The Geniuses Who Invented the World’s Best Poker Bots

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Computers have outplayed humans in chess and Go for decades. But poker was long considered unhackable. The game requires not just crunching numbers, but creativity and complex strategy. That only started to change about 10 years ago, when a new generation of unbeatable poker bots began to appear online. 

The makers of the technology remained in the shadows, so Bloomberg’s Kit Chellel set out to find them. On today’s Big Take podcast, he joins David Gura to share the story of how a group of Russian students invented the world’s best online poker bots and what that means for the multi-billion-dollar industry.

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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

David Gura: Bloomberg reporter Kit Chellel has spent a lot of time lately following Russian poker players, including one player who goes by the name Feruell.

Kit Chellel: It can be a very lucrative way of making a living if you’re good. And Feruell is extremely good.

Gura: Feruell plays poker online, and he’s known for having a very cerebral, disciplined approach to the game.

Chellel: For him, poker is a serious business. It’s a game of probability and mathematics. He studies it. He has studied it for years. It’s no joke to him.

Gura: Well, about a decade ago, Feruell got into a high-profile feud with another Russian poker player — someone with a very different personality, named Karpov.

Chellel: He’s kind of an internet personality. He dishes out life wisdom on all kinds of subjects from gambling through to sort of romantic strategy. And he has some controversial views that I won’t air here. But yeah, he’s a sort of nationalistic right wing sort of character, quite uncompromising. But he does also play poker.

Gura: As Kit tells it, Feruell was reading posts in a Russian-language chatroom, and something snapped.

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Chellel: So, when Feruell saw Karpov on his favorite poker forum talking about his experience with prostitutes, say, or going out and getting blind drunk. I think he took it a little personally. It was an insult to the thing that he takes very seriously. And so he called out, you know, this is complete nonsense. I bet he can’t even play poker. And Karpov, of course, replied almost immediately, I challenge you to a fight — challenged him to a one-on-one poker contest to prove that he could do what he said he did.

Gura: Karpov had thrown down the gauntlet: a matchup between the disciplined professional and the braggadocious troll. They arranged a table on the website “PokerStars,” and the battle began. It did not go the way Feruell expected.

Chellel: They played a few hundred hands, and, you know, Karpov completely dominated. I think he won $20,000 by the end of their session.

Gura: And that was it. Feruell had lost. He’d been defeated by a bombastic, undisciplined wild card.

Chellel: His pride was hurt, but I think he was also aware that there are ways to get an unfair advantage in online poker, and that Karpov might have been using one of those.

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Gura: Feruell suspected Karpov had used a bot. Now, this wouldn’t’ve been a big surprise in other games. Computers have outplayed humans in chess and Go for decades. But poker is different. It was long considered an unhackable game. And that only started to change about 10 years ago, when more and more poker bots started to appear online. And, Kit says, they’re winning.

Chellel: So I came to this with the idea that I would find the source of all the poker bots, find the genius mind behind these poker playing machines and find out how they were doing it.

Gura: I’m David Gura, and this is “The Big Take,” from Bloomberg News. Today on the show: how a group of Russian students hacked online poker, and what that means for the multi-billion-dollar industry.

Gura: A confession, and I’m not bluffing: I’ve never played online poker. So, I asked Bloomberg’s Kit Chellel what these sites look like.

Chellel: It’s normally a green felt digital table. And everyone else on the table will be represented by — it’s normally a little cartoon image and a username, which won’t be their real name. So you don’t really know who you’re playing.

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Gura: But otherwise, Kit says the game is pretty much the same as the poker you’d play at a regular table. 

Chellel: You make bets, you fold, you raise. Everything happens a bit more quickly than real life poker ‘cause it’s a click of the button. But yeah, it works— to all practical purposes, it’s just like the real thing.

Gura: Online poker started in the late nineties and early aughts, and Kit says its breakout moment was this rags-to-riches event in 2003. An unknown accountant from Tennessee qualified for the World Series of Poker. Watching the footage from back then, you can hear how exciting it must’ve been to see it live.

