> Personally I would rather take the luck out of it

Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.

I do and I play duplicate bridge, a game that has taken the luck out of a card game. I just like poker theory - I ran a bot for years - and I just don’t like variance that much and I guess I like the game for the strategy more than who has the most chips at the end, although obviously without the hazard it’s not anywhere as entertaining

Curious what do you mean by "I ran a bot"? Like, you programmed and/or operated a bot that played on real money sites?

I programmed and ran a bot that played on real money sites.

Oh, so you cheated people out of their money. That's not cool.

Not in the slightest. No different than a player playing optimally or with tight adherence to a strategy like Brunson's SuperSystem. Game Theory Optimal Poker is just the given when playing MTT - although many platforms have some form of Real Time Assistance detection.

Even in live games they use poker solvers in between breaks to optimise your playing potential and reduce the range of 'playable hands'.

Yes in the fullest. For one thing it's against the ToS of every site. But it's also just plainly unethical. Even the most elite players are merely reaching a moderately accurate approximation of optimal play, which completely pales in comparison to a bot that can find it on every hand. Of course a bot that simply assumes opponents are playing co-optimal strategies will only be minimally exploitative, but more sophisticated bots can easily incorporate historical data and find correct maximally exploitative deviations against opponents in real time, which again is something that even the best players are only able to do accurately a fraction of the time.

Also it's laughable to suggest that playing optimally is "just the given" in MTTs, which are arguably the softest format available where almost nobody in a given field is playing anywhere close to optimal. And even more laughable to suggest that modern bots are akin to players adhering to SuperSystem, a poker strategy book written nearly 50 years ago which was already extremely outdated before the advent of solvers 10 years ago.

Oh no! Not the ToS that hides inappropriately behind AML/KYC to stop you withdrawing cash, or arbitrarily lets a platform ban your account and seize funds with little recourse to any legal authority (as they're generally operating out of weird territories like Gibraltar/Isle of Man or Malta to circumvent other rules).

As for unethical, things like PioSolver, MonkerSolver, and PokerSnowie are basically de facto standard for play at high level online - and are absolutely used at breaktimes in live play. Then you have people multi-monitoring, or running GTOWizard in a VM, as a given.

You're basically claiming that all bots in action are Pluribus style, which is just nonsense. I bring up SuperSystem since its the earliest reference I can think of by a Pro to the concept of range advantage.

The modern poker sites basically just teach game theory optimal... which ends up with people running GTOWizard as a given. The best bots I've seen that avoid detection are basically doing some variant of the strategies outlined in modern guides like RIOs From the Ground Up.

It's a wild false equivalency to imply that using GTOw or Pio as a study tool is the same as using them for real time assistance.

And even if bots are imperfect, people and especially recreational players, don't sign up to real money poker sites to play against bots. Everyone knows intuitively they're at a massive disadvantage over a bot that can execute any strategy perfectly ad infinitum, even if the strategy itself is imperfect.

If you're going to be cheating scum, just own up to the fact that you're a bad guy; don't make intellectually dishonest justifications for it.

If you want to pretend you know what you're talking about, please at least reference Jonathan Tomayao at the WSOP this year. Person at the rail is four-time WSOP event winner and owner of the DTO Poker Trainer app Dominik Nitsche.

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2024/07/wsop-controversy-poker-solv...

Bryan Paris - "“Having this extra feedback between hands is helpful but a far cry from the automation of the game. Even with this feedback, Tamayo very much earned his victory,”

Tamako - "Joe and Dom actually helped. If they weren’t here, I likely do not win this tournament.”

As for the rest, I personally accept the imperfect world and play RTA-less - I'm not a naive child throwing slurs about because I can't accept the world has moved on.

{Example of an Upswing Couch and Pro who previously played online 6-max for a living, and his incredulity due to hilarious RTA in a live televised tournament) https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/1ebi5aq/do_you_want_...

I know what I'm talking about - this thread was about someone who admitted to running a BOT online for real money. Like, fully automated no human in the loop. Which again, is just straight up cheating people out of their money. That's wildly different from what Tamayo was doing, which I don't consider cheating either, at least not by the current rules. Though I do think it would be fairer if tournament rules were changed to disallow coaching while the level clock is running but I digress.

Literally nobody respectable in the poker world argues that you should be able farm human opponents with bots, regardless of how close to optimal the bots are programmed to play. Except you, I guess.

> Personally I would rather take the luck out of it and attempt to normalize (perhaps by playing duplicate hands)

There's something called "match poker" which does exactly that.

The reason poker is a successful game, outside of the inherent fun, low barrier to entry, and high skill ceiling, is that you can leverage one or many different skills to achieve victory hand to hand.

This includes 'soft skills' like body-language reads, speech-play, false-representation, baiting players into non-optimal play, as well as the underlying mathematical basis.

The luck element - known elsewhere as RNG Jesus - is mitigated completely over 10,000 hands by appropriately skilled players. There's a reason the composition of the final tables of the WSOP can be so static year on year, multiple bracelet winners wouldn't be a thing otherwise .

A fully optimised 'safe' player can be beaten both short-term and long-term live by a player who is skilled in reading tells, or simply bluffing. The BBV may be different, but the concept of a 'hero fold' exists for a reason - and is often more satisfying than a 'hero call' to veteran players.

I’m an expert poker player.

What I said was 100% correct and didn’t need a bunch of extra unrelated stuff.

I’m making a fundamental point about randomness and poker which you are failing to understand. Stop and try to understand for a second instead of launching into mansplaining.

And I'm a golden retriever. My tail wags when I've a good hand.

Please take your reductive misandry elsewhere. It's impressing no one.

So you’ve heard of mansplaining before, I’m guessing quite a few times.

Here is a suggestion. Read the comment the other person states and then engage with it instead of attempting to use it as a jumping off point for your post.

And btw, luck does not disappear over 10k hands. The final table at the wsop has not been static.

Since 2000 when hold’em poker became popular nobody has repeated back to back wins. If it was a game of skill we would expect the best player to keep winning.

Of course. Anyone with Direct Reports in IT gets training on how to handle narcissists and self-appointed experts when they devolve into bigotry to derail conversations.

As for your contention regarding the modern era, I simply answer 'Phil Hellmuth' with his 154 WSOP cashes 64 WSOP final tables. Negreanu, Ferguson and Seidel all have 40+ WSOP final tables. Hellmuth also has 17 bracelets to Ivey's 11.

But zero back to back winners since 2000.