Poker Bot Blog

Somebody once said that online poker is a modern psychological battleground. War analogies are not a new thing when talking about the game of poker. However with the rising popularity of online poker in recent years, one should also acknowledge the technology aspects present in this form of the game and how they have advanced. Odds calculators, database programs that track opponent statistical tendencies, and of course poker bots, are all part of it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to online poker these days as a modern technological battlefield.

There are many players who still categorize the use of creative technology in online poker as cheating, incorrectly believing that it gives certain players an unfair advantage. Those who hold this viewpoint are of course players who choose not to use such technology as an aid themselves, and therefore they don’t want anybody else using it either. But that is a vain desire. They need to wake up and smell the hydraulic fluid. If you choose not to use any software aids, fine – but you need to be aware that other players do choose to use them and it is a reality of the modern state of the game. Accept it, or don’t play.

It is much more enjoyable to explore the technology and incorporate it into your battle plan as you see fit. Perhaps there are some people who still use VCR’s to record their favorite show, not wanting to be bothered with learning how to use something new. But anybody who has switched to the DVR/Tivo method will tell you that you are being an archaic fool to be so stubbornly lazy. Your TV watching experience will improve tenfold by embracing new technology instead of hiding from it.

Take the poker bot, for example. It is quite understandable why some players are upset about the usage of these programs in the games that they are playing. However, it is not the weak players who take this position. They are pretty much oblivious anyway, and don’t really care who they lose their money to. In fact they may actually prefer losing to bots, who never type insults at them when they make a 4-outer on the river.

The really good players don’t care much about bots either, probably because they play high enough stakes not to be concerned with them. If a bot shows up at their table, they will probably figure out how to exploit it somehow, just like they do with all of their opponents. The people who complain about poker bots are low stakes grinders. The reason they are upset about them is they increase the saturation level of other solid players, which reduces the exposure they have to the fish, which is where their income is generated. To put it bluntly, they want the bots gone so that the fish will lose more money to them and not to the bots. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?

The answer, of course, is to quit crying and get on board with your own bot. It’s like resisting getting a tablet computer – resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. You may as well make some money while relaxing in the hot tub, or let the bot play the first few hours of that tournament for you. Time to stop longing for the olden days. Very soon there will probably be an online poker room that has an official policy of allowing poker bots. This will be a huge step in the right direction.

Using a poker bot is a natural extension of the game of online poker. They are a heck of a lot of fun to tinker with. This will also hold true for a bot vs. bot environment, and there are plenty of human players that would love to take a shot at a table filled with bots. It adds a new dimension to the game.

For example, if you notice that your bot is getting raised off hands on the flop consistently, you can adjust the profile to start pushing with anything (in response to that flop raise) randomly about 50% of the time. This will make them think twice about bullying you, and sometimes they will call off their stack when you have them beat. After a while you can have the bot change profiles again to where it only pushes the flop with strong hands – and get lots of value from it. Tweaking profiles like this to handle changing game conditions is tremendously rewarding and something that can really make the hobby fun.

There used to be a television show called Battle Bots. If you have ever seen it, you know how passionate the bot builders were about their hobby. Poker bot wars are the same thing but can be done in your pajamas. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it!

The latest news regarding Full Tilt Poker is that a group of European investors is negotiating either a purchase or a bail-out deal for the struggling online poker company. In accordance with this, the licensing entity which revoked their gaming license is reported to also be negotiating a deal to let them resume operations. The FBI, who recently seized their “.com” domain in an massive online poker room sting operation,  has allowed them use of their domain again to post hopeful updates about the status of American funds on deposit there (although the domain-seize notification is still posted within the main home page frame). So does all this mean that Full Tilt will be back? In our opinion, don’t get your hopes up.

On the positive side, money talks. Full tilt was the second largest online poker room and generated a mind-boggling amount of revenue on a daily basis. With this kind of income potential, smart investors are usually able to pull enough strings and/or grease enough palms to put just about anything together. When hundreds of millions of dollars lie in the balance, it is difficult to imagine letting them evaporate into thin air if you have an opportunity to receive a slice of the pie by cooperation.

How then is this online poker operation shut down? Because some tax-haven island nation revoked a gaming license? How the heck can that happen? Give me a break, how hard can it be to simply get another gaming license in a multitude of similar venues? Why does an internet company even need a gaming license from some jungle somewhere? To run an internet business all you need is a domain, some servers, and software that works. Nobody even needs to know where the servers are located, and in fact they can be built on a “cloud” environment where the servers are located in multiple countries.

Something isn’t right with this. A company of this stature, generating this kind of money internationally, should not be able to be shut down by any one entity or any one government agency. The fact that it has been shut down screams mismanagement. To be certain, the company is insolvent. They cannot return the $150 million owed to USA account holders because they don’t have it. Which means they are blatantly guilty of misappropriating funds, or to put it another way, embezzlement.

