Matt Mazur, Confessions Of A Bot Runner

Recently I posted about a blogger attempting to reverse the pokerstars protocol. In the comments thread on hacker news, there was one written by 'matt1’, who has himself submitted a series of articles to hacker news about his attempts at running an online poker bot on Poker Stars. You can read the Memoirs of a Poker Bot Developer on his blog, and discussion over on HN.

Following is the information I could obtain from reading his blog and tracing back through Matt’s history. I’m not doing this to 'out’ him, i’ve done no real internet sleuthing, he made all this information publicly available and wrote candidly about his experience. This is me just pulling together the threads to see what we can learn about someone attempting (and ultimately getting caught) running a bot. If this all seems a bit dry, read the cliffage below then read his blog.

Cliff notes

• Matt Mazur, who posted under nichomacheo on 2+2, was caught running a low-stakes hU SNG bot on pokerstars in October 2008. He claims to have run the bot for nearly 2 years.
• He writes to pokerstars with his thoughts regarding the issues stars had in detecting his bot.
• In July of 2009, he writes a 10-part series of blog articles regarding the whole thing.

Matt Mazur, nichomacheo

• Matt played HU SNGs on pokerstars part-time in 2006 and 2007. He seemed to have a fair success. He kept a blog in 2006 which is now archived on his mattmazur.com website. He was playing the 50s and 100s and taking looks at the 200 level, playing under the pokerstars name 'kaon’. The blog stops in December, 2006. He states in the introduction that this is because he had started working on his poker bot project.
• Matt posted on 2+2 under the name nichomacheo. You can see his profile and posts on the archive server and on the current server. He is still posting strategy up until late 2008.
• He started posting his blog again in July 2007, a new domain. It was to log his return to HU SNGs playing on FTP. This was half way through his time running a pokerbot on stars (from screenshots, the the bot appears to have Full Tilt support). The blog only lasted 4 posts.

The Poker Bot

• Over the course of ten posts on his blog in June and July this year, Matt shares some of the details of running a poker bot for nearly two years. It was operating up until October 2nd 2008, when stars caught him and shut his account.
• The bot played exclusively low stakes ($2-$11) HU NL SNGs during this 2 year period.
• There’s no precise information on how well his bot did over it’s 2-year lifetime. He posts in the last month of operation he made about $480 in 500 HU SNGs. However he excluded his 'shot’ at the 22s for reasons of insignificant sample size (which makes no sense to me as it’s part of a larger sample). If this was a cherry-picked last-month result after nearly two years of running the bot, I would guess it wasn’t a big money-earner. He also posts a lot of graphs of chip gains by blind level.
• There’s little information on exactly what algorithms he used to define the bots strategy. There are a few mentions: “At its core it made decisions based on Expected Value calculations and some glorified conditional logic”, “... numbers were fed into the bot’s opponent modelling algorithms, which were ultimately used to calculate ranges, equity, and to make decisions.”, but nothing more concrete. He also states that he didn’t use the SAGE system (which approximates a Nash equilibrium HU strategy with low blinds) as 'An exploitative strategy will trump an optimal strategy.’ This is surprising. A Nash equilibrium would certainly be profitable against low stakes opponents, and at least a strong basis of an algorithm before tweaking things to exploit your opponent.
• He says he left the bot playing 40+ SNGs a day, which he thinks led him to getting caught. His average multi-tabling rate was 3.
• He considered it important to monitor the SNGs to reply to player chat to avoid detection. Perhaps his fear was misplaced, as I’m sure many multi-tablers have chat turned off and rarely if ever engage the opponent in chat. He creating a system that alerted him whenever certain keywords ('bot’, 'computer’ etc.) were mentioned in the chat. He would then tend to the client and write appropriate human responses. As an astute anonymous commenter on his blog noted, “Wouldn’t ignoring all chat except chat about bots and cheating be a bit of a giveaway? :)”. He never left his bots running when he wasn’t there to maintain them.

