HACKER Q&A
📣 beginnercounter

Has anyone built a poker bot?


I'm looking to build a poker bot and want advice from people that have actually attempted it. What was your general approach to building it? Did you see profits at a small scale / at low stakes? What prevented you from scaling it to many instances running on multiple sites?


  👤 burntoutfire Accepted Answer ✓
I had a profitable bot around 10 years ago. It made around $500-$1000 per account per month. It didn't have a future though, as it played a particular kind of Sit'n'Go tournament that was phased out shortly afterwards (I believe mostly due to collusion rings that were active in those kinds of tournaments).

There used to be a semi-thriving community of botters on pokerai.org forum (was even frequented by some of the celeb pros, like Patrick Antonius, who were also trying to do bots). The site is down now, but perhaps you can read through it on a wayback machine. One of the interesting conclusions from there was that all the sites except PokerStars didn't care about detecting bots and some were in fact offering special deals under the table to encourage botters to come to their site (because they generate a lot of revenue for the site). In my own (fairly short) botting career on two major sites my bots were never detected. What's more, I actually detected a ton of bugs in their software which I had to work around in my bot-to-casino interface code :)


👤 jstx1
The obvious thing is that it's against the rules on every major site. You're basically saying "I'm looking to cheat, has anyone else done it too?".

👤 Nextgrid
If it was profitable, wouldn't the market equalize anyway as everyone would be doing it? Your bot thus must know some secret and be better than all other bots as you need to assume your opponents are bots too.