A Short History of Poker Bots

Poker bots are almost as old as online poker. The story splits into a hobbyist track, a commercial track and an academic track, which met somewhere around the middle of the 2010s.

Early days

When online poker took off in the early 2000s, tables were soft and clients were simple. Hobbyists wrote scripts that read the screen and played fixed rules. Most were bad; a few made money in limit Hold’em, where fixed bet sizes made rule-writing tractable. The first widely used open framework, OpenHoldem, appeared in this period and is still around; see the review.

Commercial bots

Through the late 2000s and 2010s, commercial bots sold on a subscription or licence basis – Shanky Technologies being the best-known name – with profiles for the major rooms. Rooms responded with client-side scans and bans, and the cat-and-mouse pattern that still exists was set. Public ban announcements from the largest rooms in the 2010s involved bot rings with confiscations in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The academic track

University research groups worked on poker as a hard problem in imperfect-information games. Heads-up limit Hold’em was declared essentially solved in 2015. Programs then beat top professionals in heads-up no-limit and later in six-player no-limit, which ended the debate on whether machines could outplay humans at the game. Those programs were never released for use at online tables, but their methods shaped the solvers that followed.

Solvers and RTA

Commercial solvers such as PioSolver brought game-theory-optimal study to ordinary players. Once solver output could be looked up during a hand, real-time assistance became a problem in its own right, and by the early 2020s major rooms had banned it explicitly, with public enforcement.

Club apps

The move of private games to mobile club apps (PPPoker, PokerBros and others) created a large pool of soft tables with lighter detection than the big rooms, which is where much bot activity moved. Enforcement now comes from the app operators and from clubs and unions themselves. The guides section covers these apps.