White Belt Poker

I know an awful lot of stuff has been written about bots destroying online poker, but this article is quite interesting:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/pokerbots.html

I find the guy’s justification for selling the software extremely dubious and deeply unethical:

[Ray] Bornert had no ethical qualms about creating a poker bot. The way he saw it, the poker sites were duping people into believing that a game of hold ‘em online was as safe and secure as one at any casino in Vegas. “The reality is that the game changed the moment it moved to the Internet,” Bornert says. Bots and bot-aided collusion were inevitable. Rather than seduce anyone into thinking such things didn’t exist, Bornert had another notion: Put the power in the players’ hands. By democratizing computer-assisted firepower, he’d make it part of the competition. “It’s like football – if you don’t wear a helmet and pads, you’re going to get hurt,” he says. “A poker bot is your equipment.” And if that is considered unethical, then so be it. “I’d rather be unethical than be a victim,” he says. “This is intentional civil disobedience.”

This is nothing to do with the democratisation of technology, it’s about making money by cheating people. If stopping people being duped is really his concern then why not work on creating software that analyses betting patterns and behavior in order to sniff out bots? I might even think about buying that.

Ultimately, if everyone was using a bot to play limit hold’em, the game would be about programming skills rather than poker playing skills, in the same way that a sport with no drug testing would be about chemistry skill rather than physical ability.