Poker Bot vs RTA (Real-Time Assistance)

Real-time assistance, or RTA, is any software that helps you decide during a hand: a solver window open on the spot you are in, a preflop chart app that reads the table, a tool that shows a recommended action. A bot takes the last step and clicks for you. The gap between them has become narrow, and poker sites have closed it in their rules.

The practical difference

• RTA: a human is present and makes the final click. Volume is limited to what a person can handle. The tool may be as simple as a chart or as complex as a live solver lookup.
• Bot: no human in the loop. Runs as long as the hardware and the account survive. Can multi-table beyond human capacity.

How sites treat them

Historically, RTA lived in a grey zone: sites banned bots but tolerated charts and HUDs. That changed as live solver tools became easy to use. Today the major rooms prohibit RTA explicitly, and several have published bans and confiscations for it. Club apps generally follow suit in their rules, with enforcement varying by club and union. From a terms-of-service standpoint, using RTA and using a bot now lead to the same place. See Are poker bots legal?.

Detection

RTA users are harder to spot with client-side checks – the tool may run on a second device – and are caught mainly through strategy fingerprinting: decisions that match solver output too closely across many hands, especially in spots where humans consistently err. Bots are caught by that plus timing and behaviour analysis. How poker sites detect bots covers both.

Where the line is

If software tells you what to do while a hand is live, sites call it RTA and prohibit it. If it also clicks, it is a bot. Studying with a solver between sessions and memorising ranges is neither, and is how strong players actually improve; see GTO basics.