September 10, 2025 • 30 mins
This week, we’re all in. Oz chats with Kit Chellel, a Bloomberg writer who focuses on gambling, technology, and sports betting. He wrote an article about a secret Russian bot farm that infiltrated the world of online poker in the early 2000s. We follow Kit from Siberia to Armenia, and get a peek into just how bots can make or break the future of online poker.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to text stuff. I'm's Volocian here with Cara Price,
and this is the story. Hello Oz, Hello Cara. One
of my favorite memories that we have together was a
trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas in January
twenty twenty, and we went to the panels. We spoke
on a panel, but where I really saw you could
(00:35):
come alive was on the casino floor.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Not at CES. On the casino.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
From the casino floor, I hadn't known until that point
that you were quite a you know, passionate gambler.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
That's a euphemism for degenerate, but yes I am. I'm
not a degenerate gambler. I dabble in gambling and blackjack
is my sport.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
When did you get into it?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
My mom liked to gamble, and so she taught me
how to play blackjack. And I've always loved blackjack, just
for the high highs and the low lows of it.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I only get to supervise your behavior with more I pusson.
But how much do you play on your phone?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I do play online blackjack, but not for money.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Just for fun, just for fun. Well, today's story is
actually all about how digital blackjack poker other casino games
have just gone crazy and been booming online for the
last few years, and our guest today, Bloomberg reporter Kitchillel,
has been looking into why in the.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Last five, six, seven years it has taken over the
entire world, and the reason for that is a combination
of obviously enormous demand, the idea that you can just
gamble by reaching into your pocket and pulling out a
smartphone is quite appealing, but also a regulatory changes. I
think online gambling gambling anywhere fifty years ago was seen
(01:55):
as a kind of fringe, shady, wrong side of the
tracks activity, and a combination of massive lobbying by big
gambling companies and just societal changes, really ethical changes have
meant that what used to be a shady thing to
do is now entirely normal.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, this is very much in line with my experience
of seeing sports betting ads everywhere. Besides it moving online,
what does it actually have to do with our show.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, Kit actually wrote this piece for Bloomberg that really
caught my eye with the headline the Russian bot army
that conquered online poker.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
All right, so a Russian bot army is not necessarily
a phrase we see put together with poker.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Normally we're thinking more about Russian bot armies trying to
influence elections or also, the Russian bot army is kind
of like a little bit of internet boogeyman.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Very much like if I imagine what a Russian bot
army looks like in real life, it's it's very different
than what it probably is in reality.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, Kit was also slightly dubious, but he got to
meet a real life Russian bot army.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I'll be honest, I was very suspicious about the idea
that that all this spot activity in the poker world
emanated from Russia. I think there was a tendency here
to see any sort of perception of nefarious online activity
to go as the Russians. And you know, when I
went through the available material when I started this project,
none of it seemed to be based on any real evidence,
(03:25):
on knowledge that something was happening in Russia. It was
all smoke and mirrors. So I approached it with a
very skeptical eye. But then after doing six months to
a year worth of reporting and finally meeting the people
behind it, you know, it turns out the rumor was
essentially correct.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So it was the Russians.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was the Russians.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
What are the Russians doing? Well?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
I'll let Kit explain that everyone who plays poker knows
that there's software that can play poker very well. So
I was curious about who was using this new technology
to actually make money from online poker. And there were
all sorts of rumors of out genius Russian poker bots.
You could log onto the poker chat rooms and everyone
(04:05):
was complaining about Russian bots, but there was no information
about who they were, who was making them. So I
went looking for the people who made those bots, and
that led me to this operation based out of Omskin, Siberia.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Nothing I have ever done in life has led me
to OMPs in Siberia, and I don't know if anything
ever will.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
You never watched a Bond movie from Russia with love.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
From Ompsk with love, Now it has a different ring
to it. This is really interesting and I just want
to know more about it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah. So it turns out that not only is this
Russian group making lots of money doing this, but also
that the technology they've built has fundamentally changed the way
poka is played online and in real life. So it's
one of these interesting kind of human machine interaction stories
about the ways we may not be even conscious of
(04:56):
the fact that we're interacting with machines all around us
and they're fluencing our behavior.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I think I was fascinated by the idea that these
are very human games. I mean, poker is the most
human of games. It involves bluffing, lying, dishonesty, deception, reading
human visual clues. It's the archetypal game that machines shouldn't
be able to play, and the things that humans used
to exclusively dominate. Now machines more and more are taking over.
(05:24):
And that's true in gambling as much as anywhere else.
And when we talk about gambling and we talk about
the people using technology to do it, I still think
most people today who place online bets or who bet
on sports or play poker, they don't know that this
world exists. They don't know there's a whole subculture of
players who are using state of the art technology to
play these games in a very inhuman way. And I
(05:46):
was fascinated by the fact that it's kind of there,
in secret but affecting games we all know and love.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I'm really excited to hear the rest of your interview
because I want to know more about how machines are
actually influencing the way human players.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I'll let explain that here he is the standard for
machine intelligence really is is always creative thinking, which is
which is a very human thing to do. And one
of the simplest and most binary ways to test the
machine's ability to think like a person is to play
a game that involves deduction and logic. The gamification of
this technology allows researchers to test how good it is,
(06:23):
and poker is very actually a very good proxy for
real life. You know, it's a game of imperfect information.
The players don't really know what the other players might hold.
They have to guess, they have to do the best
they can with the limited information they have. That's what
real life is like. And in the world of computing,
you deal with ones and zeros and certainties. What computers
have had traditionally been quite bad at is dealing with
(06:46):
these very uncertain situations where you're guessing and you're reading.
So Poker is a very good proxy for how human
like a machine can be. And I think it's interesting
that it took until about twenty fifteen, which is extremely
late in the world of artificial intelligence for the best
poker bots to be able to beat really good poker pros,
and ever since, really the best poker blots are essentially unbeatable.
(07:10):
In practical terms. It's really a question of how slowly
or quickly you will lose to them.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And this brings us back to the story which has
the headline the Russian bot Army that conquered online Poker.
The piece opens with two online poker players engaged in
a standoff. Tell us about the standoff and the match
that followed.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
The situation was one that very typically happens in an
online poker where the people who are online poker professionals,
they tend to compete exclusively online. That means they can
be challenged and challenge anyone in the world. So the
top poker professionals online will routinely open up and say
come and play me and see how good you are.
