Friday, 7 January 2011 at 01:53

The poker bot owners declare that they are not defrauding anyone. However good players tend to differ in opinion.

To make a statement that internet poker has experienced a rocky ride would be putting things lightly. There have been cheating scandals, the political problems, and the banking problems that the poker companies themselves have gone through recently. In addition there were dumb poker celebrity scandals which incredibly show up in the rumor mills. It is sufficient to make players think about ditching this hobby altogether. However then what would we do for entertainment? Then there is the fact that some folks actually play online poker for a job.

However many good players would complain that the tables have become much more difficult to beat lately. Done are the times when a good player could sit down at a table at any poker room, play for 2-3 hours in the evening and predictably earn $120 while watching your favorite show. Nowadays it is apparent that most people know how to play good enough. This is a real bummer, but not unexpected. Recreational players are just not going to continue to keep losing their chips forever. This is simple economics if you think about it for just a minute. Unless the donkeys are high income earners they have to learn the game or they will give up.

One interesting evolution in the game that has drawn a lot of fanfare is the onslaught of poker bot programs. Many blame these for making the tables tougher. However the truth is that many of these programs are bad players themselves and consequently only are used in the very lowest limits. There are a couple of decent ones out there though. The poker rooms vary significantly in their enforcement of their anti-bot regulations, but the overall trend is moving in a direction of tolerance. There are several understandable reasons for this.

First off, we are back to fundamental economics again. The competition makes things rough. To remain in business any operation must create enough income, and online poker businesses are not immune. Poker bots are the best players that the poker room has. They pay the most rake. Some sites simply cannot afford to ban them. Only the very busiest rooms have the permission from their accountants to do that, and the places who do are basically are just making a PR maneuver.

Next Up, we need to ask ourselves, are these pokerbots really all that bad of a thing to have at the tables? What harm do they bring? The tables have more players because of them, and some poker rooms may not survive without them. So in actuality they create liquidity, which helps all of us in the long run. They retain no definable unfair edge over real players, as they have no access to any additional data. The only people who are complaining about them are good players who have concluded that bots are to be blamed for the tables being tougher. But as previously mentioned, that was an inevitable and unavoidable eventuality regardless.

Finally, poker bots do not actually violate the spirit of the great game that we call poker. In reality they compliment it. Programming a poker bot profile to play how you want it to is perhaps the ultimate level of a persons poker learning experience. It is the next logical step for a serious student of the game. Watching it do what you want is very gratifying, and a tremendous amount of fun. Don’t judge it until you have tried it. And who can tell, you could save internet poker as a result.

Tags: Online game poker bot poker game