News

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 01:14

A startling report in the New York Times brought poker bots into the limelight and how they have been causing the major poker rooms a major headache.

As long as computers can be used to do anything using sophisticated computer programs and applications, there will be underhand programmers who will exploit them. Since online casinos and poker room programs became sophisticated enough to be opened up to the general public, there have been programmers who have tried to create automated programmatic robots, or "bots" to exploit any weaknesses in those programs.

To date, the most successful of these exploitations have been bots programmed to join online poker games and emulate real players. In the past, they have not had the level of sophistication to enable them to win much and so were never seen as a threat and mostly disregarded by poker rooms. But a new breed of bots have been created that have a much higher level of programming and are able to win on a more consistent basis. In fact, one producer of these poker bots, Shanky Technologies even sells their bots for $129 to players who are trying all angles to get an edge and win more money.

Full Tilt Poker has stated they will ban any player who gets caught using them. To date they have had to ban 400 players for using bots in their games. PokerStars have also said they will ban any customers caught using bots to do what is little more than cheating.

But the actual truth is less glamorous in that these bots, despite their sophistication and ability to win, are not cutting the mustard as well as their owners would like. Analysts have revealed that the vast majority of poker bots are losing more than they are winning at the online poker sites where they are being deployed. Their weakness lies in their inability to emulate real human intuition, which is a big aspect of the skill of poker and often the difference from the big time winners and the also-rans. While they can be programmed to know all the rules of the game and to account for a huge number of variables in the cards that are dealt, they cannot read other players or intuitively guess what another player will do next.

Despite their flaws, bots are here to stay and the larger poker rooms will fight to keep them out despite it costing them money in lost players, while smaller poker sites are more likely to look in the other direction an try to hold on to their members. Either way, real players with real skills still have the edge over what is little more than a collection of coded statements and arguments, at least until someone figures out how to make them a lot better.