This guy Farewell was one of the world's best heads
(07:51):
up poker players. He had an elite level skill set,
and he got into a kind of an argument online
with another Russian and challenged him to a game of
poker and very surprisingly lost that contest and lost a
lot of money and the way he got beaten. He
was immediately suspicious. And I know poker players when they
lose game of poker will always tend to say I've
(08:11):
been conned, I've been cheated. In this case, someone with
his abilities losing a match like that, it kind of
was suspicious, but it was also the way he lost.
His opponent was making decisions that human beings don't normally make.
He complained and said they was cheating involved, and the
other guy on the other side denied it. But my
research led me to evidence that his opponent had access
(08:33):
to this state of the art poker pot system that
was built in Siberia, And I think what I discovered
was that this kind of matchup happens a lot in poker.
You're playing someone online and you don't know who they are,
or where they come from, or what they're using, and
it's genuinely very hard to tell if someone is using
a solver, if someone has a computer that's not necessarily
(08:54):
the one they're using running in the background, it's very
difficult to tell. And I think what most people who
play the game online don't realize is just how widespread
this is. It's almost impossible to stop what did.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
This moment crystallize for you and why did you start
the story here.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
This was early days in the poker bot era, and
I think back then very few people knew poker bots existed.
I liked the idea that one of the world's best
proponents of this particular game of poker could be defeated
by a complete nobody in the poker space. This guy
had no reputation. If anything, his reputation online was all
sorts of things that had nothing to do with poker.
(09:30):
He had a kind of clownish, cartoonish online persona. You know,
it's the idea of Novak Djokovic losing to someone from
your local tennis club at tennis. It's just so improbable,
and you have to look at why that would happen.
And the answer led me to pokabots.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And in particular the bot farm Corporation. Yeah, paint of
a picture of their lives in Siberia, these young men
and how they got started.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, this was fascinating to learn about. I mean, I
had a sort of specific image in my mind of
what bot farmers would look like. She I think the
reality of it was slightly different to what I expected.
I'd imagined one sort of big poker kingpin with a
garage full of computers and a bunch of employees, but
in reality it was a bunch of sort of nerdy
students that two technical colleges in this remote region of
(10:15):
Siberia where they have very good computing courses. So these
kids were spending all day doing very advanced courses in
software and programming and machine logic and mathematics and physics.
And this happened at around the time that online poker
was really getting going, it was really becoming bigger businesses.
It was two thousand and one, two thousand and two,
for the first time, really you could have a game
(10:37):
of poker against someone anywhere in the world online, any
time of day and night, for real money. And these
kids started playing. They realized they were good, and they
got better, and they realized also that they could make
a lot of money, mainly playing American people who thought
they were fantastic at poker and logged on after a
hard day at work and didn't realize they were playing.
A math PhD who had studied game theory was using
(10:59):
an on training tool to play nearly perfect poker. So
initially they made a lot of money, just a bunch
of students getting together on the top floor of a campus.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
They're just playing. They were playing as players.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
They as human the human but they but they had
learnt the science of poker, and there is a mathematical
science behind poker. If you're willing to put in the
house and you have that kind of brain, it's a
distinct advantage, especially playing everyday folks who don't know those things.
So they were making good money just playing human to human.
But these Russian colleges, they are excellent farms for very
(11:31):
tech minded people, and so it wasn't long before they
started applying that that technology to the game of poker.
And it didn't take long to realize that you can
have a piece of software running. It can play twenty
four hours a day. It doesn't need a break, it
doesn't need food, you don't need to pay it, and
it will play much better poker than the average human.
And you can scale it almost infinitely. As long as
(11:53):
you have the ability to create accounts. You can have
as many bots playing as you want. And so they
thought transitioned greatly from humans playing less capable humans online
to having lots of computers run this software automatically and
only being sort of broadly supervised by a few tech
operators who kept on yet things to make sure nothing
was going wrong. And they made millions and millions and
(12:15):
millions of dollars in those early years.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
And at what point did they start to attract the
notice of investors and also local police.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Well, I think they attracted the attention of local police
because the dorm was busy all hours of day and night.
They were playing mostly people on the side of the world.
Lots of students would arrive wearing their hoodies and marching upstairs,
and you know, eleven o'clock at night, and there was
activity all through the night. So the neighbors complained and
(12:44):
the local police came round, and I guess they assumed
it with sun criminal operation, and so they invited the
cops in and just showed them the computers with the
poker on the screen, saying, we're just playing poker.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Which is ripping off Americans, how about it.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
I mean, I'm sure the Russian police were quite work
well unhappy about what was going on, but it was
so easy to scale it. And I think the key
thing to remember is that their starting point was a
very high level of knowledge and a very scientific approach
to poker. And you know, over the course of six, seven,
eight years, they just got stronger and stronger and stronger.
You know, every single month this system operated, it got
(13:19):
better at playing poker. By twenty ten, twenty eleven, the
system was able to play an individual human opponent, analyze
that human's track record in poker, every game they've ever
played online because you can buy game records. So if
you're a habitual poker player and you.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Pay perfect knowledge of your opponent.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Perfect knowledge of your opponent's games, all the mistakes they've
made over the last couple of years, all the weaknesses
in their game, and the system could spot those weaknesses
and taylor of its own approach to the specific weaknesses
of its opponent. And that's really that's where the real
mind is in poker. I mean, all human poker players
have winknesses in the game. It's natural that will happen.
If you're able to algorithmically analyze them and exploit them,
(14:03):
then you know you will win vastly more money than
you lose. And they did.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
This was back in twenty eleven. Was kind of a
heyday of this. But your story obviously came out in
twenty twenty four, So I want to kind of get
through all the steps that take us from twenty eleven
to twenty twenty four. What was the kind of urgency
that you and your editors wanted to run it now
rather than back then.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
The main reason to do the story when we did
it was that no one had done this before. I
had never been had someone show me where the poker
blots come from. I've had read lots of stories about
academics in Pittsburgh and Alberta, Canada, sitting in their offices
and you know, crafting these ingenious, artificially intelligent poker programs.