World Series of Poker Archive: This could be the last card of the 2003 World Series of Poker…

Chellel: No one expected him to do well, found himself on the final table with some of the biggest stars in the game and won several million dollars.

World Series of Poker Archive: With a full house, Chris Moneymaker eliminates Sam Farha. And the 27 year-old has stepped out of the virtual poker room. And in a very swift and unlikely manner is atop the poker world.

Chellel: You couldn’t think of a more perfect name—

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Gura: That’s pretty good.

Chellel: —for a poker player. As far as I know it’s his real name. But a guy with the name Moneymaker who comes from nowhere and wins this massive tournament. It sort of piqued interest in poker as a game. And in the years that followed that online poker grew explosively. There were millions of players around the world trying to have a go at this. You know, many of them thought this was a viable way for them to make money.

Gura: Do we have any sense of how much money is, is bet on online poker in a given year, say, or just how big money-wise this is?

Chellel: I think the revenue that the poker sites make from online poker is in the region of three billion dollars per year. But of course, that’s a tiny portion of the amount of money that changes hands. So you’re looking at probably a hundred billion dollars or more changing hands in terms of bets being made online. Which is a significant sum of money.

Gura: And a significant prize for the first people who could build a bot that could beat it. I asked Kit why it took so long to develop a poker “bot” that could hold its own.

Chellel: It’s arguably the most complicated game for machine intelligence to master. The reason poker is so challenging for machines is that it’s a game of incomplete information. You don’t know what the other players on the table are holding. You have to make an assumption based on their behavior about what they might have. So, you have to make a guess about the best course of action. And also you have to lie. If you never bluff in poker, you will lose more often than not. You need to be able to sometimes falsely give the impression you have a great hand just to win hands you shouldn’t win. And these things are really difficult for computers. Now, in chess, all they have to do is process a very large number of scenarios. It’s basically a data processing exercise. You could argue it’s not real intelligence. It’s just crunching numbers, but poker requires creative thought.

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Gura: For decades, the best bots were being developed at computer science programs at universities in the US and Canada. But even those left a lot to be desired.

Chellel: The best academic bots were not very good. In fact, they were a bit of a laughingstock. The bots would get very easily confused and melt down. Faced with a situation they couldn’t process, they would make incomprehensible decisions, and the top human players used to absolutely hammer them.

Gura: And it was in that vacuum that a group of Russian students saw an opportunity.They were math whizzes and poker players, who were already using online games as a way to make money. And they realized that if they could build a bot that could guarantee victory, they could make a fortune.

Chellel: It was Darwinian. It had to be good, otherwise it wouldn’t make them any money.

Gura: They called their bot “the brain,” and Kit says it wasn’t just good. It was dominant. In 2012 and 2013, when the group entered their bot in the world online computer poker contest, the brain beat out bots developed by teams at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Alberta, which proved the brain was one of the world’s best. And as the brain grew and developed, so did the ambitions of its makers.

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Chellel: What started out as a quite a small bot farm, which is them and a few of their friends operating computer software, running it day and night and trying to make as much money as they could — essentially selling access to their poker brain. And doing that, they could play thousands of games a day as opposed to a few hundred.

Gura: Those students decided to franchise the brain. They were willing to partner with anyone who wanted to operate their own bot farm. And in exchange for access to the bot, their “partners” agreed to share a portion of their winnings. Within poker circles, the whole enterprise came to be known as the Bot Farm Corporation — or BF Corp, for short. The only limit to their growth was how long they could stay under the radar, which wasn’t very long.

Chellel: Users who were logging on to a poker website and just losing over and over in robotic fashion were complaining and saying, I’m sick of this website, there’s so many bots on here, it’s hopeless. And so I think websites realized it was ultimately— it was going to hurt their business model. And so they started deploying technology to get rid of bots and keep them off the site.

