Perhaps the best use of a poker bot is for playing multi-table tournaments. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is escaping the dreaded rake.
In fact, many successful part-time poker players have discovered that tournaments are the way to go. These folks usually keep anywhere from $200 to $700 in their poker account and play events that have buy-ins from $5 to $30. Fields of 200-800 seem to be best. In this kind of tournament any decent player has an edge. There is enough dead money in a typical 200-player field to make up for your entry fee plus some. It is estimated that somewhere around 20% of the field has almost no chance of making a high final-table finish. This is a juicy situation. In fact it may be the last bastion of easy money left in low to medium stakes online poker.
Compare that situation to NL50 cash games. Sure, once up on a time these were a goldmine. But nowadays it is becoming difficult to find truly good games anywhere above NL10. Unless you can consistently find good tables, the house rake will eat you up in cash games. It is astounding how much money is being constantly removed from the cash tables. You really need to be a pro with a large bankroll and play NL200+ to start getting away from the devastating effects of it.
In MTT’s, you pay a small entry fee once and compete for a huge prize pool. You don’t need to locate bad players, they are sure to be in the mix – even at higher buy-ins. Part of the reason for this is the existence of “satellite” tournaments to gain entry into larger events. But in reality most good poker players just cannot effectively make the proper adjustment to tournament strategy. That means a tournament player can move up in stakes and expect to stay profitable even without moving up in skill level. This makes MTT’s a perfect target environment for poker-botting.
There are several effective methods of employing a poker bot to play a tournament for you. Perhaps the most popular is using the bot to get you to the final table before taking over and finishing it yourself. Others prefer to come in around the bubble. Either way, you are stepping in fresh when your opponents have been grinding it out for hours.
Finally, some people use the bot to play the entire event for them, and even use an aftermarket add-on software (known as a hopper) to enter a new event when the last one finishes. If you have a good profile that can adjust to shorter-handed play, you can literally setup a spare PC to go around the clock making money for you. Take a look at the chart below which was accumulated using the Jackal MTT profile available in the Bonus Bots forum:
Another nice thing about botting tournaments is the existence of very small buy-in events, which can turn a small starting bankroll like $50 into a four-figure account balance. In fact, you can even start with 0 and play freerolls until you get a few bucks and then move to the $1 events. This is exactly what one person did last year in the Bonus Bots forum, calling it a rags to riches challenge. In a little over four months he had built a $12,000 bankroll starting with nothing!
In our next post we will give some specific tips for using your poker bot in MTT’s.