But they didn't do it to make money. They did
(14:43):
it to sort of test the boundaries of what machines
could do. Anyone who's played online poker knows there are
bots out there, So I just I was curious to
know what kind of person does it purely for the money?
How good do you have to be? How do you
get into that job? And so there was a big
hole in our knowledge of this, and so I went
looking trying to fill it. And botting Artificial intelligence has
(15:04):
been a reality of poker for a long time, and
I don't think that that has ever changed, and it
probably will never change.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I thought, you know, poker is obviously a game of
incentives and motives and reading your opponent and direction and misdirection.
So I'm very attracted to this quote and your piece,
which was neither professionals nor poker providers want to acknowledge
the presence of intelligent machines for fear of deterring the
new players whose money keeps the game afloat. Explain that, well, yeah,
(15:33):
this was the big challenge of the story.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
I mean, no one involved in the poker industry wants
to talk about poker bots.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Arguably, the new reality of poker is dominated by technology.
It has changed the way even human professionels play the game.
I think you'd be a fool to think that most
online markets aren't absolutely crawling with bots. Yet if you
talk to the big providers, they just don't want to
talk about it. They don't want to acknowledge the presence
of bots on their system. They don't want to talk
(16:01):
about where bots come from. And it's a simple reason
for that is that they rely on new money. They
rely on people like me and you deciding we want
to have a go online poker and logging on investing
our hard earned dollars in a game of poker. If
they sort of acknowledge the existence of these unbeatabule machines
in their ecosystem, it doesn't help them commercially. So there's
(16:22):
just no information out there. Conversely that people who make
money from poker bots don't really want to talk about
it either because they kind of their business model relies
on secrecy. If people know who they are every platform
they play on, they'll be excluded, they'll be banned, their
winnings will be seized. So with secrecy on both sides,
So what that letter is a big void of information
(16:42):
and lots of sort of crazy online speculation and conspiracy
theories that weren't based in reality at all.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
What would it be like as a normal if you're
listening to this podcast and you're playing online poker. Would
you be able to tell if you're playing against a bot?
Are there only tells that bots have? I don't think
you can tell.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
No.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
I think the experience of losing to a very good
game theory optimal poker bot, it's a series of situations
that just go against you inexplicably. It feels like you're
getting rotten luck over and over and over and over
and over and over again. When you have an advantage
in a game like poker, it doesn't manifest as one big,
dramatic win. It's not the big, showy hand that gets you.
(17:19):
It's the one hundred hands, it's the two hundred hands.
And if he speak to people who work with poker bots,
they're not worried about a single hand of poker. It's
not where interests them. They're interested in the plus minus
dollar value after a thousand hands. That's where the real
value is to them. So actually, I don't think it's
very fun playing poker bots. One of the characteristics of
good game theory oatical poker is that there's loads of
(17:40):
action pre flop. That means that when you're playing poker,
before the community cards have even been put down the table,
before you see what the possible hands might be, you
get dealt your two whole cards. Poker bots game theory
tells you you must bet aggressively before the community cards
are down, which works. You know you're more likely to
win or lose hands if you do that effective, but
(18:01):
it's boring. It means you don't get those dramatic moments
of one card, two card, three card, what have I got?
You don't get those big showdowns. So I think it's
boring and frustrating, quite frankly, to lose slowly to a
poker bot online.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
So the providers didn't want to talk, the poker bot
makers didn't want to talk, and yet you got the story.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah, it was a tough one. It tried all sorts
of things to get to the bottom of it, and eventually,
I think it was just persistence paid off. I had
bothered enough people that would eventually reached the guys who
built this software that I was doing it, and they
got in touch with me, and that was pure luck.
And it just so happened that they had reached a
stage in their careers where they were ready to talk.
You know, their business model had changed somewhat, and they
(18:45):
seemed quite keen to tell me what they were looking
at doing next and tell me their big plans for
the next poker revolution that they wanted to oversee. I
think if I'd approached them ten years ago, I don't
think they would have talked.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
After the break kip me to the humans behind the
Russian bots. Stay with us, So how did they approach
(19:24):
you and did you have any red flags when you
got inbound from purported Russian poker bot Manager Farm Manager.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I had a few red flags. I mean, there was
some quite scary stuff online about who they were and
what they were about, and of course the mental associations
that go with a black market Russian poker operation. You
can imagine there might be some scary people involved in that.
I'd spend possibly a year, I think, trying to talk
to these guys, trying to find them, researching every aspect
(19:56):
of their businesses. I knew that there were six or
seven Russian company needs that they were linked to, but
there was no online information about them. So I basically
just called everyone that I could find that had the
loosest connection to those companies and ask them about what
they did and how they did it. After I've been
doing this for a few months, one of my encrypted
messages services popped up and it was, you know, a
(20:18):
message from someone claiming to be from Neo Cores, which
is the bot farm operation, and they told me they
were thinking about breaking their silence and talking about their
business for the first time, and I had to meet
them face to face and the only place we could
do that was Armenia. Journalists can't really go to Russia
these days, and there's limited places they can go, but
Armenia is a friendly neighboring country, and so I flew
(20:41):
out to Armenia and they showed up in a couple
of big SUVs with tinted windows, and we were sitting
in the shadow of Mount araw Rat in a vineyard,
which they chose as the place to have our big
sit down interview. I think the quite what to expect,
but you know, as always, the reality of things is
never as intimidating as your imagination of it. And what
I met was a bunch of very smart guys, kind
(21:04):
of nerdy guys who are fascinated by maths and game
theory and technology, who had built, actually, you know, whatever
you think about poker bots, an ingenious system for exploiting
winkses in the poker market, and they'd be doing it
longer than anyone else. And I went through all the
different evolutions of this poke bot business, from the start
in Siberia all the way through to the most modern one,
(21:25):
which is Deplay, which is kind of an artificial intelligence company.
