With the advancement of the AI, many people start to question, whether it will help them live a better life or a worse one. The sheer amount of progress, which artificial intelligence gathered over the last few years, may render many archaic professions useless, leaving many people unemployed.
In poker, AI have been theme of discussion long before it became a trending topic worldwide. Some people, who cannot win fair and square, resort to cheating and using “poker bots”, a complicated program, which attempts to play near perfect poker strategy, from mathematical stand point.
Even though most reputable poker rooms have security teams, cheaters still attempt to use these poker bots. It is a 100% fact, that nowadays all self respected poker sites catch those who try to trick the system, fairly quickly, but you may still face such AI programs, while you grind online.
This is why it is of utmost importance to learn how to spot poker bots. Humans created AI, so it is only normal for us to be able to outsmart it. With little help from The Poker Agent team, not only you will immediately learn how to recognize bots, but you will also be able to counter their strategy, because you now know what you are up against.
Is additional software needed to spot poker bots ?
Large poker rooms , unions and clubs have integrity teams, which use all kinds of helping software to be able to monitor the hundreds if not thousands of tables, playing simultaneously, in order to spot poker bots and ban them.
Luckily for you, no software is needed in order for you to spot poker bots. The only thing you need is to be observant at all times. Here are our 5 easy methods with which, you can easily spot poker bots :
5. Timing Tells
There is a myth among amateur players, who believe that poker bots play super fast. Maybe the first attempts at creating these cheating AI algorithm were taking decisions unrealistically fast, but as of their current form this is not the case.
Nowadays poker bots take their time before making a play, in a bid to try and mask their behaviour , which to resemble a real human being.
This is not a bad strategy , but if you are even remotely observant, you can spot obvious timing tells, which bots make. Most poker bots are programmed to take exactly the same time to think. Needless to say, that it is pretty easy to spot an account, which always acts within 5.4 seconds. Even if you do not notice at first, after a while it becomes an elephant in jewelry store.
There are also other kind of poker bots, which are programmed to randomize their timing patterns. This automatically makes them a bit more difficult to be spotted, but it is also an easy task for a veteran grinder. The thing which you need to do against those type of poker bots is, put them in different situations and observe their reaction time.
The obvious leak in them taking a random amount of time before each decision, is that sometimes they will take unrealistically long time pondering whether to call from big blind, 2 more BBs with solid hand and in other occasions they will call whole stacks on the river with Ace high without hesitation. If few weird timings occur, you can be 100% sure your opponent is a poker bot.
4. Chat behavior
This way to spot poker bots is probably the easiest. If your opponent never chats, even if you tease him constantly, it may well be a robot. It is a rare thing for player to never respond if addressed in the chat correspondence.
Players who never chat are not always bots, but you can start looking for more clues, if the opponent is dead silent.
3. Make unorthodox play and look at their reaction
To spot poker bots, sometimes you will need to leave your zone of comfort. After all nearly all poker bots are programmed to play against “ABC poker players” who make predictable decisions. By using their superb mathematical understanding of the game, they can exploit those “regular poker players”, who play poker by the book.
If you spot poker bots and try to counter attack their strategy or just want to make sure they are bots, start making strange decisions. Min raising in weird spots, 4-betting in all the “wrong spots”, check raising constantly. Normal players get pissed at such behavior and will catch you bluffing or call your raises after just a few hand, but because bots follow their own patterns and cannot deviate from them, majority of the time they will fold against such aggression.
It is possible to make poker bots fold 99% of their holdings in some spot, if they are programmed just to play aces and kings there. It’s basically printing money.
2. Slow Time
Unfortunately we are not Neo from the matrix, but we have other way to slow time and reveal poker bots. This strategy works particularly well in heads up.
All you have to do is play incredibly slow. That’s it. Now observe your opponent. Real players are quickly getting annoyed at this, which 99% of the time result in them playing much faster or incredibly slow themselves. Villains will start slowing their decision making process in a bid to annoy you or play with incredible speed out of frustration.
Not only that, if you play heads up and always take your full time to act, most of the time opponent will just leave the game. On the other hand, bots never leave the game, in fact they…..
1. Play Volume
There are some incredible grinders who play almost 24/7, but they are more an exception, than rule. One of the first ways people started to spot poker bots , is by noticing how active they are. This method is especially useful in smaller poker sites, clubs and unions.
If you see some player constantly playing without a break, chances are, he is poker bot. Imagine someone playing near perfect poker for 48 hours on 10 tables. It is very hard thing to do, especially if he does it all the time.
Be careful with users, who seem to always be online, when you play, Make an experiment and log in at different hours throughout the day and check if they play constantly.
Final Words
If you spot poker bots , our advice is to swallow your ego , leave the table and report the account(s) to the support team of the poker room.
To avoid playing against poker bots altogether, take a look at the poker apps, in which we offer only legit clubs, protected 24/7 by security team.
To keep yourself updated on the topic of poker bots and other poker trends, visit our Telegram channel.
