Re: I didn\'t mean bots !
 

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Apologies to everyone I confused in my original post : I wasn't talking about bots. (By which I mean programs that run automatically on your PC and make your call/fold/etc actions without you even being there).

Instead, I'm imagining some software that "helps" you to make a better decision. You tell it what is happening during the game, and it recommends what to do when the action gets to you.

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The only difference between a Bot and an Advisor program is the automation of the advice. The automation is the simplest of programming tasks. Both types of programs already exist!

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One issue would be speed : you'd have a lot of information to type in. But since this is a possible issue for the future, let's assume you can use voice recognition.


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You wouldn't need to type anything, the program would read the screen.

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Poker sites couldn't detect you using this kind of "advisor" software, if you ran it on your old PC that's not online. Perhaps they could detect its intelligence at work, indirectly, via playing style detection (but see other posts above).

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There are several methods currently used by the bots/advisors to avoid detection.

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I guess I'm assuming at least 2 things :

1) that the advisor software will be good enough to win money for people, at least at low limits

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The advisor is only as good as the person programming/tweaking it. A basic advisor playing a simple strategy is easy, while one that would analyze opponent behaviour and react to it, is more complex. There is considerable reasearch going on in this area.

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2) that people will want to use it in large numbers


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It is unlikely that any bot software would become widely used for some time. Just think about how many people playing poker have no idea about rakeback. However, over time the use of advisors/bots by the determined few is likely to grow.

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If both of these held, I wonder if the online poker growth would end ?

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I doubt that bots/advisors would be the catalyst for a slowdown in poker growth in the near term future.

However, I would not advise anyone to play Chess online for $$.