Are You Ready For Poker Battle-Bots?

I used to love that show “Battle Bots.” What ever happened to it anyway? Remote controlled carnage, metal bashing and slicing metal, a demolition derby that left the winner the least damaged and still mobile. Strategy manifested itself in sound construction, thinking on your feet, and bringing a worthy game plan to the arena.

Well don’t look now, but a similar sport is beginning to evolve in low-limit online poker games. The use of poker bots (software programmed to play poker for you automatically on your computer) is gaining in popularity, especially at the lowest-limit, Limit Hold’em tables. We’re talking .25/.50 and .50/1.00 here – too low for serious poker players to care about, but perfect for serious poker players to put a pokerbot in and see if it can hold it’s own.

Many of these types of games being played at at the larger online poker rooms are becoming populated by bots. You stand a decent chance of being in a game half full of humans and half bots these days. So it’s not exactly Battle Bots (not yet anyway), as there are human players mixed in with the bots. Imagine a man dressed in a suit of armor standing in the middle of the Battle Bots arena swinging an axe at everything moving around him – that can be you at the low limit hold’em game!

With few exceptions, most of the pokerbot programs being used are simply not as good as reasonable human players and therefore will do much better (that is lose less) against a field of other bots. However, most low-limit human players are not “reasonable.” For a variety of reasons, the humans playing in these games just don’t play well. Maybe the stakes are too low to take seriously, maybe they are new players still learning how to play, maybe they are all drunk or smoking dope. Who knows. But the result is a pretty even playing field between the bots and humans, especially at .25/.50 and below.

That being said, some of the bots are better than others. No doubt there are privately made bots out there now which are grades above most of the commercially available products. But impressive poker bots created by savvy programmers are starting to be sold to the public as well. There are two types: Those that automate the actions from a third party software designed to simply analyze odds and give playing advice, and those that are complete stand-alone products which you simply turn on.

The advantage to the first type is that you are in control of programming the decisions and thus are not left at the mercy of some programmer who may or may not be a good poker player. The disadvantage of this type is that the third party software programs on the market (which these bots operate from) simply don’t have enough variables to be able to program a very good bot - for example, they do not take previous round betting action into consideration when making decisions. Therefore, the best bots will be self-contained programs designed by good players.

Whichever way you want to go, I say get in there and do some botting! Bring on "Poker Battle Bots!" Get your bot set up and send it into action. Either that, or put on your armor and start swinging that axe.