Preflop Bot

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In the discussion so far some people have distinguished between the pre-programmed decision making and the actual "button pushing," but others have not. If you take out the button-pushing aspect, this becomes the same as PokerInspector.

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You make a very good point. In defense of button-pushing, I'd say this: I think the intent of the rule against bots is to prevent unscrupulous characters from settting up their bots to play the tables while they go off for a night on the town or whatever else they want to do.

By limiting a bot's "button pushing" to preflop actions only, the author would essentially eliminate the ability for the bot to make money while the human is away. The human would have to be present and making decisions constantly postflop.

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If the player has to be there anyways (to play post-flop), there is little or no reason to eliminate that first button push. Existing (and legal) programs can be used just as well to help you with preflop hand selection, as well as postflop actions.

I think the main objection to bots is that people don't want others setting one (or more) up to 8-table 24x7, while they are nowhere near the computer. Personally I think the best way to stop this type of abuse is for the sites to take a clue from other online sites that don't want programs accessing their content. You want to check for available tickets on ticketmaster.com, you look at a jpg of some letters that are all warped and have to type in what letters they are. This is a difficult task for a program to do, but relatively easy for a human. If pokersites occasionally popped up a dialog box with one of these types of problems, and the player could not act on any table until it was answered correctly, it would keep unattended bots from playing. It could even be targetted somewhat, perhaps picking more on people with longer continuous sessions and more than one table open, but should not be restricted to those.

If the person is going to sit there at the computer the whole time, then I see little difference between playing with the assistance of something like PokerInspector and letting a bot play for you the exact same way. All it does is make it slightly more difficult for the player to override and do something different.

You've already got something (PokerInspector) that you configure with your handselections and desired actions, and that looks at the table+action and tells you what you should do, putting the recommended action in a little box in the window. It is then extremely easy to write your own separate program that looks at the PI window, reads the box that says "Fold" or "Raise", and then switches over to the table window and actually pushes the corresponding button. In this scenario, which is the pokerbot? PokerInspector is just recommending something, but not actually performing any action. The other program knows nothing of poker and just looks at one window to send a message to another window. Sure, together they are a bot, but which do you ban? The first has plenty of legitimate uses, and the second is so easy to write it wouldn't need to be bought, but rather could be custom written by anyone who wanted it. This is where checking that there is an actual human at the computer is good. If there is (perhaps using the jpg method above), then you can't really complain, because whether it's a program doing the read/push or a human doing the read/push, the end result would be the same play. You could hire some HS kid and pay him $10/hr to do the same function for you.