At this point, no one had connected them all, and
as I went through all of those different iterations of
the business, they said, yes, that was us, so the
same like three or four guys were the architects of
the whole system, and that's like two decades worth of
poker experience there. It was fascinating to hear them talk
so openly about what they did. Their oversight of the
(21:47):
online poker gave them a unique view of how the
whole thing works. You know, they weren't providers, they weren't
running poker sides, they weren't players, they weren't just playing
themselves for their own profit. They had enormous reams of
data in how this whole market operates.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
What has changed in their business model that makes them,
timing wise, want to speak to you last year.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
I think they've they've been through an evolution of their
view of poker. I mean, obviously they've always made money
from poker, and they still are, but I think they've
recognized that the online poker market the way it exists
now isn't sustainable. At least that's what they believe because
they are essentially involved thousands of times a day in
playing online poker against opponents on various different platforms. They know,
(22:32):
for example, that the average player who joins online poker
an online poker site and invests money will leave much
more quickly than was the case ten years ago. So
people are logging on to play online poker and try it,
thinking that it's going to be fun, and they're quickly
discovering that it's not very fun, losing their money and leaving. Now,
the whole of the online poker economy is structured like
(22:53):
a pyramid. At that bottom rung of new money coming
in funds the whole thing right up to the very
top of the Chris money makers who you know, the
guys that you see in the World Series of Poker
in Las Vegas on the final table. None of it
works unless you have that bottom rung of new money
coming in funding the whole thing. And I think they
recognize that the game really may not exist anymore if
(23:14):
it becomes too easy for machines to compete against humans
and beat them.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Too many poker bots have killed the golden goose of
the bottom layer of the pyramid. Essentially, that's exactly it.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
And actually it's not just poker bots either, it's the
whole atmosphere around the poker economy. It's, you know, it's
how intimidating it can be, how unfriendly it can be,
how competitive it can be. If you're not losing to
a Russian poker bot, you know, there's every chance you'll
be losing to a Brazilian PhD student who is simply
(23:44):
better at processing information than you are. But the point is,
it's it's just not fun to lose so quickly. So
they recognize that there is a love of poker. People
are very passionate about the enjoy playing it. But I
think their view is that that the new poker economy
needs to be more welcoming. It needs to be more friendly,
and it needs to be more tailored to welcome in
new people rather than just driving them away. You know,
(24:07):
to use the tennis example again, if you want to
expand the game of tennis, you don't just pit your
club players against the local pro who beat them six love,
six love, six love. Then they go home and they
never play again. But that's what happens in the poker market.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
So looks the business models. Let them win a bit
and sacrifice a bit of margin in favor of more volume.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Essentially, the business model is the margin is people playing,
so they should be playing in a way that makes
them want to play more, and the poker coonry hasn't
been particularly good at that so far, and they are
looking for a new way to sort of structure the
payment system and make sure that you're not playing against
people who are twenty thirty levels above you make it
(24:47):
more fair, more fun. And it's ironic really that the
people who are trying to do this are the same
ones that have helped make poker such an inhospitable place.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, so they're really I mean, is that the spiers
who came in from the cold, who are based trying
to remake poker into a more equitable and slightly fairer arena,
perhaps so that more people play. I mean, that is
an intro is a very interesting and strange and unexpected inversion,
and that was kind of why they wanted to talk
to you at this moment.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
You think, look, they're business people. They don't care about poker.
They don't even play poker anymore. These guys, you know,
they played in their youth, but it's it's a job
to them, you know, it's it's their career.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
You mentioned the beginning that poker is a kind of
unusual subset of the kind of wider world of online gambling.
Looking at the wider world, how has technology changed an
AI in particular, changed gambling more broadly.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
I mean, I really believe we're we're in the middle
of a revolution of online vetting, which has been led
by AI. I just don't think most people have realized
it yet, because most people who use these games for
leisure purposes, who bet on sports or horses, or play
online slot machines, they haven't yet realized that there's this
sub set of players out there who were using artificially
(26:02):
intelligent software to play the games in an optimal way.
This whole story goes back decades and there's a subculture.
There's a kind of subset of professional gamblers who are
very tech minded, very scientific, very mathematical, very bloodless in
the way they play the game. And they all emerge
from Las Vegas in the nineteen eighties, from the carve
(26:24):
counting circuit, and they applied that sort of advantage mindset
to technology, and they asked, you, what would happen if
we took our mathematical skills and we added the advantage
of terabytes of processing power? How much money could we make.
And it turns out what they discovered and what they've
been doing ever since the last forty years, is the
only profitable way to bet. They've been doing this in
(26:47):
secret for decades. They never talk about it because it's
their livelihood, and the casinos are quite happy not to
talk about it either, because they don't want anyone to
know their games are broken and vulnerable. But that's the reality.
It's like a secret arms race. And it was that
I found that whole world so fascinating that, you know,
I spent the last five years of my life writing
about it for Bloomberg, And I've got a book coming
(27:08):
out next year which is the sort of origin story
for how this new generation of tech gamblers came to exist.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
The book's called Lucky Devil's.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
That's correct, Yes, Simon and Schuster our next year.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
There's a lot of movies, I mean, obviously the Ocean's franchise,
you know, front and center, but plenty of others as
well about gambling and beating the house and stuff. What
do you think makes the sort of human gambling winning
against the odds, ingenious ways to beat the system so
(27:40):
compelling to audiences and readers everywhere.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I think people recognize what it feels like to play
a rigged game. It's like modern capitalism encapsulated in a
kind of easily understandable format, in a relatable format. Most
people know what it feels like to spend your whole
life trying to play a game fairly and still lose,
whether it's your job, whether it's your love life. This
(28:05):
feeling that the world that the cards are kind of
against you, I think is very familiar, and that the
house the casino has become sort of metaphor for entrenched
wealth and power that basically makes the rules, changes the rules,
and acts for its own benefit in a way that's
very unfair for the majority of people.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Now.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
I think that's that's undeniably true of the gambling business.
I think it's arguably true of modern politics and modern
economies around the world. And I think it's very relatable
to sort of get one over on the man. And
these guys are sort of in the minority that actually
were able to do it, and they didn't do it
by cheating. They did it just by their smarts. They
did it just by hard work. And that's what I
(28:47):
find compelling. I think is that it's a lifetime worth
of effort and grinding away to get that tiny advantage
and turn it into money.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Kitchen Well, thank you for joining us on tech Stuff.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Thanks Ausin.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
For Tech Stuff. I'm as Voloscian and I'm Cara Price.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and
Tyler Hill. It was executive produced by me, Karra Price,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and also wrote our theme song.
