World Cheating Championship

Finally, a championship to make mom proud.

Anywhere you turn in the world of internet poker, you hear rumblings about poker “bots” (short for “robots”), computer programs that can play online poker automatically, making decisions based on the cards dealt to it, the cards on the board, and the opponents’ moves. Bots are prohibited by the poker rooms, as one might expect, and even though there is the occasional instance of bot use, they are not nearly as prevalent as many conspiracy theorists like to claim. In fact, the bots that do make an appearance usually get ferreted out very quickly by the online poker rooms and the associated user account gets banned.

While bots generally will not beat a good player on a regular basis, especially at higher stakes, they are most definitely considered cheating devices. The primary advantages they have over their human opponents are that they never fatigue and their play does not get affected by emotions. You will never see a bot go on tilt.

Now, an unethical loser named Ken Mages has coordinated with Darren Shuster, a Los Angeles public relations executive, to create the World Series of Poker Robots, to be played in Las Vegas June 12-15, with a $100,000 grand prize. In the contest, bots will compete against each other at the poker table to see which one is the ultimate cheating machine. An online poker room has even sponsored it. Which one? Why, none other than attention-craving site GoldenPalace.com, which has been known to throw money at other ridiculous things like a cheese sandwich that supposedly depicted the image of the Virgin Mary. Considering GoldenPalace has a policy forbidding poker bots, its sponsorship is shady, at best.

Mages has developed a bot that has, according to him, been successful at low stakes games.

"I could sit down at a 50-cent table, put 50 bucks in the account, go to bed and wake up with at least $75," Mages said.

Of course, making money with the bot at the poker tables wasn’t enough, so Mages began selling copies of the software for $60. Because of his unwillingness to provide technical support to his morals-poor customers, he sold out to Hong Kong engineer, Ben Lo. It should be mentioned that Lo will be one of the six competitors at the World Series of Poker Robots.

Another bot designer, Jonathan Schaeffer, at least sees the benefit to poker robots. Because programmers have to take human behavior and incomplete information into consideration, the lessons learned from bot development could apply to other programs used for “real world” issues. That may be a genuine opinion, but it is tough to feel good about it when he probably tests the bot in real money games.

Here’s to hoping a virus hits the World Series of Poker Robots network.

Originally published June 22, 2005