players are really thinking properly. Fortunately at this point, it's a pretty small minority who actually are.

'There are lots of players new to the game who don't really have a clue what they are doing. They make a lot of errors very regularly, and they are not paying attention to the things that matter. They don't notice that someone has never bluffed or that another bluffs all the time. It's all the difference in the world - it's how you win at poker. So you only really have to play a simple system to win. It's why these bots can make steady money.'

So, if you can't beat them, should you join them? Sadly, while there might be thousands of bots playing online, it isn't an easy way to make a living. Poker bots such as WinHoldEm have a basic framework of poker information but require thousands of man-hours' worth of extra programming to make them viable. After that, you're left running what amounts to a giant scam. If you get caught, casinos can seize any of your profits they hold online and close your accounts.

'Graham' runs a high-level bot scam playing around 50 tables simultaneously with associates both in America and in mainland Europe. He claims to have achieved the Holy Grail of botrunners, combining bot software with commercially available programs that collect hand histories of every active player from poker sites all over the world. With this in place, he claims his syndicate will start testing the bot against intermediate players for higher stakes (you'd need about £3,000 to sit down and feel comfortable). Graham claims that bots are probably being used for money-laundering and that the only difficult part of his operation is providing each bot with a clean 'human' face.

'I got banned and had my funds taken when one of the biggest WinHoldEm botters in the world - a Vegas guy - got busted and it led back to me. He got lazy and had 50 accounts seized - enough money to buy a few new cars. The accounts were linked to bank details and then to another account that belonged to a pro poker player; I'd traded him an account of mine and the trail came back to me. Now I need two new identities to replace my bots. After the thousands of hours of programming and testing, I suppose this is the only hard part.'

In response to a request for an interview, John Shepherd, director of corporate communications for Party Poker, gave us a written statement instead. 'We have caught individual cheats and also groups of people who were colluding or using bots,' it reads. 'In all cases, we closed their accounts and seized their funds and barred them from our system. [But] by far the majority of our players prefer to use skill than make any attempt to cheat.'

But sadly for companies such as Party Poker, the story doesn't end there. Because it's not a case of bots or collusion; now you can do both - and when bots collude, they do so far more cleverly than humans. Programmers can seat multiple bots on the same tables and have them read each other's cards via a third-party server. 'It's the difference between going out shoplifting and doing an armed robbery,' says Dave.

This story first appeared in the Mail on Sunday's brilliant new magazine, Night & Day Live. To arrange home delivery of the paper visit www.mailonsunday.co.uk

Professional player and author David Sklansky is the world's foremost expert on poker - books such as The Theory Of Poker have made him a godlike figure to many bot programmers. He believes getting bots to collude is not only viable but a genuine threat to regular players.

'The biggest problem for card rooms is the bots that are programmed to collude. If you have two or three of your own bots in the same game, then besides playing the basic strategy, they will be able to play an improved strategy based on knowing each other's own cards, and will really cause the other players to struggle.

'If you had a game with three world champion players and three players at a lower individual level who were colluding (sharing cards and information), then all three world champions would eventually lose.'

Meanwhile, back in my study, I'm watching my bot crunch away. I see we have a strong - but not unbeatable - hand, a straight. Buttons flash, money moves into the pot. My opponent then raises to try and scare me out of the pot. But the bot will not be manoeuvred by petty psychology. It has considered all the possibilities the hand has to offer and how the opponent has bet so far, and raises back. And when the final card is turned over, the WinHoldEm calculations are proved correct. We've won. Platinum lightning flashes across the screen.

I should feel ashamed. I always believed there was honour and glory in taking down a pot, in reading a man and using your instincts and self-control to conceal your fear and adrenaline. Of course, I can still find a game like that, but not here - it needs to be with humans, around a card table. The online game is dead: by its very nature, it is wide open to cheats and colluders. The sooner we realise that we don't know who or how many people we're really playing, the better.

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