Poker Bot Glossary: Bot, RTA, Solver, GTO, HUD and More

Terms used across the site, defined briefly. Each heading is an anchor, so articles link straight to the definition.

Bot

Software that plays poker on a player’s account without a human making decisions: it reads the table, decides and acts. Prohibited by the terms of virtually every poker room. See What is a poker bot?

RTA

Real-time assistance. Any software that advises on a decision while a hand is being played, such as a solver window or a chart app reading the table. Now banned by major rooms alongside bots. See bot vs RTA.

Solver

A program that computes a game-theory-optimal strategy for a defined poker spot. A study tool used away from the table; PioSolver is the best-known example. See bot vs solver.

GTO

Game theory optimal. A strategy that cannot be exploited by any opponent strategy. What solvers compute and what modern bots approximate. See GTO basics.

HUD

Heads-up display. Software that overlays statistics about opponents – how often they raise, fold, and so on – on the table, drawn from hand histories. Permitted on some rooms, restricted or banned on others, and unavailable on most club apps.

Exploitative play

Deviating from a balanced strategy on purpose to profit from a specific opponent’s mistakes. The opposite pole to GTO; strong players use both.

Rake

The fee a room takes from each cash-game pot, or the entry fee on a tournament. The house’s income and the main cost of playing.

Rakeback

A percentage of paid rake returned to the player, through a loyalty scheme, an affiliate deal or an agent. See rakeback explained.

Club app

A mobile poker app – PPPoker, PokerBros, ClubGG, Upoker, X-Poker – where independent clubs run private games inside the operator’s software. See the guides.

Agent / union

In a club app, an agent recruits players and handles their deposits and withdrawals; a union is a group of clubs that pool their tables and share rules and enforcement.

VPN

A virtual private network, used to route traffic through another location. Many rooms and apps flag or block VPN connections, and using one to bypass a geographic restriction violates their terms.

Emulator

Software that runs Android apps on a desktop computer. The way club apps are played on a PC or Mac, and a visible signal to apps that check their environment. See running a bot on an emulator.

Screen scraping

Reading the game state from screenshots of the table rather than from the client’s memory or network traffic. The method most bots use.

OCR

Optical character recognition. Turning pixels into numbers and text, used by screen-scraping bots to read stack sizes and pot amounts.

Hand history

A text record of a hand: cards, actions, amounts, result. Rooms export them; tracking software imports them; bots write their own.

EV

Expected value. The average result of a decision over all possible outcomes, weighted by probability. Positive EV decisions make money in the long run regardless of the result in any single hand.

Bankroll

Money set aside exclusively for poker, sized so that normal variance does not exhaust it. See bankroll management.

Tilt

Playing worse than you know how because of emotion – usually after a loss. One thing bots genuinely do not do.

Fish / reg

Informal terms for a weak, recreational player (fish) and a regular, usually competent player (reg). Game selection is largely about the ratio of one to the other.

Collusion

Two or more players sharing information or coordinating actions at the same table to the disadvantage of others. Cheating everywhere; running several bots at one table is collusion.