Just Poker Talk

PokerSmoke is a brand of poker bot software. If you don’t know what a poker bot is, it’s basically a computer that plays in place of a human player at the online poker tables.

Here is an excerpt of what it can do from PressRelease365:

PokerSmoke is a poker bot that has been designed to give players the edge over all those others who are not making use of poker bots. With very high level programming and artificial intelligence to back it up, players have been making more money than ever. Simply because PokerSmoke has been designed to make the best possible decisions at the right times. Every imaginable situation that may arise in a poker game has been taken into consideration and incorporated into the programming.

The implications of this type of software are pretty obvious, especially with vastly improving AI.

For the user of this type of software, one can play online poker for every hour of the day and at as many tables as the site allows. This allows the user to generate money without playing. If the AI can be used in combination with PT or has a built in feature that analyzes important statistics, poker bots can be very dangerous against the average player, and also it takes away the human element of playing online poker, makes people more cynical to the online game.

Imagine sitting at a poker table and facing eight bots. The social aspect of poker is a large part of the success of the game, and with online poker the social aspect is already lacking, and now with the abundance of bots, that pretty much ends the social aspect. In the end we end up playing alone against a computer with only one goal, to make money.

Another potential problem is if online poker rooms start employing bots as prop players to boost traffic. It’s a win-win situation for the poker room, and it’s not like the average user can detect the problem. I for one don’t know how to read if a player is a bot or not, and if I was able to detect one, who would I complain to? Certainly not management.

I would be interested in what percentage of players are poker bots and what online poker rooms are doing to detect users of poker bots.

The other question on my mind is what online poker is about to the people who play. There are obviously many reasons, but does playing against computers instead of real humans matter? When we play online poker, there is the assumption that the players we’re playing against are all real players, but we only know that because that is our assumption and we don’t have much proof whether they’re real or not. Would the revelation that all along we’ve been playing against computers, change anything for us?

PokerSmoke, poker bot, poker, cheating