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The Truth About Bots
Note: This article was written as a short insert for a feature in InsidePoker Magazine and is far from a comprehensive review of the subject.
Bots are one of the least understood aspects of online poker. Here I hope to debunk some of the most common myths about them.
- Bots Don’t Chat. Ask a typical online player how to spot a bot, and they’ll say that ‘bots can’t chat’. But that’s not the case. Many bots can chat, at least in an elementary fashion. It’s relatively easy, for example, to program a bot to say ‘Nice hand’ each time it loses. To be fair, most bots are not this advanced, but they do exist.
More importantly, lack of chat is far from a good indicator that a player is a bot. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons why a person could not respond to chat – perhaps their chat has been revoked, for example. Perhaps they’re playing several tables at once, and have the chat switched off so they can concentrate. Or perhaps they’ve blocked your chat because they think you’re annoying! There are far too many other reasons for a player not to chat, besides bot usage, to make lack of chat suspicious.
- Bots Play Lots of Tables at Once. A common complaint that I’ve seen posted online is that somebody who plays 16 tables at once must be a bot. The theory is that 16 tables is too much for anybody – it’s not humanly possible to play that many. But that theory is wrong.
When compared to other forms of computer gaming, online poker is relatively slow and requires relatively little input from the player. To an experienced gamer, it can be quite easy to play this many tables. In fact, just a few years ago a man called Hevad Khan was reported so frequently as a bot that he created a video of himself, showing him playing almost thirty tournaments at once on a single monitor, to prove to his detractors that he was a human player (you can see that video here). Hevad recently made the final table of the WSOP Main Event.
Also bear in mind that the last thing a bot user wants to do is draw attention to themselves. Since playing lots of tables is so commonly reported as ‘bot behaviour’, few bot users would risk playing more than a couple of games at once.
- Bots Have a Skill Advantage Over Human Players. In actual fact, a bot usually has very little skill at all. Bots don’t get tired and emotional, so they can play for long hours, but that’s just about the only advantage they have. Sure, bots can calculate odds quickly, but so can an experienced player. At the end of the day, a bot sees the same table as you, and has the same amount of information with which to make its decision that you do. A typical bot will play a very tight, straightforward strategy, and try to make money by exploiting weak and loose players over a very large number of hands.
Poker is not like chess, where IBM’s latest powerhouse routinely gives the grandmasters a run for their money. We are far from having a computer that can play even heads up limit Hold’em (often regarded as the simplest game to ‘solve’) at a world class level. Only recently, Phil Laak and Mori Eskandani both beat the world’s most advanced poker-playing robot for the second year in a row.
- Bots are Winners. In reality, very few bots are able to win, even in weak low-limit games. A typical bot user will try out a program like WinHoldem (a commercially available bot program) for a few hours, then stop using it when they realise that their bankroll is gone. It takes a lot of work (and often, programming knowledge) to design a bot that is able to beat the opposition. Sure, some winning bots exist. But they’re so rare that the typical online poker player will never sit at the same table as one.
- Bots are a Threat. Online poker sites are constantly working to prevent bots from being used at their tables. As the technology improves, it will become so difficult to get away with using a bot program that it simply won’t be worth the time and effort. Bot users beware – the end is nigh for you and your kind.
