Poker Bot Software

All About Poker Bot Software

The bots that are currently on the market vary widely as far as the way they were written and the way that they work. Our favorite, the Shanky Technologies bots, work out of the box as stand-alone applications which minimize to the system tray. This has the advantage of not being detectable by poker rooms doing screen scrapes, especially if you follow the advice given in the instructions and rename the file to a common application.

The bots which require Online Poker Inspector are a bit more taxing on resources, as you have to own and run the additional software as well. This means that any poker room scraping for software will discover OPI software running - you need to be careful about this as some poker rooms specifically do not allow that program, and there is no way to hide it. The bot program, on the other hand, may or may not be able to hide from scraping. Consider Poker Android for example. It does have the ability to hide from detection attempts and is in fact a very impressive program. The main challenge with it is coming up with a winning profile.

One of the interesting things about Online Poker Inspector is that it is compatible with Poker Tracker, to some degree. It can access it's database and make some decisions based on the type of profile it deems itself to be up against and the overall game-type. This does add some extra dimensions to the decision-making process.

All this creates an interesting marketplace for OPI-type bot users, that of trading in OPI profiles. We have dabbled in this a bit without much success. Sure you can find people claiming to have a winning profile for sale, and they will sometimes even show graphs from Poker Tracker showing the win rate going to the moon over 50,000 to 100,000 hands or so. In our experience, you never get the same results and eventually everyone who bought the profile starts mumbling the scam word.

We have also spent many, many hours designing our own OPI profiles but have never been able to make one that beats the rake at any limit over $.25/.50, and at any sites other than Ongame Network or Absolute (where all the other OPI bots play). In our opinion there just aren't enough variables to design a winning profile against real players and these types of bots are mostly hype - although they can be a lot of fun to mess around with. (We see a lot of claims now around the web that former-winning profiles don't win anymore because of the US Player fallout at many of the sites - we are highly skeptical of these kinds of statements as well.)

With Win Holdem, however, you have as many variables as you care to program. This looks like a very doable solution, if they only offered an out-of-the-box product that wins! They don't - you have to make it yourself, and the successful programmers aren't selling profiles as far as we can tell. That makes sense if you think about it. Another major disadvantage to Win Holdem is that poker rooms can detect this product unless a considerable investment in additional hardware is made as well (we're talking about another entire computer system here). This is necessary because the poker rooms are actively looking for this program and want to stop it.