Have you ever watched one of those futuristic science fiction movies where technology evolves to such an extent that robots run our everyday lives? It's been the subject of a number of important landmarks in both film and literature. From inane cartoons like The Jetsons to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (an adaption of Philip K Dick's, Do androids dream of electric sheep?) Scott showed us a bleak, dystopian cityscape where, paradoxically, by engineering robots to look like humans, we lost an essential part of our humanity in the process. It harked back to novels like Shelly’s Frankenstein, which forced us to ask some difficult questions about playing god.
But what if robots were already invading our present reality? We have our suspicions about a number of political figures, but what we can say with certainty is that robots are alive and well in the online gambling space. It works like this: software engineering companies develop programs with complex algorithms to mimic a kind of artificial gambling intelligence, such that it's difficult to know whether you're playing a game of online poker against another person or against a computer program.
Poker bots can make some surprisingly good moves. Up until now, experienced poker players were almost always better than any bot, but complex software development has changed the game significantly. Although the majority of bots play poker quite badly, some of the industry leaders will make available software engines that are able to take down, with surprising ease, a large portion of the online gaming population.
What dedicated bot users will do is leave their software to play poker on their behalf while they’re away from the computer. They’ll specify minimum and maximum amounts to bet and play for, and will often return to find that they have won substantial figures, thanks either to just a really good software algorithm or a slew of inexperienced players at their tables.
Major poker rooms, such as PokerStars and Full Tilt, regularly monitor their sites to prevent the proliferation of bots. Once identified, any accounts using a bot will be frozen and the money emptied and returned to the customers who have fallen victim to the program. Full tilt recently made it known that they had seized over $50,000 of customer money that was said to have been accumulated by one of the bots operating on the site.
It may sound counterintuitive, but a poker bot is a much harder system to develop than, say, a computerized chess program. Chess is all about strategy, information, and rational decision-making. Poker, however, has the added human variable element, in which bluffing constitutes a major tenant of the game’s operation.
If bots continue to develop in complexity and quantity, it's likely that online poker may cease to be as popular as it has been up to now. People won't spend their money on a game where they could be outwitted by a machine. Human-based poker is how the game has been played historically and how many believe it should stay. There is something about being in the presence of another poker player, reading his or her entire gamut of his phrases, words, and gestures that just can't be mimicked in an online tournament. Stick to the real stuff.
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