It is easy to see how this can happen. This business had a lot of expenses and they probably didn’t see a real issue “borrowing” funds from player deposit accounts given the amount of revenue being generated and the amount of daily deposits coming in. However that creates an insolvent situation where you cannot stand a “run on the bank.” And once you start putting your fingers in the till, and living on credit, it becomes a slippery slope that is difficult to reverse. In the end the amount of money that they are actually upside-down  is probably frightening. But, with proper management, it may be recoverable given the revenue potential of a large online poker room.

As a potential investor, you would want to look at the net figure that needs to be recovered to be back in the black and weigh that against operating expenses and expected revenue. The expected revenue is where the gamble is. Their reputation has been tarnished. How many players will come back? You can bet that the first thing most of them will do is test the withdrawal button! So how busy can they expect the tables to be when they reopen their virtual doors? This will greatly depend on their new withdrawal policy.

If they cannot quickly process the flood of expected withdrawal requests, you can expect traffic to dry up fast. Which means they can either reopen with a limited withdrawal policy (like Cereus is doing) and expect a huge reduction in traffic as a result, or add all the expected withdrawal requests to the up-front investment expense. The latter method is better, but of course a larger initial cash outlay is a risk that many investors will shy away from.

We think that there is a really good chance the whole deal will fall apart. The majority of Full Tilt players were from the United States. To make up their accounting deficit they will need that traffic, which means snubbing the USA government and fighting a battle with the FBI by allowing American players and American banking transactions again. Cooperating with the FBI would mean trying to operate as a non-USA poker room, and paying the entire $150 million owed U.S. account holders in cash. That is a pretty big stumbling block. In the end, it might simply be too big of a mess to straighten out.

Now let’s talk about effective strategies for using your poker bot to play tournaments. Blindly sticking it in any MTT that is about to go off will not yield good results, any more than using a cash game profile will. The first thing to do, therefore, is to make sure your profile is designed for tournaments. This means pushing preflop with a reasonably wide range of hands when your stack begins to get short (in comparison to the big blind size). The shorter your stack gets, the more liberally you should be pushing. When you have less than 5 big blinds, I would push with anything. However you need to be the first player raising when you shove liberally, so that you still have at least some fold equity when you do it.

You also might want to tighten up and stop gambling when you have a big stack, especially if the big blind size is still at a small enough level to indicate that the tournament is in the early-to-mid stages. Better to wait a bit and start gambling as you get closer to the money. Other than paying attention to your stack size, there is one preflop hand that should be played differently in a tournament than in a cash game (regardless of stack size).

Playing AK

You should be willing to shove with AK in a tournament situation, if another player is showing preflop aggression. It should be limited to only one other player however. If two guys with decent stacks are obviously going to war, get out of the way and fold it. Otherwise, be willing to get all-in against one other opponent. Please note that this strategy will kill you in a serious cash game, because you will only get called when your opponent holds AA or KK. In a tournament, however, gambling for your stack – at least two or three times – is usually required to make a deep run. Consequently people will often call all-in bets with any pocket pair, and sometimes with AQ or AJ. That makes AK a great gambling hand to try and double up with, and often you will fold out the other player with the big all-in raise anyway.

Choosing Your Events

Once you have a good tournament profile all set, you then need to be selective in which events you play. Look for large fields. They have bigger prize pools, and they are not that much harder to make a deep run in, because your opponents are being eliminated at an exponential rate. So they are more profitable to play. This should be a no-brainer, but many people don’t understand this concept. However there is a limit to how large the field can be before it starts becoming more difficult. In our experience the best events for poker bots have between 300 and 1500 entries.

Beyond that, pay close attention to ‘guaranteed’ events and ‘deep stack’ events. There is good value to be found in the guaranteed events by watching for ones where you get an entry shortfall. Ten seconds with a calculator should tell you if the number of entries look like they will pay for the guarantee amount. Go for the ones that appear as if they will fall significantly short. The house makes up for the shortfall, so in a way you are getting on the right side of the rake with this strategy.

Deep-stack events give a poker bot an advantage over typical human players, because they require stamina and patience – something bots excel at. Enter any deep-stack event that has a good-sized field.

Rebuy Strategy

Pay close attention to this next tip. It is a real pro tip for rebuy events. Play them like this:

1. Buy-in for double at the beginning (make one rebuy immediately)
2. Sit out the first hour, don’t play a hand (yes that means fold AA)
3. Buy the add-on at the end of the first hour

What that will do is give you a slightly smaller than average stack after the break, when the eliminations start. It will cost you exactly three buy-ins. However, this is more than made up for by the fact that over 20% of the field is usually gone by this time. Amazing, but true. This is a great math equation in your favor. Obviously, you need to be around after the first hour is up to make the add-on rebuy and start your bot for this strategy to be workable.  An alarm-clock software on your PC can come in handy for this.

What you have just read on this page is pure gold; worth every penny of a $79 ebook. Yours, free. Go buy the Shanky Technologies bot, join their support forum, get one of the better tournament profiles they have there, signup at Bodog and/or an iPoker room, and follow the above advice. Stay away from cash games. Do all that and I absolutely guarantee you will be successful and make money at online poker.