These days, casual online poker players who go online have likely played against a bot, sometimes even without their knowledge. Having said that, they likely lost their money to the bot. Bloomberg’s Kit Chellel reports that these hobbyists are growing weary of losing money and are abandoning the game.
Chellel writes that without these players putting in money, the professionals wouldn’t earn a profit, the websites wouldn’t get a percentage of the action–the rake, in poker parlance–and the game’s economy would collapse. His deeply reported story covers the rise of the bots, who’s behind them, as well as how they’ve change the game. Even the best humans train with software to be more ruthlessly efficient. Chellel also writes that the game is now less about psychology, spectacular bluffs or calls, and more about revealing as little as possible to opponents and grinding out the percentages.
He adds that machines have taught people to play better, more boring poker. At one point, deeply reported is not an exaggeration. Chellel meets with group of young men in Armenia. These young men, adept in the mathematical dark arts, belong to a Russian collective called Bot Farm Corporation. The poker community reviles BF Corp. for the way their AI bots have transformed the game. Yet the twist to the tale is that they recognize that poker can’t afford to keep losing hobbyists too. They tell Chellel they are working on a new machine model that would match players of similar skills against each other. This would make for more competitive action and likely to keep the hobbyists coming back. One of the men says that they need to make a new game.
