[adanthar]

Being one step behind is not a problem with a situation like this. You only need to tie once to break every bot player on your site logged in that day within an hour. Moreover, the site has as much monetary incentive to take effective countermeasures as the bot user does to write (or use) a bot; they save themselves thousands for every account they close.

Mistakes aren't really an issue once you get into countermeasures involving more than just 'detecting the word 'winholdem' on the computer screen.' Once the program starts actively detecting memory sniffers, or looks for specific files and time stamps on a hard drive coupled with particular betting patterns, things get a lot more interesting. And like I said, they only need to catch up *once*.