Join us on Friday for the Week in Tech. Karen
(29:45):
and I will run through all the biggest stories in
tech and the headlines you may have missed. Please do rate,
review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com.
Welcome to text stuff. I'm's Volocian here with Cara Price,
and this is the story. Hello Oz, Hello Cara. One
of my favorite memories that we have together was a
trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas in January
twenty twenty, and we went to the panels. We spoke
on a panel, but where I really saw you could
(00:35):
come alive was on the casino floor.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Not at CES. On the casino.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
From the casino floor, I hadn't known until that point
that you were quite a you know, passionate gambler.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
That's a euphemism for degenerate, but yes I am. I'm
not a degenerate gambler. I dabble in gambling and blackjack
is my sport.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
When did you get into it?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
My mom liked to gamble, and so she taught me
how to play blackjack. And I've always loved blackjack, just
for the high highs and the low lows of it.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I only get to supervise your behavior with more I pusson.
But how much do you play on your phone?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I do play online blackjack, but not for money.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Just for fun, just for fun. Well, today's story is
actually all about how digital blackjack poker other casino games
have just gone crazy and been booming online for the
last few years, and our guest today, Bloomberg reporter Kitchillel,
has been looking into why in the.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Last five, six, seven years it has taken over the
entire world, and the reason for that is a combination
of obviously enormous demand, the idea that you can just
gamble by reaching into your pocket and pulling out a
smartphone is quite appealing, but also a regulatory changes. I
think online gambling gambling anywhere fifty years ago was seen
(01:55):
as a kind of fringe, shady, wrong side of the
tracks activity, and a combination of massive lobbying by big
gambling companies and just societal changes, really ethical changes have
meant that what used to be a shady thing to
do is now entirely normal.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, this is very much in line with my experience
of seeing sports betting ads everywhere. Besides it moving online,
what does it actually have to do with our show.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, Kit actually wrote this piece for Bloomberg that really
caught my eye with the headline the Russian bot army
that conquered online poker.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
All right, so a Russian bot army is not necessarily
a phrase we see put together with poker.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Normally we're thinking more about Russian bot armies trying to
influence elections or also, the Russian bot army is kind
of like a little bit of internet boogeyman.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Very much like if I imagine what a Russian bot
army looks like in real life, it's it's very different
than what it probably is in reality.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, Kit was also slightly dubious, but he got to
meet a real life Russian bot army.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I'll be honest, I was very suspicious about the idea
that that all this spot activity in the poker world
emanated from Russia. I think there was a tendency here
to see any sort of perception of nefarious online activity
to go as the Russians. And you know, when I
went through the available material when I started this project,
none of it seemed to be based on any real evidence,
(03:25):
on knowledge that something was happening in Russia. It was
all smoke and mirrors. So I approached it with a
very skeptical eye. But then after doing six months to
a year worth of reporting and finally meeting the people
behind it, you know, it turns out the rumor was
essentially correct.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So it was the Russians.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was the Russians.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
What are the Russians doing? Well?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
I'll let Kit explain that everyone who plays poker knows
that there's software that can play poker very well. So
I was curious about who was using this new technology
to actually make money from online poker. And there were
all sorts of rumors of out genius Russian poker bots.
You could log onto the poker chat rooms and everyone
(04:05):
was complaining about Russian bots, but there was no information
about who they were, who was making them. So I
went looking for the people who made those bots, and
that led me to this operation based out of Omskin, Siberia.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Nothing I have ever done in life has led me
to OMPs in Siberia, and I don't know if anything
ever will.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
You never watched a Bond movie from Russia with love.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
From Ompsk with love, Now it has a different ring
to it. This is really interesting and I just want
to know more about it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah. So it turns out that not only is this
Russian group making lots of money doing this, but also
that the technology they've built has fundamentally changed the way
poka is played online and in real life. So it's
one of these interesting kind of human machine interaction stories
about the ways we may not be even conscious of
(04:56):
the fact that we're interacting with machines all around us
and they're fluencing our behavior.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I think I was fascinated by the idea that these
are very human games. I mean, poker is the most
human of games. It involves bluffing, lying, dishonesty, deception, reading
human visual clues. It's the archetypal game that machines shouldn't
be able to play, and the things that humans used
to exclusively dominate. Now machines more and more are taking over.
(05:24):
And that's true in gambling as much as anywhere else.
And when we talk about gambling and we talk about
the people using technology to do it, I still think
most people today who place online bets or who bet
on sports or play poker, they don't know that this
world exists. They don't know there's a whole subculture of
players who are using state of the art technology to
play these games in a very inhuman way. And I
(05:46):
was fascinated by the fact that it's kind of there,
in secret but affecting games we all know and love.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I'm really excited to hear the rest of your interview
because I want to know more about how machines are
actually influencing the way human players.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I'll let explain that here he is the standard for
machine intelligence really is is always creative thinking, which is
which is a very human thing to do. And one
of the simplest and most binary ways to test the
machine's ability to think like a person is to play
a game that involves deduction and logic. The gamification of
this technology allows researchers to test how good it is,
(06:23):
and poker is very actually a very good proxy for
real life. You know, it's a game of imperfect information.
The players don't really know what the other players might hold.
They have to guess, they have to do the best
they can with the limited information they have. That's what
real life is like. And in the world of computing,
you deal with ones and zeros and certainties. What computers
have had traditionally been quite bad at is dealing with
(06:46):
these very uncertain situations where you're guessing and you're reading.
So Poker is a very good proxy for how human
like a machine can be. And I think it's interesting
that it took until about twenty fifteen, which is extremely
late in the world of artificial intelligence for the best
poker bots to be able to beat really good poker pros,
and ever since, really the best poker blots are essentially unbeatable.
(07:10):
In practical terms. It's really a question of how slowly
or quickly you will lose to them.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And this brings us back to the story which has
the headline the Russian bot Army that conquered online Poker.
The piece opens with two online poker players engaged in
a standoff. Tell us about the standoff and the match
that followed.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
The situation was one that very typically happens in an
online poker where the people who are online poker professionals,
they tend to compete exclusively online. That means they can
be challenged and challenge anyone in the world. So the
top poker professionals online will routinely open up and say
come and play me and see how good you are.
