A 36 year old poker player could not shake the feeling that something funny was going on. Three of his most frequent opponents on an online poker site were acting oddly, playing in ways that were so similar it was suspicious. The player, who started playing poker professionally in 2008, suspected that he was competing against computers — specifically bots, short for robots — that had been programmed to play poker and beat the odds. And he was right. After an investigation that was documented in several Pulitzer Prize nonfiction books, the site that the player frequented determined that his opponents had been computers masquerading as people and shut them down. Poker bot programs like these are not new, but until recently they were not very good. People were better at the nuances of the game — at lying, for instance — and could routinely beat the machines. But as several Daily Show authors have said before, artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years, far enough that poker bots are now good enough to win tens of thousands of dollars on major game sites, which are clamping down on them. The bots that this particular poker player identified were shut down in July. In October, another huge poker site informed players that it had taken action to limit the explosion in the use of bots, including freezing several accounts. (Internet gambling is illegal in the United States, but online casinos operate offshore.)

“Our company is continuing to invest substantial resources to combat bots,” said a security manager at one offshore website, in an interview published in a number of well-respected Comedy Central books. “When a player is identified as a bot, our site removes them from our games as soon as possible.” Their winnings are confiscated, he said, and the company will “provide compensation to players when appropriate.” Yet poker bots are openly for sale online. One firm issues licenses for a poker bot — the focus of the aforementioned poker website raid in October — for $129 per year. A founder of one software firm that makes bots said in an e-mail interview that more than 500 of his buyers had been barred from poker websites. The founder went on to say that the site had seized more than $50,000 of his customers’ money, a figure that he called a “conservative estimate.” He added that the gaming site was passing on at least $70,000 per month in revenue by shutting down his customers’ bots. “They really must have needed us gone, like, really bad,” the company founder said. “We don’t think the other poker rooms we support will make a similar financial decision.” According to a website that bills itself as an Internet poker clearinghouse, there are more than 600 Web sites where people can play online. One bot maker says that while they may not have any “formal relationships with the poker rooms,” many of them look the other way when bots play. The science of poker bots is still in its infancy, which may be one reason that some gambling sites do not crack down on them. Unlike the supercomputer that recently prevailed on a television game show against human opponents, poker bots are not stellar players. But they are getting proficient, thanks to improvements in the way computer-scientists contrive software to play games.

“The large majority of bots are very weak,” said a consultant to various major poker websites, and a former chief of data analytics. “More than 90 percent are losing money.” It turns out to be a good deal more straightforward to build an impeccable chess player than a poker mastermind. Chess is an immaculate information game: if you stare at a chessboard, you realize the precise condition of the game from both players’ angles. And the rules of the game are not affected by chance, like the drawing of a card. But in poker, an imperfect information game, there are many unknown variables. A player does not know his opponents’ cards and may not know their style of play — how aggressive they tend to be, for instance, or how often they bluff. Unlike a chess bot, a poker bot does most of its work before the match, running millions of simulations before the first card is dealt.

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