Ed Miller wrote an excellent article called Bots, Cheating and Online Poker that I encourage you to read. It’s the growing existance of bots that I want to touch on specifically, though.

The reason bots are a threat is because it’s not too hard to code a bot that will beat the small games, both limit and no limit. Small games are the lifeblood of the poker economy and the $100 losses at $2-$4 are ultimately what feed the $1,000-$2,000 games at the top - pyramid style. In a normal small stakes game, incompetent players fill most of the seats, and the few good players “shear the sheep,� as it were, taking their cut, but leaving most of the money floating around.

Bots, however, have the capability to be in hundreds of games simultaneously. Eventually they will “skin the sheep.� They will continue to expand and fill seats until someone stops them, or until it’s no longer profitable. If the bots are making no money, then it means the cardroom is getting its rake, the good players are getting a tiny bit, and the bad players are getting slaughtered. They’ll quit. And without their money, the whole online poker pyramid will collapse.

Before, it was generally accepted - or at least that’s how I interpretted the situation - that bots couldn’t really win any real money at online poker. They are too predictable for any halfway decent player to beat and they don’t change gears to adjust to table conditions well enough. Now, however, this has been proven false - in a way. Bots are presumably still predictable (at the very least in how unpredictable they are) and I’d guess that there are no bots that can change gears as quickly and as effectively as an expert human player. But bots don’t have to have the largest win-rate or even a large one at all; they just need to do a little better than to break even. And from what I’m seeing, they’re fully capable of this.

There’s another reason why bots may actually surpass humans in some aspects: They don’t tilt.

That’s huge.

Most players at my tables - myself included - do some really, really stupid things from time to time and that usually ends up costing us somewhere around 1-2 hours worth of table winnings, say bluffing off four big bets into a calling station because we’re tired or don’t pay attention or we play like donkeys. Bots don’t have that problem; they have no emotions. My largest leak is that, while I usually know what the correct play is, I don’t always act like it. If I could disconnect the emotional part of myself while at the table, I’d make a lot more money. Or, conversely, if I spend a week programming a bot to play just the way I would, I’d get the same end result: an emotionless me who doesn’t yield to impulses and do stupid crap.

Adjusting to the table online, where the circulation is high - meaning that players come and go rapidly - may be overrated. The players who sit for long periods of time are usually the ones who play a lot, and they in turn tend to be fairly disciplined which means that they have fairly trustworthy PokerTracker stats. When it comes to them, I have no edge over the bots; the computers have the same information as I do. I may score a few bucks here and there noticing when someone loses with a really big hand and then raises every chance he gets for the next three hand before he leaves the table, something that a bot may not pick up, but that doesn’t happen very often.

And I’m probably not nearly as unpredictable as I’d like to be. Fact of the matter is, I’m not unpredictable at all, except when I do stupid things. I don’t mix up my game much, precisely because of the high circulation. People don’t stay long enough for me to think that a meta-game advantage of smooth calling in the BB with pocket aces is worth the one small bet that I miss out on by raising. I always raise. A bot, on the other hand, can decide that it’s going to raise 95% of the time from the BB in this situation, and actually do that, and be sufficiently random about it.

So the standard reasons for why humans are better than bots don’t apply at all as much as we might like to think. And bots don’t tilt.

So what’s to learn from this? Look out for bots, first of all. Don’t necessarily get paranoid and accuse everyone left and right of being a bot, but be aware that the problem exists. Secondly, understand just how much money you’re losing because of tilt. Because unless you’re a bot or a really, really bad player to begin with, that’s very likely to be your largest leak. Perhaps we can learn something from the bots?