thepokerbaffer

I went to a low-stakes live poker festival and spewed my money, of course I fuckin did.

I booked time off work, and spent a week a bit drunk and high, floating about, sloshing buyins all over the local community like an Alan Bennett character who’d double dipped diazepam.

During the week I played with people who were truly terrible, but also came up against some tough opponents.

I do not think I sat at a single table all week where there was not at least one player that I was 100% dead to if we played 100x HU games.
I’m not rolled for the live events I was buying into (abi €175) and I knowingly sat at tables where 15% of opponents killed me outright, 40% were about my level, and the rest I was beating.

45% of those humans were probably gonna take my money, slowly or quickly, and if they were gonna do it slowly the rake would kill us both anyway.
Most times at a festival like this I will not have a winning week, and at the end of it, is there anything other than ape-like emotion that makes me care that it went to human players and not online bots?

Even with a reported prevalence of online bots in poker, strategically, I still should have taken my 3k leisure money from this week and put it into online tourneys 22-100 instead of live 100-500.
It’s obviously a better use of bankroll management and I would have saved on several other expenses associated with live poker.

Live poker has a social value element that can’t be ignored, but as today I’m thinking about the difference between poker bots and human professional poker players, we can assume neither is great social value, and in relation to my poker game winrate, dismiss the social value argument for this specific discussion.

I can win at poker when I play micros online, and very low stakes live. As I increase in stakes, and fail to develop my game through study and engagement with the more complicated concepts, my winrate declines.

I still continue to satellite into higher stakes games, and occasionally flick in a direct buyin because I have an okay job and I am playing/gambling well within my means.
I do it on slots, I do it on table games, I do it on pretty much any bet that’s there to bet on because, like the largest majority of people who play poker, I like to gamble.

People claim it’s unfair to “lose to bots”, but a human set up those bots, and it’s not a small, nor easy job. I’m losing to a human who probably worked as hard on his bots as the human pro did on his nerdy solver stuff.

I don’t care about either nerd, I’m drunk and high and I’m here to punt. I’m losing to some nerd at poker either way, so what else is new for me? Is the rage around poker bots because for human poker pro nerds the feeling of losing to a different kind of nerd is a new feeling?

Have they always been the Nerdiest Nerds, and now the Gen Z computer wizards are walking all over them? Welcome to my Millennial sense of self-worth, human nerd, pick up the burger flipper tool and get ready to fill your flesh hole with robot dick.

So, let’s recap the winrate hierarchy here:

• The absolute rag-ends are losing to me and players like me
• Players like me are losing to decent human players/winning bots
• Decent human players are losing to the best human players/winning bots
• The best human players are losing to winning bots
• Winning bots are losing only to other better bots

I’ve never been top of the tree, the money never trickled down, and now you want me to care that there is a new top of the tree? At least I can now get a game 24/7 and bots play fast.

I do understand some people will think I’m extremely stupid, and it’s not an entirely unfair accusation, but if I’ve comfortably accepted my leisure money is gone, then do I really care where it’s gone if I’ve had a good time?

I satellite into the $530PKO on Stars sometimes; I’m so obscenely dead in that tournament when I sit at any table and it’s shit-all to do with bots. Still, my ego drives me forward and I continue to play satellites and cling to the dream of binking the $530PKO.
I don’t know how to do this kind of maths, but I suspect I would have a better ROI in the short-term against the bots in a $530PKO than some of those human machines.

Only a small part of my engagement with poker is relevant to winning money, and professional poker players should absolutely understand that about long term recreational players (aka, their income stream), if our engagement was solely with winning money, none of us would play anymore.

I love all strategy games, and I cannot help but respect the brilliance of poker bots, a strategic power move so potent in terms of success that bots continue to dominate some rooms, and sneak into others, despite quite stringent security approaches.

That said, I do not feel negative about this being strategic end-game for humans v bots in online poker. I’ve watched the Terminator Movies and Planet of the Apes, the monkeys always survive.

Poker has only ever constituted some of my strategy game hours, and I play some extremely boring, spreadsheet based games (TRIMPS, FactoryTown, Kingdoms and Castles). Last month I spent most of a weekend working out how to code blocks to ensure an automated delivery of breadrolls to a digital shop. I effectively built (almost drag and drop) a Bread Roll Bot and I found it extremely satisfying to see it in action.

If a poker site would give me a similar UX and I could “code” my own bot, tell it what it should be doing and when, and watch it lose my money making the same poor decisions I would, then it would be the first poker site to drag me away from Stars since Paradise closed down.
Making me actively click “fold” on 84os UTG on every table is so 2003.

I would play in a tournament with bots, for the same daft reason as I play in the $530PKO with human beasts: My ego is out of control.

With a framework centered around the poker business of bots, the industry undoubtably shifts, but with all players on the same bot-structured platform, the strategy playing field becomes as level as it ever has been in poker; two tech resource streams of product feature and security meet, because the best ways to service the players now also inherently services the identification of potential bad actors.

As a Product Marketer, bots suggest new opportunities for poker acquisition, giving me the only real hope I’ve had for over a decade that a product-attracted next generation of online poker players could be a reality.
New players need to learn to play the game at the CURRENT starting level without greedy humans directly, or via bots, sharking their money. House-bots, trained to have a 90% RTP and trained to make a noob understand what online poker is now in 2024 are the recruitment agents we all need.
In theory, this model is attachable to any poker product, but the industry attitude towards bots is so increasingly negative, this project would be a hard sell to any product team and their concerns would be PR related rather than technical feasibility.

As a recreational strategy game player, the idea I could spend my gaming hours tinkering with my poker bots and then let them loose like I do my TRIMPS for eight hours is really interesting to me.

My online poker hours have been declining over the last five years. It’s partly because other games are so good and cheap and easy to download now, but also because I don’t want to take the next step to become better at poker, cos it’s boring and hard work, and we’re talking about my leisure time.

In my free time, I want to do things I’m interested in, and I’m a lot more interested in a drag and drop style bot-builder than I am in interpreting reams of solver output.
Poker has best suited a very specific type of person for a long time, and maybe the online game is evolving; the cultural meteor that is AI is coming in fast in all industries and of course the dominant dinosaurs don’t like it.

I’m just a little recreational rat, hiding in my hole whilst the world as we know it explodes.
I think I can co-habit with the poker bots; they can take my money, they just need to show me a good time.