The Hobby of Poker Playing Robots

In 2004 I tried playing poker online for the first time. I quickly became bored and wondered if it would be possible to make a little bit of money by automating the complete poker playing process. There were different programs out there already created but none of them were capable of doing what was needed to create a winner. They all had their pros and cons, but there was no solid solution. I am not a gambler, but I am always searching for interesting challenges, and this was a big one.

Before I continue, I would like to explain the differences between Poker and all other casino games. But before I get into that I would like to explain how odds work.

The simplest definition of odds is: the likelihood of a thing occurring rather than not occurring

If we flip a coin, there is a possibility of 2 outcomes. The coin is either heads or tails. If you were betting, you would have to choose the outcome by selecting heads or tails. Your chances of winning are 1 in 2. In the end, it’s a 50% chance of winning. If you were to take that coin and flip it 3 times the outcome could be HHH, TTT, HHT, TTH, HTT or THH. T being tails, and H being Heads. If this flip is truly random, the more you flip the coin, the more even the outcome. Flipping the coin 3 times might bring us heads each time, but flipping the coin 1 million times will bring it much closer to 50/50.

You can try flipping virtual coins on this website and see the results yourself:

https://www.mathmammoth.com/practice/coin-tosser

Every game played at a casino has certain odds. Let’s take a look at roulette, which is pretty much the easiest game to understand. A roulette board looks like this:

The Odds of winning, or the probability of winning, is on the following tables:

The important column to look at here is the one on the right, the House Edge Column. Basically this is telling us the house, or the casino, will ALWAYS have an advantage. If you have ever been to any casino around the world, it is this advantage that pays for all the expenses, staff, rent, curtains, electricity…all the casinos in Vegas…If you play roulette, just like flipping the coins and getting TTT, you might win at roulette, but eventually if you play long enough, you lose to the house, because the house always has an edge. All casino games are like this, except poker.

When playing Poker, you do not play against the casino; you play against other poker players. The casino makes money by taking a percentage of your winnings, this is called rake.

There is always a big discussion on how much of poker is skill, and how much is luck, but this goes beyond the scope of explaining the hobby. All we need to know is to win at poker playing at a casino; we just need to make more than the rake. If the average rake per hand played is 1$, and we average out 1.25$ per hand we are making money. Beat the rake, and you are a winning poker player.

Creating a robot to play poker for you is not the easiest task around. Like I said earlier, there is software out there but it’s not very good. Creating a robot is also not a one man job, so I had to put together a team of developers to cross the next hurdle.

By this time, I was already a member on different poker websites and a few programming websites. I started discussions about my idea, and before you know it I had my own website where the topics were related to making poker robots, or…as we like to call it poker bots…Google it!

I thought the best way to tackle this was to create a team, so I recruited everyone and anyone that showed the least bit of interest, and there were about 40 people in the group. Like a professional sports team, I slowly started to take people out of the group. Some were not interested, some had no skills, others were not willing to work, some had 10 different skills, yet others hardly had one. Eventually there were about 10 of us. We called ourselves Lab One.

We started putting our ideas together and soon realized all the software we had to work with wouldn’t cut it. It would not even come close. Luckily some of Lab One’s members were freakishly smart, and one of them created the software we needed, during business trips late at night from various hotel rooms across North America. He wanted us to use it, but he had one request…He wanted it to be open source so we can share it with the world.

For the people reading this and do not know, open source is software for which the source code is freely available. If you do not like the program, you could tweak it to your liking, because you see the code and can change it for the better.

He convinced us that for this particular project it would be better to give out the code to anyone for free, this way; potentially hundreds of people test it and report the bugs. The software will evolve much faster this way.? Better to have as many people testing the software than just the 10 original Lab One guys. The software is still available for download, for free of course, because it is open source. The game is Texas Holdem, and the software is called Open Holdem.

Open Holdem is software that clicks buttons for you while playing online poker. Before clicking buttons it must make decisions on what buttons to click using its own poker logic. The software has its own default poker logic, but it is not very good at playing. It plays basic poker, but it is easily beatable. Lab One does not share its private poker playing logic, you’re on your own there.