This guy Farewell was one of the world's best heads
(07:51):
up poker players. He had an elite level skill set,
and he got into a kind of an argument online
with another Russian and challenged him to a game of
poker and very surprisingly lost that contest and lost a
lot of money and the way he got beaten. He
was immediately suspicious. And I know poker players when they
lose game of poker will always tend to say I've
(08:11):
been conned, I've been cheated. In this case, someone with
his abilities losing a match like that, it kind of
was suspicious, but it was also the way he lost.
His opponent was making decisions that human beings don't normally make.
He complained and said they was cheating involved, and the
other guy on the other side denied it. But my
research led me to evidence that his opponent had access
(08:33):
to this state of the art poker pot system that
was built in Siberia, And I think what I discovered
was that this kind of matchup happens a lot in poker.
You're playing someone online and you don't know who they are,
or where they come from, or what they're using, and
it's genuinely very hard to tell if someone is using
a solver, if someone has a computer that's not necessarily
(08:54):
the one they're using running in the background, it's very
difficult to tell. And I think what most people who
play the game online don't realize is just how widespread
this is. It's almost impossible to stop what did.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
This moment crystallize for you and why did you start
the story here.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
This was early days in the poker bot era, and
I think back then very few people knew poker bots existed.
I liked the idea that one of the world's best
proponents of this particular game of poker could be defeated
by a complete nobody in the poker space. This guy
had no reputation. If anything, his reputation online was all
sorts of things that had nothing to do with poker.
(09:30):
He had a kind of clownish, cartoonish online persona. You know,
it's the idea of Novak Djokovic losing to someone from
your local tennis club at tennis. It's just so improbable,
and you have to look at why that would happen.
And the answer led me to pokabots.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And in particular the bot farm Corporation. Yeah, paint of
a picture of their lives in Siberia, these young men
and how they got started.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, this was fascinating to learn about. I mean, I
had a sort of specific image in my mind of
what bot farmers would look like. She I think the
reality of it was slightly different to what I expected.
I'd imagined one sort of big poker kingpin with a
garage full of computers and a bunch of employees, but
in reality it was a bunch of sort of nerdy
students that two technical colleges in this remote region of
(10:15):
Siberia where they have very good computing courses. So these
kids were spending all day doing very advanced courses in
software and programming and machine logic and mathematics and physics.
And this happened at around the time that online poker
was really getting going, it was really becoming bigger businesses.
It was two thousand and one, two thousand and two,
for the first time, really you could have a game
(10:37):
of poker against someone anywhere in the world online, any
time of day and night, for real money. And these
kids started playing. They realized they were good, and they
got better, and they realized also that they could make
a lot of money, mainly playing American people who thought
they were fantastic at poker and logged on after a
hard day at work and didn't realize they were playing.
A math PhD who had studied game theory was using
(10:59):
an on training tool to play nearly perfect poker. So
initially they made a lot of money, just a bunch
of students getting together on the top floor of a campus.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
They're just playing. They were playing as players.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
They as human the human but they but they had
learnt the science of poker, and there is a mathematical
science behind poker. If you're willing to put in the
house and you have that kind of brain, it's a
distinct advantage, especially playing everyday folks who don't know those things.
So they were making good money just playing human to human.
But these Russian colleges, they are excellent farms for very
(11:31):
tech minded people, and so it wasn't long before they
started applying that that technology to the game of poker.
And it didn't take long to realize that you can
have a piece of software running. It can play twenty
four hours a day. It doesn't need a break, it
doesn't need food, you don't need to pay it, and
it will play much better poker than the average human.
And you can scale it almost infinitely. As long as
(11:53):
you have the ability to create accounts. You can have
as many bots playing as you want. And so they
thought transitioned greatly from humans playing less capable humans online
to having lots of computers run this software automatically and
only being sort of broadly supervised by a few tech
operators who kept on yet things to make sure nothing
was going wrong. And they made millions and millions and
(12:15):
millions of dollars in those early years.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
And at what point did they start to attract the
notice of investors and also local police.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Well, I think they attracted the attention of local police
because the dorm was busy all hours of day and night.
They were playing mostly people on the side of the world.
Lots of students would arrive wearing their hoodies and marching upstairs,
and you know, eleven o'clock at night, and there was
activity all through the night. So the neighbors complained and
(12:44):
the local police came round, and I guess they assumed
it with sun criminal operation, and so they invited the
cops in and just showed them the computers with the
poker on the screen, saying, we're just playing poker.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Which is ripping off Americans, how about it.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
I mean, I'm sure the Russian police were quite work
well unhappy about what was going on, but it was
so easy to scale it. And I think the key
thing to remember is that their starting point was a
very high level of knowledge and a very scientific approach
to poker. And you know, over the course of six, seven,
eight years, they just got stronger and stronger and stronger.
You know, every single month this system operated, it got
(13:19):
better at playing poker. By twenty ten, twenty eleven, the
system was able to play an individual human opponent, analyze
that human's track record in poker, every game they've ever
played online because you can buy game records. So if
you're a habitual poker player and you.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Pay perfect knowledge of your opponent.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Perfect knowledge of your opponent's games, all the mistakes they've
made over the last couple of years, all the weaknesses
in their game, and the system could spot those weaknesses
and taylor of its own approach to the specific weaknesses
of its opponent. And that's really that's where the real
mind is in poker. I mean, all human poker players
have winknesses in the game. It's natural that will happen.
If you're able to algorithmically analyze them and exploit them,
(14:03):
then you know you will win vastly more money than
you lose. And they did.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
This was back in twenty eleven. Was kind of a
heyday of this. But your story obviously came out in
twenty twenty four, So I want to kind of get
through all the steps that take us from twenty eleven
to twenty twenty four. What was the kind of urgency
that you and your editors wanted to run it now
rather than back then.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
The main reason to do the story when we did
it was that no one had done this before. I
had never been had someone show me where the poker
blots come from. I've had read lots of stories about
academics in Pittsburgh and Alberta, Canada, sitting in their offices
and you know, crafting these ingenious, artificially intelligent poker programs.
But they didn't do it to make money. They did
(14:43):
it to sort of test the boundaries of what machines
could do. Anyone who's played online poker knows there are
bots out there, So I just I was curious to
know what kind of person does it purely for the money?
