True story, I was involved with a group of people that tried. We had about 3 programmers and a professional poker player working on the project full time. Any poker client bot will recognize the cards by the picture, since there is no data dissemination. Therefore the bot needs to run on your computer to have access to a screen. The poker sites make you sign a waiver that allows them to search through your computer while you play. The poker client will look for known bot programs, as well as take screenshots of your computer looking for fishy software. To get around this we had to set up virtual machines, which wasn't that big of a deal. However, the poker site would still sometimes catch us and take the money in our account. Second problem was the logic. This is much more difficult than it sounds. It is much easier to write limit hold em poker, than no limit. Even with limit poker though, the good players would figure out your bot's patterns, and take advantage of them. Therefore we needed to hire very low wage earners (I was doing this out of a third world country) to constantly move the bots around to new tables. To go after the less sophisticated players, we attempted to play the lower limits, which required more human attention. Scalability was a big problem. We were able to cover our costs and make a little money, but it was a very slow grind. In a related story, I know a 1st generation Chinese American poker entrpreneur who started a poker sweatshop out of china. He hired an army of smart kids, taught them to play low risk poker, and pays out a % of profits to the players. He's making a killing.
I had almost the same thought. Use a virtual machine to go about this. My friend from highschool is a borderline genius that plays in WSOP events all the time. I am thinking about trying to implement the same thing. Although you are correct about the NL theoretical situations. How did you go about changing IP addresses and all of that? Understand you may not want to talk publicly about this of course.
Also can you use a anonymous like visa gift card to fund account? I guess main thing is to always keep subtracting money from the account? Would hate to just have the system take it all.... how do you think they go about this?
First the site would warn you, then freeze your account for a week, then take your money and ban you. We weren't too worried about the IP address thing, as far as I can remember. We only had about 5 accounts up and running. We were running them on 1 computer in Chicago, 2 in Panama, and 1 in NY--since that is where the individuals involved were living at the time. Scaling out accounts was very difficult. Remember that the boy needs to see the screen. Therfore aby 1 login is limited to about 8 tables, or however many you can fit on a screen. Also, the bot program used a lot of computing power (this was back in 2003). We were limited in that each login could only work on 1 computer at a time, and a credit card could only be used for 1 login. In general, I'd say that the poker clients are prett good at keeping bots off their playground. We wrote a mountain of code before we threw in the towel, finishing about break even on the project.
playing poker and trading Emini S&P 500 futures are no different. They are both speculating or gambling. if u want to make more money, raises it in poker game or add more contracts trading in the es.
Have a look at Aaron Browns "The Poker Face of Wall Street" Interesting comment he makes is that the markets are much easier than poker.
I created this thread a while back and maybe you could find some useful stuff in there. I did make the switch and work for a large prop trading/market making firm. You can PM me or post me whatever questions you have. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147181&highlight=should+i+stick+with+poker Generally speaking, I'm glad I made the switch. If you know what you're doing, trading is alot more profitable and scalable. You don't have to worry about what's going on with regulation. If you only have a small about of money though, and need to make a career out of it, poker is much better. It isn't that hard to turn $50 into 100K in like 2 years with enough time, effort, and natural skill. That is just impossible in trading. On a daily basis, poker is alot less stressful and has alot less variance. You have to take 1% edges in poker to be profitable but you can wait a long time to enter hugely +EV trades. On bots, they do exist, but they''ll get caught. 2+2 and PTR along with the sites keep them out. Here's an interesting article on that. http://www.pokertableratings.com/blog/2010/07/bot-ring-discovered-on-poker-stars/