Improve your skill with buying poker-playing software

Have you ever had the feeling playing poker online that some of your most capable opponents even if you couldn't fault their game were somehow a little too poker-faced? Do you sometimes feel that your best opponents have playing styles that are preternaturally similar? It's seemed this way to some people; it's when they complain to the websites they play on that they actually learn how right their instincts were. They learn that the opponent on the other end is a computer - a robot poker player - software designed specifically to beat humans at poker; and to wipe the floor with them.

Playing poker online has always been kind of risky. The possibility that you could be playing a robot poker player has always been a potential risk involved in the activity. It's just that it never was much of a risk because poker playing computers were never that good. They could never do things like bluffing - the way humans could. We live in a time when we have supercomputers named Watson beating expert Jeopardy contestants on TV. Artificial intelligence has evolved far enough today that poker is easily within the ken of a computer. These days, anyone with a computer and the requisite poker program and trying to take advantage of online casinos that offer poker games, can win thousands of dollars.

To the online casinos that put these things together, the robot poker threat is a serious one. If this is allowed to continue, poker players are quickly going to lose their interest in losing money for no reason. And the online casinos will be out of business. Most of them have been pouring resources into finding ways to identify computer players so that they can shut them down.

And yet, you can buy poker-playing software for your Windows computer anywhere. For about $100 a pop. And they can buy blackjack software and other stuff as well. There are hundreds of websites where you can play poker online (even if all of them are offshore because online gambling is illegal in America). And almost none of them care about who uses a robot player. Still, most software poker playing software today are pretty primitive (one exception may be the products of Shanky Technologies). Somehow, it's hard for a programmer to allow for all the chance events and the idiosyncrasies of the poker game.

Not all players use their poker software purchases to make a bit of quick money. Sometimes, they just use them for practice to help improve their own game. But this kind of thing is only just starting. As technology becomes more readily available, who knows what other spheres of activity we'll encounter computers on?

Next >