Are Poker Bots Good Enough to Beat You?
More and more players are nowadays being concerned with the fact that sophisticated card-playing robots are being used in online poker rooms. We all know that bots exist and that they are being used. The main question is “are they good enough to beat you?”
WinHoldEm is an example of such a poker bot. It is the first commercially available auto playing poker software. It can be also used when several people are playing as a team and are also running WinHoldEm.
According to poker site operators, poker bots are nothing to worry about. Maybe they have nothing to worry about, but we certainly do. I mean the poker rooms make money by charging a fee on the pot. Regardless which player gets the pot they will still charge that fee. But the player has loads to lose.
Kurt Lange, CEO of Poker Academy had this to say: “It’s inevitably going to become a serious problem when they figure out that bots win hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”
Poker site operators should concern themselves more with this problem. And it is a serious problem at that. All any player is looking for is a shot of winning the pot by competing against another human player, not a robot. On one hand poker sites loudly proclaim that automated play is no big deal. On the other they covertly scan for and eliminate suspicious accounts.
Vikrant Bhargava, marketing director of PartyPoker had this to say: “We’re making sure we never have bots on our site.” PartyPoker has an estimated 100 employees that scan for bots.
In my opinion the cheaters will not be eliminated. They will simply get smarter and find ways to prevent poker rooms from detecting the bots. Regardless of what Vikrant Bhargava said, I am still not 100% sure that there are no bots playing at Party Poker. Sure, the poker rooms can make it hard to use bots. But they still can completely eliminate the problem.
Can poker bots beat you? Are they good enough to beat a human poker player?
WinHoldEm will make a profit in low stakes Fixed Limit Hold’Em poker games that have10 seats. It is a small profit, but a profit none the less. Chances are that the poker room will detect the bot and will confiscate the account of the cheating player.
You are probably playing against a bot if you are playing 0,25-0,5; 0,5-1; 1-2 Limit Hold’Em poker and you keep losing.
If you are playing High Limit or No Limit Hold’Em chances are that the bots will lose. The bots that exist today will most of the times lose money to you when playing such games.
Shorthanded, 5 and 6-seated, No Limit Hold’Em poker games are the most troublesome to bots. At the current stage it will still take years for someone to develop a bot that can win this type of game at any level. All the people trying to make money of these games by using bots will only lose money and make the game more profitable for human players.
Tips on how not to lose to Poker Bots:
- Be on top of your game, play good solid poker;
- Play No Limit Hold’Em and Pot Limit Hold’Em;
- Play shorthanded, 5 and 6-seated Hold’Em poker games.
- Use the chat feature. Ask the other players some simple questions like their name and what they do for a living. You should be suspicious if they cannot answer you.
