Do poker bots work? | Poker Bonus Club Marawa

Last month Full Tilt made the poker headlines with the news that they froze a number of accounts for using poker bots. Now online poker players all over the world are asking themselves: Do pokerbots really work and by how many people are using these bots?

To answer these questions we first have to establish what poker bots really are. A poker bot is a program that can play hands on its own. It is a piece of software that enables a person to start up their poker client, sit down at a table and let the bot play the game on its own. So to be clear: software like Poker Tracker or Hold’em which collects data on opponents to make better informed decisions, is not regarded as poker bot software.

In the pokerbot industry, there are roughly three categories of bots. First you have the so called ‘click slaves’, meaning a type of program that clicks the right buttons for you, but does not actually tell you what to do. You need to have programming skills to make them play correctly, because you need to add your own playing instructions to run the software. Second, you have the ‘third party decision brains’. These are odds calculator programs that are hooked to button clicking software (the aforementioned click slaves). Third, you have the most appealing category: the ‘stand-alone bot applications’. These programs do the think work and clicking for you, so you just have to install and run it.

From the last category, the software from Shanky Technologies is the most-used and widely regarded as the best piece of poker bot software. It was also their bot that was banned from Full Tilt Poker. The Shanky forum has over 7000 members, so we can conclude that many people use the Shanky bots.

The fact that the use of poker bot software is widely spread plus the actual banning of poker bot users by Full Tilt leads us to conclude that poker bots do actually work. Don’t expect to beat the high stakes though. There have been reports of high winnings on lower stakes cash games and Sit & Go’s. The low level of opposition on the smaller stakes, combined with the continously evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes the use of robot software appealing for certain people.

Before you start seeing dollar signs in your eyes, don’t forget you risk a lot by using these poker bots. After all, Full Tilt didn’t just ban the players that used them, but also froze all their accounts with in some cases ten thousands of dollars on it!

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