Do Robots Play Online Poker?
The news online has been abuzz with claims that poker rooms are sometimes frequented by robots. Let’s set the record straight. First of all, they’re called bots, not robots. To be a robot, it would have to be more than just a computer program. It would have to be an actual computerized piece of equipment capable of movement. Second, to create a bot to play poker at a commercial online poker room is more than a little complex.
The code, or the inner workings of the poker room software isn’t available for everyone to see, so it’s not easy to make another computer program interact with that program. It’s not impossible. There are people who can do it, but it isn’t easy. The next part is more complicated, though. Once you’ve somehow connected an automatic poker-player bot to poker software, you need to program that poker player bot.
There are some excellent poker tutorial programs out there, but very few allow you to plug in the cards and the actions of the other players. Almost all require you to play their own games. If you do find one that allows you to plug in the action on the board, though, it can only make moves defined by the type of player it has been programmed to play. That is, it can be a tight-agressive player, a loose-agressive player, a tight-passive, or a loose-passive. If you don’t change it frequently, it’s easy for the other players at the table to catch on and predict the player’s every move.
Bots cannot control a bankroll the way that a real player can. Bots might win, meaning that the bankroll is not a problem, but if they lose too much, they’ll simply bust without any way to reload.
There’s another thing to consider here, too. Most players in the low to medium stakes rooms are mostly in it for the challenge and the fun. There is very little fun in leaving a bot to play your game.
If you do think you’re playing against a bot, though, say hello. If they answer, it’s probably a real person.
