Poker Bots myth or reality?

First of all let's define what a bot is. A bot is an automated system or application that play for you. To be a fully functional bot it needs to be able to play even when you are not in the room. There are a lot of applications that makes your decisions or interaction with the poker room easier but these are not functioning bots, they are just helpful applications. A bot needs to to be able to do all the playing by itself, it needs to retrieve the information, make the decisions and play the hands.

Another important part here is that the poker rooms wouldn't actually complain to much about poker rooms if their players didn't. People botting are not really cheating and it doesn't hurt the game in any way. The reason poker rooms try to prevent bots is that the players don't like bots. This is probably based in misconceptions about bots. Personally I would rather play against bots than against other players as they would be more easy to outsmart once you know they are bots.

Ok, lets get a grab on the question wether bots exist or not. The 23rd and 24th of July the poker bot Polaris played the pros Phil the Unabomber Laak and Ali Eslami. Polaris managed to win one event, tie one and lose two. In total this was a victory for the humans but it should be seen as an evidence that poker bots can not only play but actually play well. There is no doubt that poker bots can and actually do exist. Even if they don't beat the Unabomber they can surely give him a match.

Now that we know that poker bots do exist, can we do the jump to saying that they actually play at the online poker rooms? You might want to say that Polaris was built buy a whole team of scientists and that was the reason that it could manage to play as well as it did. By all means, that is perfectly true and if you compare it to Deep Blue (the computer that managed to beat Kasparov) it seems quite similar. On the other hand for a bot to be functioning it doesn't have to beat either Laak or Kasparov, there are lots of chessbots out there and you can buy them in almost any game store. Would you say that you beat the chess game at the hardest difficulty all the time? If you do you are a true pro and if you don't you might still be a good player. The point here is that a bot doesn't need to beat the best players, it is enough if it beats the bad ones. All the chess games out there are not equal to deep blue but they still make a tough opponent for most of us and that is all it takes.

A poker bot doesn't even need to be a winning player, as long as it doesn't lose money it is a working bot. Would you really claim that when it is possible to build a bot that can match some of the best pros in the world that it would be impossible to build one to break even against the mass of poker players in the poker rooms? Of course not and this is the main point. It is possible to build a working poker bot and you can make a lot of money doing it. What are the odds that no one would?