A Short History of Poker Bots
From hobbyist scripts and the first bot frameworks to research programs that beat professionals, to club apps, RTA bans and solver-driven bots.
Plain-language articles about poker bots: what they are, how they work, legality, detection, how they compare with solvers and RTA, and results.
This section is the knowledge base. It answers the questions people search for about poker bots without selling anything and without pretending the topic is simpler than it is: what a bot is, how one works, whether using one is legal, how rooms detect them, how they differ from solvers and real-time assistance, and whether they actually win.
We build a bot ourselves, which gives us a view from the inside and an obvious interest. We deal with that by being specific: where a claim depends on jurisdiction, a room’s terms, or numbers we cannot verify, the article says so.
From hobbyist scripts and the first bot frameworks to research programs that beat professionals, to club apps, RTA bans and solver-driven bots.
Whether a poker bot is legal depends on your jurisdiction; whether it is allowed depends on the site's terms, and almost every site bans them.
An honest look at poker bot profitability: where bots have a real edge, why most fail, and the costs – rake, downtime, detection – that eat results.
The mechanics of a poker bot: reading the table by screen or memory, building a game state, deciding with rules or solver output, acting, failing.
How poker rooms catch bots: client-side checks, timing and behaviour statistics, strategy fingerprinting, player reports, and account links.
RTA tools suggest actions while a human plays; bots play by themselves. Why sites treat both as cheating, how each is detected, where the line is.
A solver computes strategies away from the table; a bot plays at it. How they relate, why a bot cannot run a solver live, and which you need.
A poker bot is software that plays online poker without a human deciding. What counts as a bot, what does not, the main types, and why it matters.