[Evan]

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I have a hard time believing it's "not that difficult". Have you (or anyone) made one of these bots? I'll play it heads up if you want to test it. I know there was some software available that had various bots. I used it for a bit and the bots definitely weren't great. There was one that was supposed to be nearly unbeatable heads up, which is I guess how bots do best. Anyway, I doubt that whoever made that would call it easy, and I really doubt that those bots could beat a 10 handed game above .5/1 (if that).

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I haven't written a bot but I've developed a lot of software and played a lot of poker. And I think building a bot that can beat games up to 5-10 online would not be very hard. Remember, the bot doesn't have to beat you, it just has to beat the plethora of bad players online.

Consider a bot that is a "rock", it only plays premium hands and plays them aggressively. It keeps a database on every player it's ever played with, and can quickly calculate a hand range for that player in any situation (hands he raises with preflop, on the flop, checkraises the turn with, etc). In many cases it would be better able to predict the relative likelyhood of being ahead, or behind to an opponent, than you could, due to it's perfect memory and instantaneous calculations.

I don't doubt it would be very difficult to make the bot play well at high limits, or to make subtle moves, but beat low limits online? Doesn't seem very hard to me. After all, I do it. And I have huge holes in my game.

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If you had to ballpark it, how many hours would it take to build it?

Note: I have neither interest in building a bot nor the ability to do it. I'm just curious.