Like golf, skiing knitting and needlepoint, any hobby will cost you money. This includes poker. You must stick to your limits, because you can easily get carried away. Lab One discussed what our limits were, we could not have one guy willing to lose 2000$ a month and another willing to lose only 50$. Everybody chose a limit, they were willing to lose, and we averaged it out, the ones on the high end would help the ones on the low end. We were a team and needed to work together. We started testing with real money online, at first the results were not that great, but the losses were not very big. And 10 people testing together, we were able to get a lot of statistics to go over by the end of the week. One week for live testing, one week for discussions, one week for tweaking then we start over again.

Eventually one January the money started rolling in. By the end of January I purchased 2 more computers. By the end of February there were 4 more. In March I purchased 4 servers from dell USA and went to pick them up at a rented mailbox. I shipped one to Italy, one to Holland, and one to the UK, and the last one came home with me. In November I purchased another 4, and again sent them to different parts of Europe. The money used to purchase the 6 extra servers was from some of the Lab One members. It’s funny how you can trust someone with thousands of dollars even though you never met in person. It was all through my web sites forum. Finally we were being rewarded for our time.

Because one poker account will bring you a certain amount of money, the more accounts you had, the more money you made. I opened accounts using different people I knew, equally sharing the profits. Eventually I started to worry about the legality of it all, and if this was taxable income. Lottery winnings and gambling profits are not taxable in Quebec. As for the poker bots, they were not cheating they were just playing their cards making the preprogrammed decisions that we as a group thought would be the best way to play them.

Because of this hobby, I had to learn the different technologies that needed to get the job done. It is not every day someone says they use VMware ESX at home on a daily basis, or has a more robust computer network than some of the companies he has worked for. Everything must work properly. It has to. If there is a problem I need to solve it fast, as any downtime costs money. It is the same in my hobby as it is in the real world.

Maybe that last paragraph was a little too dramatic. Maybe I was tooting my horn a little too much…let me toot some more…

Ok Max, so we understand you recruited a bunch of guys and one of them created some open source software. So what?

This is poker we are talking about, not Tic-Tac-Toe! Let’s look at another game played, a human versus a computer opponent.

What is the difference? Chess is a game with perfect information. There are no surprises. All the information you need is right there on an 8 by 8 checkered board. Nothing is hidden. Poker on the other hand is more complex. It’s making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It is a game of imperfect information, where multiple competing players must understand estimation, prediction, risk management, deception, counter-deception, and player profiling.

Finally, let me talk about the members of my team, by using their nicknames, For most of them I don’t know their real names anyway As a team we have been working together for over 7 years.

Winngy is a guy from Ireland and is a master at solving problems before they start.

Folder Lives in Amsterdam and a perfectionist when it comes to testing.

Nick Coldhand Is a tour guide from Italy. Master of automation. I am still trying to figure out if it’s because of laziness… ??

Single Malt the nutcase who created this software…in hotel rooms…for fun, is a database administrator.

Brass Knuckles, from either north or South Dakota is our poker statistics expert.

Cybercriminal is in Costa Rica, originally from Baltimore. When email first came out he was the biggest spammer in the world. He moved to Costa Rica, paid a woman to marry him. I had the chance to visit them in Costa Rica. She called him a dummy. He paid her and eventually she fell in love with him. Together 26 years with 3 children.

Stinkypete is the quiet one. Only speaks when spoken to. Sometimes we think he is dead. It seems like whenever he posts something on the forum, it’s always a screenshot.

SPUD, the C++ expert was originally from France, but moved to Montreal because it’s French too. He says it hard to learn French here…

BillW is from Texas, raises cattle, and is a fine poker player. Knows nothing about a computer other than turning it on. 76 years old.

And finally, there is me, Max in Montreal. The guy who put together the team, the website, and always willing to show someone how to do something, explain something, tell a story, or learn something new and exciting. Computers are my passion; and teamwork is the key to success. I could not have succeeded in this hobby if it was not for the 9 others in Lab One. We all pushed each other to learn more, at the same time we enjoyed doing it.

I have been doing this for over 20 years and still going strong. Most of my computer knowledge was learned because of this hobby. It is easier to learn something when you enjoy doing it. It was always a question if I should add this information about me when looking for a job. Would it be taken positively or negatively? When I tell people about robots playing poker, the first thing they might think is yeah, every degenerate gambler has a system…

I am proud of what our team has accomplished, and the relationships created over the years. I don’t think of myself as a gambler, I think of myself as a problem solver, and after reading the story about my hobby, I hope you think so too.

Website:

maxinmontreal.com