How good do you have to be? How do you
get into that job? And so there was a big
hole in our knowledge of this, and so I went
looking trying to fill it. And botting Artificial intelligence has
(15:04):
been a reality of poker for a long time, and
I don't think that that has ever changed, and it
probably will never change.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I thought, you know, poker is obviously a game of
incentives and motives and reading your opponent and direction and misdirection.
So I'm very attracted to this quote and your piece,
which was neither professionals nor poker providers want to acknowledge
the presence of intelligent machines for fear of deterring the
new players whose money keeps the game afloat. Explain that, well, yeah,
(15:33):
this was the big challenge of the story.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
I mean, no one involved in the poker industry wants
to talk about poker bots.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Arguably, the new reality of poker is dominated by technology.
It has changed the way even human professionels play the game.
I think you'd be a fool to think that most
online markets aren't absolutely crawling with bots. Yet if you
talk to the big providers, they just don't want to
talk about it. They don't want to acknowledge the presence
of bots on their system. They don't want to talk
(16:01):
about where bots come from. And it's a simple reason
for that is that they rely on new money. They
rely on people like me and you deciding we want
to have a go online poker and logging on investing
our hard earned dollars in a game of poker. If
they sort of acknowledge the existence of these unbeatabule machines
in their ecosystem, it doesn't help them commercially. So there's
(16:22):
just no information out there. Conversely that people who make
money from poker bots don't really want to talk about
it either because they kind of their business model relies
on secrecy. If people know who they are every platform
they play on, they'll be excluded, they'll be banned, their
winnings will be seized. So with secrecy on both sides,
So what that letter is a big void of information
(16:42):
and lots of sort of crazy online speculation and conspiracy
theories that weren't based in reality at all.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
What would it be like as a normal if you're
listening to this podcast and you're playing online poker. Would
you be able to tell if you're playing against a bot?
Are there only tells that bots have? I don't think
you can tell.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
No.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
I think the experience of losing to a very good
game theory optimal poker bot, it's a series of situations
that just go against you inexplicably. It feels like you're
getting rotten luck over and over and over and over
and over and over again. When you have an advantage
in a game like poker, it doesn't manifest as one big,
dramatic win. It's not the big, showy hand that gets you.
(17:19):
It's the one hundred hands, it's the two hundred hands.
And if he speak to people who work with poker bots,
they're not worried about a single hand of poker. It's
not where interests them. They're interested in the plus minus
dollar value after a thousand hands. That's where the real
value is to them. So actually, I don't think it's
very fun playing poker bots. One of the characteristics of
good game theory oatical poker is that there's loads of
(17:40):
action pre flop. That means that when you're playing poker,
before the community cards have even been put down the table,
before you see what the possible hands might be, you
get dealt your two whole cards. Poker bots game theory
tells you you must bet aggressively before the community cards
are down, which works. You know you're more likely to
win or lose hands if you do that effective, but
(18:01):
it's boring. It means you don't get those dramatic moments
of one card, two card, three card, what have I got?
You don't get those big showdowns. So I think it's
boring and frustrating, quite frankly, to lose slowly to a
poker bot online.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
So the providers didn't want to talk, the poker bot
makers didn't want to talk, and yet you got the story.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah, it was a tough one. It tried all sorts
of things to get to the bottom of it, and eventually,
I think it was just persistence paid off. I had
bothered enough people that would eventually reached the guys who
built this software that I was doing it, and they
got in touch with me, and that was pure luck.
And it just so happened that they had reached a
stage in their careers where they were ready to talk.
You know, their business model had changed somewhat, and they
(18:45):
seemed quite keen to tell me what they were looking
at doing next and tell me their big plans for
the next poker revolution that they wanted to oversee. I
think if I'd approached them ten years ago, I don't
think they would have talked.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
After the break kip me to the humans behind the
Russian bots. Stay with us, So how did they approach
(19:24):
you and did you have any red flags when you
got inbound from purported Russian poker bot Manager Farm Manager.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I had a few red flags. I mean, there was
some quite scary stuff online about who they were and
what they were about, and of course the mental associations
that go with a black market Russian poker operation. You
can imagine there might be some scary people involved in that.
I'd spend possibly a year, I think, trying to talk
to these guys, trying to find them, researching every aspect
(19:56):
of their businesses. I knew that there were six or
seven Russian company needs that they were linked to, but
there was no online information about them. So I basically
just called everyone that I could find that had the
loosest connection to those companies and ask them about what
they did and how they did it. After I've been
doing this for a few months, one of my encrypted
messages services popped up and it was, you know, a
(20:18):
message from someone claiming to be from Neo Cores, which
is the bot farm operation, and they told me they
were thinking about breaking their silence and talking about their
business for the first time, and I had to meet
them face to face and the only place we could
do that was Armenia. Journalists can't really go to Russia
these days, and there's limited places they can go, but
Armenia is a friendly neighboring country, and so I flew
(20:41):
out to Armenia and they showed up in a couple
of big SUVs with tinted windows, and we were sitting
in the shadow of Mount araw Rat in a vineyard,
which they chose as the place to have our big
sit down interview. I think the quite what to expect,
but you know, as always, the reality of things is
never as intimidating as your imagination of it. And what
I met was a bunch of very smart guys, kind
(21:04):
of nerdy guys who are fascinated by maths and game
theory and technology, who had built, actually, you know, whatever
you think about poker bots, an ingenious system for exploiting
winkses in the poker market, and they'd be doing it
longer than anyone else. And I went through all the
different evolutions of this poke bot business, from the start
in Siberia all the way through to the most modern one,
(21:25):
which is Deplay, which is kind of an artificial intelligence company.