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Gura: But remember how Kit called the bot “Darwinian?” When sites put up defenses, the brain’s designers would develop a workaround. And eventually, they got rid of the franchise model. They just started selling it to whoever wanted to buy it. And all of a sudden, anyone could buy a bot. There was no stopping it. Which created a big problem for the industry.

Chellel: A few years ago, some Morgan Stanley analysts said it was an existential problem for poker: why would anyone play a game against an unbeatable machine?

Gura: With websites awash in bots and it becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between humans and computers, the game was corrupted, and players were leaving in droves. After the break: Why the people behind “BF Corp” are now fighting to save online poker.

Gura: After a group of Russian students created the world’s premier poker bot and started selling it to anyone who would buy it, online poker platforms were flooded with these unbeatable machines. You’d think that would be horrible for their business models. But according to Bloomberg’s Kit Chellel, some of these sites didn’t think this was the end of the world.

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Chellel: What I discovered was that some poker — particularly poker clubs, which are kind of private unions of players who set up their own private games and run them as they like — some of these organizations were actively inviting bots to play on the site.

Gura: You heard him right, online poker sites started to recruit bots to play poker. The reason? It helped if those digital poker tables were full.

Chellel: If customers log on, they see empty tables, they won’t play. People want to log on, find an active game, jump on the table and join in. But the reality of the way people play poker is that there are going to be hours in the day when there’s just not enough people for that to happen. So poker bots actually can be really useful for keeping those tables busy.

Gura: Sure, the poker bots might win a lot, but they guarantee a lot of games are happening — games that are played at a really high level. Kit says these are referred to as “liquidity bots.” B-F Corp also cashed in on that trend. They started a new venture called Deeplay, to sell bots they developed specifically for poker sites. The company’s website says its mission is to “provide a comfortable environment for gamers that its robots employ different strategies to maintain in-game balance.” Kit wanted to talk to its creators, but in spite of all the success they had, they didn’t do in-person meetings or interviews with journalists. But Kit was persistent, and after a few months, he convinced them.

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Chellel: It was a strange encounter. We had to meet in Armenia because of the war, we couldn’t— I couldn’t get to Russia and they couldn’t really come to Europe. So Armenia it was.

Gura: Kit met with three of the Russians who created that bot called the brain but he says they weren’t who he expected. They were funny and curious. They even planned a series of touristy activities so they could all get to know each other. And they eventually told him why they wanted to talk to a reporter.

Chellel: They do want to come out of the shadows is what they told me. They want to have a more public face now and they want to try and be the solution rather than the problem.

Gura: Kit asked them about something that had been nagging at him: They had started doing this because they love poker but had their bots changed the game they love forever?

Chellel: One of the members of the group said to me, we’re in a capitalism game. You know, they didn’t make the game this way. They didn’t create it. They are just operating within the boundaries and the limitations of the game as it already exists. And I’m sure they would argue that if they weren’t making bots, someone else would be making bots and the bots would still exist. They just happened to be quite good at it.

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Gura: In other words, yes, the game is changing — and not for the better. At least not if you’re human. But it’s not the bots that are ruining the game, they argued; it’s capitalism.

Chellel: Well, what we’ve seen in poker is that when machines can beat us at our own game, nothing good comes as a result. It’s been very detrimental to the game of poker I think to people’s enjoyment of poker. It’s also interesting that the response of the poker community has been largely to pretend this threat doesn’t exist. And so, I’ll be interested to watch over the next few years, whether the game finally wakes up to what’s going on and makes some changes.

Gura: The brain’s creators are already implementing some. Kit says they’ve come up with a new way to use the technology they developed to bring back some of the joy that’s disappeared from online poker.

Chellel: They want to make a sort of friendlier gaming environment where you play against, the algorithm will match you against someone who plays similarly to you. So it’s a bit like if you’re a tennis player and you join your local tennis club, you don’t go straight to the A-league, you know, you’ll play in the D-leagues against players with similar skill set to you early on. And the whole idea is to sort of target newcomers, target people who play for fun rather than having the whole system set up to reward people who do it for a job.

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