Caught

• In October 2008, his Stars account was locked. He received an email from pokerstars security saying that they were aware of him running a bot. Funds from the account were confiscated.
• By far the most interesting section was the email exchange he had with pokerstars security staff when his account was closed. He gave his thoughts on poker bot detection, making some valid points as to why pokerstars should have been able to detected or his bot earlier. During the 2-year period, he states that there was very abnormal play (one time he left the bot running, and one of the processes failed, leading the bot to register and sit out in 20 consecutive SNGs) that should have triggered an investigation.
• He notes that pokerstars do use automated CAPTCHAs, as the bot operator received one once whilst the bot was running. I’ve never heard of anyone else seeing a CAPTCHA on pokerstars before. I remember a year or two ago, i used to get these every hour or two playing on partypoker, I guessed because i was using AHK scripts for betting hotkeys. The stars 'bot-like’ threshold to trigger a CAPTCHA must be pretty high (or it is triggered manually).
• He says the biggest hurdle to get over was reading the game actions:

I started off using some unreliable character recognition techniques, but eventually found a much easier way. While talking to another bot developer about the problem, he said he’s never had the problem. After some detective work we discovered that he ran PokerOffice, which adds its own control to the window which can be read using normal methods. So rather than doing the extensive work required to have the bot obtain the text, I just let PokerOffice run in the background and let it do the majority of the work.

• This is what it looks like when your account gets shut. There’s loads of interesting information to glean from this screenshot:
  • It appears he automatically 'loses’ the 3 tournaments he was playing in when he was locked out.
  • You can sharkscope these tournament IDs (like 111794709) which confirms a lot of what he says is accurate – the date, his account name, the site etc.
  • It appears this bot has full tilt functionality.
• He says he is happy the bot was finally caught so he could move on to his new venture, All-In Expert.

All-In Expert

• In June 2008, whilst still running his poker bot, he launches 'all-in expert’, using code he used in writing his poker bot. The software, still available for download, appears to be an all-in equity calculator similar to pokerstove. Matt creates a new account on 2+2 to launch the product.
• On the 18th of November, he says the business has 'failed’ on his blog. He posts a link on hacker news.

Sharkscope Connection

Update: Matt has clarified via email the information below. He has no connection with Sharkscope; he did write his own results scraper for Pokerstars called PokerShark and mined his own data, but later switched to sharkscope instead. The similarity in names is just a co-incidence.

• Perhaps the most interesting part is a seeming connection to sharkscope, the online SNG tracking tool. One of the final parts of his poker bot 'memories’ is the post PokerShark: Gaining an Edge at Online Poker’.
• In the article, he states that before he was running his poker bot, he started to write a tool that would scrape the data from the results of HU SNGs. Using this information, he overlaid this on the poker table, and used it to automatically register him to tournaments against opponents profiled as 'mediocre enough’ to play. He said this occurred from July 2005 through to October 2006. He said that by October, he had decided to make the jump to writing a full poker bot.
• The question remains how this relates to the Sharkscope.com website. Obviously there’s a connection in the name with PokerShark. In the blog post, there’s clearly a screenshot taken from the sharkscope website (which has him listed as the biggest winner in 2006). However this is clearly a low-quality screenshot, and it also has full tilt tracking (he makes no mention of tracking players on FT).
• In November 2006, he makes a post on 2+2, stating that he has the results of 900k HU SNGs from private data-mining over a period of 'several months’. One of the first comments was is whether this information came from sharkscope, which he denies. He planned to give the information away, but the project never came to fruition.
• Looking at the 'busted’ picture, it seems it has Sharkscope functionality built in for the mentioned game selection algorithm. Note the “searches remaining”. This suggests he is not the creator of sharkscope himself, but doesn’t explain his blog post regarding him mining (and planning to give away) his own data. These two facts seem contradictory.