At this point, no one had connected them all, and
as I went through all of those different iterations of
the business, they said, yes, that was us, so the
same like three or four guys were the architects of
the whole system, and that's like two decades worth of
poker experience there. It was fascinating to hear them talk
so openly about what they did. Their oversight of the
(21:47):
online poker gave them a unique view of how the
whole thing works. You know, they weren't providers, they weren't
running poker sides, they weren't players, they weren't just playing
themselves for their own profit. They had enormous reams of
data in how this whole market operates.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
What has changed in their business model that makes them,
timing wise, want to speak to you last year.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
I think they've they've been through an evolution of their
view of poker. I mean, obviously they've always made money
from poker, and they still are, but I think they've
recognized that the online poker market the way it exists
now isn't sustainable. At least that's what they believe because
they are essentially involved thousands of times a day in
playing online poker against opponents on various different platforms. They know,
(22:32):
for example, that the average player who joins online poker
an online poker site and invests money will leave much
more quickly than was the case ten years ago. So
people are logging on to play online poker and try it,
thinking that it's going to be fun, and they're quickly
discovering that it's not very fun, losing their money and leaving. Now,
the whole of the online poker economy is structured like
(22:53):
a pyramid. At that bottom rung of new money coming
in funds the whole thing right up to the very
top of the Chris money makers who you know, the
guys that you see in the World Series of Poker
in Las Vegas on the final table. None of it
works unless you have that bottom rung of new money
coming in funding the whole thing. And I think they
recognize that the game really may not exist anymore if
(23:14):
it becomes too easy for machines to compete against humans
and beat them.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Too many poker bots have killed the golden goose of
the bottom layer of the pyramid. Essentially, that's exactly it.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
And actually it's not just poker bots either, it's the
whole atmosphere around the poker economy. It's, you know, it's
how intimidating it can be, how unfriendly it can be,
how competitive it can be. If you're not losing to
a Russian poker bot, you know, there's every chance you'll
be losing to a Brazilian PhD student who is simply
(23:44):
better at processing information than you are. But the point is,
it's it's just not fun to lose so quickly. So
they recognize that there is a love of poker. People
are very passionate about the enjoy playing it. But I
think their view is that that the new poker economy
needs to be more welcoming. It needs to be more friendly,
and it needs to be more tailored to welcome in
new people rather than just driving them away. You know,
(24:07):
to use the tennis example again, if you want to
expand the game of tennis, you don't just pit your
club players against the local pro who beat them six love,
six love, six love. Then they go home and they
never play again. But that's what happens in the poker market.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
So looks the business models. Let them win a bit
and sacrifice a bit of margin in favor of more volume.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Essentially, the business model is the margin is people playing,
so they should be playing in a way that makes
them want to play more, and the poker coonry hasn't
been particularly good at that so far, and they are
looking for a new way to sort of structure the
payment system and make sure that you're not playing against
people who are twenty thirty levels above you make it
(24:47):
more fair, more fun. And it's ironic really that the
people who are trying to do this are the same
ones that have helped make poker such an inhospitable place.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, so they're really I mean, is that the spiers
who came in from the cold, who are based trying
to remake poker into a more equitable and slightly fairer arena,
perhaps so that more people play. I mean, that is
an intro is a very interesting and strange and unexpected inversion,
and that was kind of why they wanted to talk
to you at this moment.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
You think, look, they're business people. They don't care about poker.
They don't even play poker anymore. These guys, you know,
they played in their youth, but it's it's a job
to them, you know, it's it's their career.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
You mentioned the beginning that poker is a kind of
unusual subset of the kind of wider world of online gambling.
Looking at the wider world, how has technology changed an
AI in particular, changed gambling more broadly.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
I mean, I really believe we're we're in the middle
of a revolution of online vetting, which has been led
by AI. I just don't think most people have realized
it yet, because most people who use these games for
leisure purposes, who bet on sports or horses, or play
online slot machines, they haven't yet realized that there's this
sub set of players out there who were using artificially
(26:02):
intelligent software to play the games in an optimal way.
This whole story goes back decades and there's a subculture.
There's a kind of subset of professional gamblers who are
very tech minded, very scientific, very mathematical, very bloodless in
the way they play the game. And they all emerge
from Las Vegas in the nineteen eighties, from the carve
(26:24):
counting circuit, and they applied that sort of advantage mindset
to technology, and they asked, you, what would happen if
we took our mathematical skills and we added the advantage
of terabytes of processing power? How much money could we make.
And it turns out what they discovered and what they've
been doing ever since the last forty years, is the
only profitable way to bet. They've been doing this in
(26:47):
secret for decades. They never talk about it because it's
their livelihood, and the casinos are quite happy not to
talk about it either, because they don't want anyone to
know their games are broken and vulnerable. But that's the reality.
It's like a secret arms race. And it was that
I found that whole world so fascinating that, you know,
I spent the last five years of my life writing
about it for Bloomberg, And I've got a book coming
(27:08):
out next year which is the sort of origin story
for how this new generation of tech gamblers came to exist.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
The book's called Lucky Devil's.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
That's correct, Yes, Simon and Schuster our next year.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
There's a lot of movies, I mean, obviously the Ocean's franchise,
you know, front and center, but plenty of others as
well about gambling and beating the house and stuff. What
do you think makes the sort of human gambling winning
against the odds, ingenious ways to beat the system so
(27:40):
compelling to audiences and readers everywhere.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I think people recognize what it feels like to play
a rigged game. It's like modern capitalism encapsulated in a
kind of easily understandable format, in a relatable format. Most
people know what it feels like to spend your whole
life trying to play a game fairly and still lose,
whether it's your job, whether it's your love life. This
(28:05):
feeling that the world that the cards are kind of
against you, I think is very familiar, and that the
house the casino has become sort of metaphor for entrenched
wealth and power that basically makes the rules, changes the rules,
and acts for its own benefit in a way that's
very unfair for the majority of people.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Now.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
I think that's that's undeniably true of the gambling business.
I think it's arguably true of modern politics and modern
economies around the world. And I think it's very relatable
to sort of get one over on the man. And
these guys are sort of in the minority that actually
were able to do it, and they didn't do it
by cheating. They did it just by their smarts. They
did it just by hard work. And that's what I
(28:47):
find compelling. I think is that it's a lifetime worth
of effort and grinding away to get that tiny advantage
and turn it into money.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Kitchen Well, thank you for joining us on tech Stuff.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Thanks Ausin.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
For Tech Stuff. I'm as Voloscian and I'm Cara Price.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and
Tyler Hill. It was executive produced by me, Karra Price,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and also wrote our theme song.
Join us on Friday for the Week in Tech. Karen
(29:45):
and I will run through all the biggest stories in
tech and the headlines you may have missed. Please do rate,
review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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