Poker Bot's Equal A Lot Of Work

I have been looking at a couple poker bot forums. I really like the idea of programming a bot for your style of play then just letting it run.  This would free you up to allow you to make money playing poker and not be tied to the computer all the time.

And while this sounds nice it is a lot different in reality.  My estimation is that it would take a minimum of a couple thousand hours to develop a good poker bot, that’s assuming you have a back ground in programming and also a back ground in playing limit poker.

With a poker bot it will never play really good poker because there are too many variables, when I am playing poker I look at how many times or if a player ever folds their cards, I never bet without a hand against someone who I have not seen fold before, there are just too many people who play low stakes poker who will call a queen high to the river.  You can’t bluff these people you can one wait for good cards, if they will fold then you can try betting even when you don’t have a had to see how many pots you can pick up.

There are dozens of other types of things similar to this that I look for at the table, but a poker bot is not going to be able to do all this, they are going to be limited to playing hands and a few other simple variables.

They will be able to figure pot odds exactly and never get it wrong, this will be an advantage, I know many times I fold then hit my card then realize there were 4 people in the pot so I did have the right odds to call that last bet. This will never happen with a poker bot.

All this said, I am not sure I want so spend time trying to learn all that you need to know to make a poker bot work, one reason is the interface, in addition to everything else you have to be able to write a scraper program, something that will scrape information off the screen and deliver it to your poker bot.  It’s possible to get someone else who has already written one to sell it to you, but then any change or update made by the poker site can make your scraper useless.

If I was to spend 2 thousands hours learning to play better poker I could probably move up a couple levels and start making more money.  Probably more than a poker bot could make.

Besides a poker bot is probably only going to play .50/$1 limit tables and if you get 1.5 big blinds per 100 hands that is doing good. That’s about .75 cents per table per hour, so to make this work it will take 5 computers play 5 hands each which will get your total up to around $18. an hour. Well running 5 computers is a lot of work, and time invested just in doing that, I am not even sure if the programs that hide your poker bot can run multiple computers, if not that means you would need 10 computers. And 5 different ip numbers and poker accounts.  This is all work and a lot of work for not a lot of money.

Before I am going to even think about setting up 10 computers and all the headaches of networking them together I am going to have to start out thinking I will be getting a heck of a lot more that $18 an hour.



Anyway the poker bot forum if you’re interested is:

http://forum.winholdem.net/wbb/