Poker bots online – getting smarter

Ever been playing poker online and wondered whether the other players seated at your table are in fact humans?

Your suspicions that you could be playing against poker bots rather than real people are very reasonable…because bots are becoming pretty common at the major poker rooms.

The good news is that most of them are pretty ordinary players.  The bad news…not all of them are ordinary.

Apparently the many unknown variables that come into play in the game of poker – your opponents’ style of play, their cards, the flop, turn and river yet to be dealt… all make it a challenging game to conquer with artificial intelligence. Unlike chess, where perfect knowledge of all information pertinent to the next move allows for programming of the perfect move.

But breakthroughs in dealing with the unknown are slowing coming it seems – and the proof of this is coming from the online poker rooms themselves.

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, last July Poker Stars shut down a number of playing accounts that were using poker bots, and returned $57,000 to players that lost money to them.  Yes, these bots were winning!

Poker Stars themselves concede that these days poker bots aren’t the easy-beats they used to be.  “More than 90 percent are losing money,” says a Poker Stars consultant charged with the responsibility of combating bot activity.  Of course by inference that means 10% are winning…and potentially winning far more than the bad bots are losing, depending on how many account holders are using the successful bots!

Online poker rooms are going to have their work cut out for them combating the rise of the effective poker bot…and and an even bigger PR job convincing players that their rooms are free of money sucking bots.

Search Google for ‘poker bots for sale’ and you get 80,000 websites to browse through…some just selling a particular program, some rating the best bots and others offering general advice and information on how to use them.  The program behind the July Poker Stars account closures has sold over 5,000 copies…and this is just one of the thousands available for purchase and download.

They say even the best bots are still a long way of beating the pros.  But I’m a lot closer to the bunny end of the spectrum when it comes to playing poker and this is where the good bots are now having success.

Think I’ll stick to live games!

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