Poker Bot Blog

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.

Looking for a poker botting forum? Well who can blame you. Hobbies are made more fun by participating in online forum communities with others who enjoy the same activity. If properly run, these are great places to learn, share your experiences, help others, and stay enthusiastic about the hobby. I participate in local fishing forums and reading the fishing report posts from other members really gets me pumped up about going out again. Plus, I get the scoop on where the fish are biting and what baits and lures are working.

In a similar fashion, an active poker bot forum will motivate you by providing the success stories of others, tip you off to profitable game environments, and even put you on to good profiles and/or ways to further improve your own. Unfortunately, this particular hobby is very limited in scope and therefore the active forums are few and far between. In fact the Bonus Bots support forum is really the only truly active forum, and they don’t allow discussions about competitive products (not that there really are any). Here is the URL:

http://bonusbots.com/support

You cannot register by yourself; you will need to email the admin with a request to join. Be sure to include a desired username and password. This is just to stop the spam-bots, as they will honor any request for registration in our experience. That forum is a tremendous resource and you can learn a lot from lurking there.

The Open Holdem Forum is not as active, but it is alive. Open Holdem is only for geeks, so the discussions are pretty geeky. Also, they delete all accounts that are inactive for 2-3 months. So you really need to be into this platform (and python coding) to stay interested. Good profiles and tips are not openly shared because the open source nature of the project discourages members from creating their own competition. Also, we don’t think many of them are as successful as the Shanky botters.

The first poker bot forum I belonged to was the Poker Bot Plus customer forum. That was a good one. This was the first good OPI bot ever created, to my knowledge (which pretty much makes it the first decent poker bot product ever created). Most of us found it through the Online Holdem Inspector forum. Those were some good times, even if we were not beating the game with our profiles back then. The programmer was the guy who ran the business, and his name was Ron. He was a really good guy and I can’t help but wonder what ever happened to him. If you know him, tell him NewBotCity says hello!

From the Bonus Bots forum, a member posted the graph below for playing low buy-in MTT’s using the Shanky bot.

What you see there is a typical pattern for a winning tournament player, or a decent tournament profile for a poker bot. See the stair-stepping slope. Notice how a deep final-table finish shoots you way up to the next level on the graph, and then you have a gradual reclining slope until the next good score. That is what you want. It reflects a strong winning style of play.

I have seen other graphs that display a different pattern, more of a break-even line most of the time because of lots of barely-in-the-money finishes. That is actually a weaker style of play. It reflects somebody who wants to play it safe and always make sure they squeak into the money. So that is what happens. But with that kind of approach you rarely have a competitive stack once you make the money. More importantly, people who play that way usually keep playing conservatively after they make the money, always wanting to eek their way one more place up the pay ladder. That is not winning poker, I am afraid.

It is interesting that I can look at a graph of results and see whether or not the person is a solid winning tournament player, or simply a conservative nit. The above graph reflects a solid winning player. You need to go for it when the time is right. You need to not be afraid of those coin-flip all-in situations and know when it is beneficial to risk it. The right time is before your stack gets too short! Play to win the event, not to make the money.

A poker bot profile actually has a bit of an advantage in this regards, because a bot doesn’t usually “know” where the money bubble is. In case you think that is important, just take another look at the above graph. That bot did’t know where the bubble was. This profile obviously plays to win and isn’t concerned with the pay scale. This is evident from the deep final-table finishes that keep spiking the results up. A more conservative graph can still be a winner, sure. But only marginally so.  Over any long period, such as 500+ events, the conservative player will have much worse overall results.

Winning tournament players know this and don’t have a problem busting out early. That is the price you have to play to be a strong winning player, and to be able to make decent money from this hobby in the long run. Now, I am not telling you to play like a maniac either. Just be strong and don’t be afraid to gamble. Ignore the bubble and the pay scale – pretend that only the top three get paid. The conservative players will fear you because they know you will shove at the drop of a hat, so you can push them around and steal small pots from them. Those extra chips start to add up after a while!

When tweaking a tournament profile for your bot, pay strict attention to pot-committed thresholds. Be willing to push with AK preflop especially if you are the one making the all-in raise. Get all your chips in on the flop with KK-QQ and JJ overpair hands on safe-looking boards. Push with strong drawing hands when nobody else has raised. However, beware of hands that can be easily dominated such as AQ and AJ and get away from them preflop if your stack is still decent and opponents are raising strong.