The latest craze among poker enthusiasts and programmers is to design and use a poker bot that will play online poker for you with little or no human contact, with the goal of winning money. This latest fad has frightened both online poker sites and players, since the fear is that a computer program capable of winning online poker will be able to outperform live thinking players, robbing poker sites of quality players who are afraid of playing against so many poker bots.
In light of the recent poker bot craze, a recent industry study found that 12% of online poker players were concerned about or had entirely stopped playing online poker. Instead of risking their money against these new computer-generated poker bots, this effectively pushes players offline.
In online poker, however, there are various techniques to beat a poker computer, and knowing these methods will undoubtedly give the human player the upper hand versus poker bots. One factor that makes a poker bot a stronger player is that it lacks the human emotion and reasoning ability that humans require when playing online poker. When a poker bot is dealt a bad beat, they are unlikely to go on ’tilt’ or become enraged.
Human players have two key advantages while playing online poker. One downside is that poker sites use computer produced code to decide shuffles, deals, and hand results, while the other disadvantage, which is just as harmful to your wallet, is the poker bot, which is pre-programmed with all of the game’s statistics and probability.
However, if you understand how poker sites and poker bots work, you can use their computer-generated codes against them. In terms of poker statistical analysis, a poker bot is limited to making decisions based purely on the game’s play. To put it another way, a poker bot will only make judgments based on recognized game trends.
Furthermore, online poker sites that actively try to detect and impede the efforts of poker bot programmers and users have created a counter-measure to the poker bots, which uses the same known patterns. A poker site may ensure that a poker bot will not win by introducing a countermeasure to the poker bots, because the poker bots’ activities are predictable and limited to a skill-set directly tied to statistical odds and probability.
As perplexing as it may appear, this really works in the human player’s favor. While the poker site’s software is actively looking for poker bot patterns and attempting to distinguish between who is a human and who is a computer produced bot script, they have unwittingly created a hole that allows a human player to exploit the online poker site’s weakness.