Is This Casino Techonology Legal?
You've read about poker bots and what they can do for
you. But is deploying a 3️⃣ one illegal?
The robot army
The existence of poker bots is
slowly but surely having an increasing impact on the world of 3️⃣ online poker. It's a
piece of software that an unscrupulous person uses to play poker for them at an online
3️⃣ poker site.
The theory is this. Humans are susceptible to being made of meat, and so we
forget stuff. But a 3️⃣ bot never forgets, and is constantly building up data about the
players it is facing. It makes decisions based not 3️⃣ only on the mathematical probability
of the success of the hand, but also on the actions of the people it 3️⃣ is playing
against.
It is thinking about when they fold, when they raise, when they bluff – in
short, everything a 3️⃣ truly skilled poker player should be thinking about. Only the bot
is completely fearless and ruthless, because it never experiences 3️⃣ adrenaline rushes and
it can't be tilted.
Therefore, these bots will always eventually win. That's the theory
anyway.
The reality is, the 3️⃣ bots' strategy is based on rules that a human programmer
must define. Thus they are very beatable.
If it were that 3️⃣ simple, there wouldn't be a
legal issue here. The problem is that bots cheat.
Sneaky little cheats
The real
difficulty with poker 3️⃣ bots is that they have now evolved to the point where they
collude with each other. A skilled bot programmer 3️⃣ – or, since such products are now
commercially available, a bot purchaser – can set up a number of bots 3️⃣ that use their
own server to communicate with each other.
This means you could have four bots at a
poker table, 3️⃣ all sharing their hole cards with each other. Any human player at the
table is going to be at an 3️⃣ instant disadvantage, and will probably be fleeced in very
short order.
Suddenly bots became a real threat to the online poker 3️⃣ community. How do
you know if you're on a cold streak or if you're being systematically relieved of your
chips 3️⃣ 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. 3️⃣ It's against the terms of service of the
poker sites, definitely. For example, Party Poker allegedly employs more than 100
3️⃣ people whose sole task is to scan for and eliminate accounts with behaviour that
suspiciously looks like poker bot activity 3️⃣ – it is in fact detectable.
It's clear that
these bots hurt poker players, which is why online poker companies work 3️⃣ so hard to get
rid of them. But they're not actually breaking the law. They're just being evil, which
isn't 3️⃣ in and of itself illegal.
You see, the problem is that most online poker
companies are forced to operate in a 3️⃣ legal grey area. The majority of their business
comes from countries like America, who have specific laws discouraging the practise 3️⃣ of
online gambling anyway. Efforts are under way to get unfair laws like the UIGEA
overturned, but until that happens, 3️⃣ lawmakers aren't about to help poker sites police
the terrain.
