There’s growing paranoia in the Casino fellesskap community about the number of non-human players – bots or robots as they’re often called. Man has been playing against machine for many years of course – the great battles have so far involved chess computers but this technology is now being used by developers to play online casino games including poker, blackjack and even some of the slots games.
Gaming-assistance software (tech talk for the likes of poker bots!) are simply a tool and still require skillful application by the user in order to be effective. One of the industry leaders at Shanky Technologies recently said “Our pokerbot plays extremely well, but you do need to find a profitable game environment to put it in. A lot of our customers are good players themselves who just use the program to hold their place in juicy games while they eat dinner, or play out their customer reward points in freeroll tournaments.”
The launch of this long awaited poker bot was very strong, and sales remain brisk. Many of the Shanky customers have made good profits with their other products – in particular the blackjack bot – already.
The question of whether or not a computer program can beat good poker players has been hotly debated among poker professionals in recent years. Poker is a game of incomplete information and psychology, making the programming more challenging than creating chess computers. Early feedback on the forums would indicate that progress is being made however, as some customers have reported winning large online tournaments with the Shanky bot completely unassisted.