Charles on… anything that comes along

How delightful to see that Partygaming has slumped in value after seeing “growth” in use of its service coming to a sharp halt. Yes, as the Guardian notes, perhaps it’s a bubble, or a fad. Most likely it’s been ramped like mad and I think (hope, pray) that this is the finish of it, the point where the growth stops and then goes into reverse.

Empire Online, for which Sportingbet is considering a bid, fell 11%. Online casino 888.com now also faces a struggle to attract investors for its planned £800m flotation.

Aww, my heart bleeds. No, hang on, it pumps delightedly. Of course there’s always the possibility that the “growth” in use didn’t really come from people, but from bots, and that people who knew this bought in early and cashed out early too. (I’m not casting aspersions on the people who operate Partygaming, BTW; I think they’re innocent of that. Guilty of promoting online poker, but not otherwise.)
It makes Om Malik’s query in June of Is there a poker bubble? seem farsighted. Then again. I think anyone sensible could see that these growths couldn’t possibly be sustained, else Tony Blair and George Bush wouldn’t have time to visit each others’ countries because they’d be stuck in front of a screen, yelling “I had a pair!”

See Boing Boing’s Video-poker bots collaborate through back-channels, which refs to a piece in Wired this month about about a pokerbot called WinHoldEm - “a commercial app that automatically plays through hand after hand of video poker, adhering to a strict system and even opening a back-channel to other WinHoldEm bots in the game to collude to bilk the human players out of their bets”.

For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business. Players come online seeking a ‘fair’ shot - a contest against other humans, not robots. But an invasion of bots implies a fixed game (even though, like their mortal counterparts, they can and do lose if their hands are bad enough or opponents good enough). So the poker sites loudly proclaim that automated play is no big deal. At the same time, they are fighting back by quietly scanning for and eliminating suspicious accounts. ‘We’re making sure we never have bots on our site,’ says PartyPoker marketing director Vikrant Bhargava.

PartyPoker, Partygaming, you guys are all toast unless you can solve a method of creating an infallible Turing Tests that won’t also piss off the human punters.

That’s an impossible promise to keep, says Ray E. Bornert II, WinHoldEm’s elusive creator. He’s trying to flood the online world with his bot - and make a killing in the process. Bornert offers an elaborate justification for what many view as outright cheating: Online poker is already rife with computer-assisted card sharks and - thanks to him - a growing number of outright bots. Players should get wise and arm themselves with the best bot available, which is, of course, WinHoldEm.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 69.77%)
• Another reason to hate online poker sites: credit card fraud and its effects (14 November 2006; score: 47.03%)
• Would you trust a "managed solutions" company that allows compromised PC in its control to sending spam? (26 November 2004; score: 46.27%)