What Is a Poker Bot?

A poker bot is a program that plays online poker on a person’s account: it reads the table, decides what to do, and clicks the buttons. The human sets it up and walks away. That last part is what separates a bot from every other kind of poker software.

What a bot is not

A HUD shows statistics about opponents while you decide. A solver computes strategies away from the table. A tracker stores your hand histories. A real-time assistance (RTA) tool suggests an action while you play, but you click. None of these play for you, and poker sites treat them differently from bots, although RTA is now banned almost everywhere too. The bot vs RTA article draws that line in detail.

Types of poker bot

• Rule-based bots follow hand-written logic: “raise these hands from this position, fold to a 3-bet unless…”. The classic frameworks such as OpenHoldem work this way; the quality depends entirely on the profile someone wrote.
• Solver-based bots play precomputed or approximated game-theory strategies. Stronger, heavier, and the direction most modern bots take.
• Learning bots adapt to opponents from data. Rare outside research, because the data needed and the risk of learning nonsense are both large.

How a bot sees the table

Most bots read the screen: screenshots, template matching for cards, OCR for numbers. A few read the client’s memory or network traffic, which is faster but far easier for a room to detect and much harder to keep working. How poker bots work covers the pipeline.

Why the definition matters

Every major poker site prohibits bots in its terms of service. What a site calls a bot decides what gets an account banned, and definitions have widened over time to cover any software that automates decisions or advises in real time. Whether that is also illegal depends on where you are; see Are poker bots legal?.