Is This Casino Techonology Legal?
You've read about poker bots and what they can do for
you. But is deploying a 🎅 one illegal?
The robot army
The existence of poker bots is
slowly but surely having an increasing impact on the world of 🎅 online poker. It's a
piece of software that an unscrupulous person uses to play poker for them at an online
🎅 poker site.
The theory is this. Humans are susceptible to being made of meat, and so we
forget stuff. But a 🎅 bot never forgets, and is constantly building up data about the
players it is facing. It makes decisions based not 🎅 only on the mathematical probability
of the success of the hand, but also on the actions of the people it 🎅 is playing
against.
It is thinking about when they fold, when they raise, when they bluff – in
short, everything a 🎅 truly skilled poker player should be thinking about. Only the bot
is completely fearless and ruthless, because it never experiences 🎅 adrenaline rushes and
it can't be tilted.
Therefore, these bots will always eventually win. That's the theory
anyway.
The reality is, the 🎅 bots' strategy is based on rules that a human programmer
must define. Thus they are very beatable.
If it were that 🎅 simple, there wouldn't be a
legal issue here. The problem is that bots cheat.
Sneaky little cheats
The real
difficulty with poker 🎅 bots is that they have now evolved to the point where they
collude with each other. A skilled bot programmer 🎅 – or, since such products are now
commercially available, a bot purchaser – can set up a number of bots 🎅 that use their
own server to communicate with each other.
This means you could have four bots at a
poker table, 🎅 all sharing their hole cards with each other. Any human player at the
table is going to be at an 🎅 instant disadvantage, and will probably be fleeced in very
short order.
Suddenly bots became a real threat to the online poker 🎅 community. How do
you know if you're on a cold streak or if you're being systematically relieved of your
chips 🎅 by an army of little cheating robots?
This has to be illegal.
It's got to be
against the law, right?
Bizarrely, it's not. 🎅 It's against the terms of service of the
poker sites, definitely. For example, Party Poker allegedly employs more than 100
🎅 people whose sole task is to scan for and eliminate accounts with behaviour that
suspiciously looks like poker bot activity 🎅 – it is in fact detectable.
It's clear that
these bots hurt poker players, which is why online poker companies work 🎅 so hard to get
rid of them. But they're not actually breaking the law. They're just being evil, which
isn't 🎅 in and of itself illegal.
You see, the problem is that most online poker
companies are forced to operate in a 🎅 legal grey area. The majority of their business
comes from countries like America, who have specific laws discouraging the practise 🎅 of
online gambling anyway. Efforts are under way to get unfair laws like the UIGEA
overturned, but until that happens, 🎅 lawmakers aren't about to help poker sites police
the terrain.
