Thomas Bakker

musings on poker bots and more

About Me

I am a twenty-two year old college student from the Netherlands, studying for university degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science and China Studies. Some of the projects I’ve been involved in include:

  • Between August and December 2010, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz and I were hired as independent consultants by Cake Poker to determine if anyone had exploited a security vulnerability in their poker software. We did this by developing, testing and applying statistical methods that analyzed the way players played to detect if anyone had more information than they were supposed to have. After verifying that our methods worked on simulated data (generated using self-written artificial poker players), we applied them to Cake Poker’s data from the 18 months during which their security vulnerability existed, which consisted of ~80 million games (~200 gigabyte of logs). See the report linked below for our results.
  • In December 2010, Two Plus Two Publishing published my poker strategy book Analytical No-Limit Hold ‘em. You can purchase a copy from Amazon.
  • In May 2011, I started the first independent poker news site named Subject: Poker together with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz and over six writers after the US Department of Justice shut down the three largest poker sites in April of 2011 and two sites failed to repay players over $350 million. Subject: Poker was the first to report almost all major poker-related stories since, has been referenced by several large mainstream news sources, and has developed a large following, with over 250,000 unique visitors and more than one million page views. In January 2012 we decided to stop publishing new stories, since our newly founded security consulting company (see below) meant we could no longer be a truly independent source of poker news.
  • In October 2011, I started this blog to write about poker AI and other things that interest me.
  • In December 2011 I started a poker security consulting company together with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, named Bakker & Davidowitz Consulting. Most of our work is centered around data analysis to develop and implement fraud detection methods.

Please see my LinkedIn profile for more information.

Some poker-related things I wrote

Book

2011 Analytical No-Limit Hold ‘em. ISBN 9788897257752, Boogaloo Publishing. Publication date: July 25th, 2011.
Italian translation. Available directly from the publisher. 
2010 Analytical No-Limit Hold ‘em: Crushing Mid-Stakes Short-Handed Games. ISBN 1880685507, Two Plus Two Publishing LLC. Publication date: December 10th, 2010.
Advanced poker strategy. Available from Amazon. 

Articles

2010 Book Excerpt - Optimal Calling. December Issue of (Online) Two Plus Two Magazine. Publication date: December 1st, 2010. 
An excerpt from my book, Analytical No-Limit Hold ‘em, about optimal calling frequencies in poker.
2010 Book Excerpt - Perceived Ranges. November Issue of (Online) Two Plus Two Magazine. Publication date: November 1st, 2010. 
An excerpt from Analytical No-Limit Hold ‘em about perceived ranges in poker.

Other

2010 Results of our Independent Cake Poker Investigation (with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz). Publication date: November 30th, 2010. 
 We have developed and applied statistical methodologies to analyze ~80 million played poker games, in order to detect certain types of malicious players.
This report goes hand in hand with the summary posted here and the announcement of the investigation posted here.