Poker Tips and Strategies

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The issue of poker bots is an ever present one in online poker. It has basically been around from the very beginnings, and the number of companies and various websites offering poker bots for sale for has only increased ever since. For starters, I think we can rule out these offers, without a second thought. Why would anyone sell something that’s potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few bucks? I know these sites feature rather convincing sales copy, but that does little to defeat the above logic.

Can poker bots successfully compete against real poker players at all?
Does current technology make that possible? The answer to that would have to be yes and no. Technology is certainly capable of creating a poker bot that can successfully take on the world’s best players: it has been proven and it can be done. The same way I can’t replicate NASA’s space shuttle in my back yard though, I can’t possibly create a poker bot that could achieve anything close to what it’s supposed to. The poker bot which proved its capabilities against some of the top professionals was developed in a university lab, with no efforts and costs spared. It was also programmed with help from some of the world’s top professionals, so yes, if you can pull all those resources together, you will definitely be able to create a viable poker bot. Also, you probably won’t go around selling it for on some website that screams “scam” from a mile away – I can pretty much guarantee that.
“a poker bot needs to be able to think, so a layer of AI was added on top of the odds-calculus capabilities” it sounds so simple, doesn’t it? As a person who’s worked with AI, I can tell you it’s anything but that, and a statement like that is not just an insult to reasonably smart readers but it’s also a gross underestimation of the intricacy of the game of poker.

Does this mean there are no poker bots playing online?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Some of the experts seem to think that the very entities which use poker botting the most are the online poker sites themselves. They allegedly do it to secure critical player liquidity (the same reason for which they offer rake rebate deals and poker propping), without which they would never survive, so the logical argument is certainly there. Most of the mainstream poker rooms make a clear case of not wanting to see any such attempts made at their tables though.

Poker rooms have a number of ways to detect poker botting, an offense which is considered of the highest degree and which is usually punished by the ceasing of all funds and by the closure of the suspected players’ accounts. One of the ways poker rooms can detect botting is through a software hook which is installed onto the client’s computer together with the client side of the software. This hook has the ability to detect programs running in the background, and it can identify poker bots too.
The solution can be tricked relatively easily though. Botters almost always use a second computer (possibly a laptop hooked up to a PC) to mimic human interaction perfectly and to keep the computer on which the software runs clean. While this move may be a strike scored by the botters, it doesn’t mean botting is anywhere as close to required minimal efficiency as some would like to believe. The poker industry has the resources to raise hell against bots and botters, and therefore I believe that commercially available poker bots are absolutely useless in today’s advanced online poker environment.

If you want to give botting a go, I’ll have to advise against it. Your bot will probably start by losing money, and it’ll continue with having your account suspended and your bankroll confiscated.

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Tags: online poker, poker bots, poker robots