War Against the Bots

[SweetPea]

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I think it would be better if sites doesn't allow players to access hand histories. No PokerTracker, no PAHUD, no gametime. That would difficult programmers work on making bots.

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That wouldn't work. These guys are making HUGE money. There are hundreds of underpaid, non-Western, coders that would fight for the chance to build a screen scraping hand history builder for less cost than a bot farmer makes in one day.

We're 2 years too late to stop bots without drastic changes to online poker. They could have been stopped in the beginning, but now they've shown their true profit potential to their owners and they won't be stopped by any sort of simple measure.

You have to understand the scale. A bot that makes 1BB/100 at $.50/$1 is pulling in close to the US minimum wage every hour. The cost to setup another computer will be overcome inside the first week of play!

So you're making $100/day with your 1BB/100 $.50/$1 bot. Take your $700 profit at the end of Week #1 and buy another machine. Now you are making $200/day. Wait 3 days and buy another computer...rinse and repeat.

Everyone seems to think that bot presence in poker is increasing linearly. I find that hard to believe. Once a bot owner builds a winner, his presence at the tables will grow almost exponentially until he's saturated the entire market of his available sites, accounts, or IP's. Wouldn't he be a fool not to?