Poker bots are poker playing computer programs. Andrew Smith writes in his blog that poker bots will probably put and end to online poker.

His argument is as follows. Today poker bots can match and even beat the best of poker players. Therefore they would easily be able to get the better of almost all the poker players who play online.

Unscrupulous online players will use poker bots to make their moves for them and no one will be able to tell the difference. Smith writes, “Human players will consistently lose. Eventually, all but the stupidest humans will just stop playing.”

Smith has the support of Ian Fellows, who is a researcher at the University of California in San Diego and is involved in making poker bots. Fellows is the author of the open-source poker bot “Fell Omen”. According to Fellows the poker bots developed before 2000 were rudimentary and could easily be beaten by humans. Around 2000 poker bots were able to give even good players a run for their money. But now poker bots are one step ahead.

What Fellows says seems to be true. In July 2008 the second man versus machine poker competition was held alongside WSOP. In the first such competition held in 2007 the poker bot, Polaris, had narrowly lost. The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, the creators of Polaris, upgraded the poker bot and came back with a vengeance. This year the poker bot faced a team of humans from Stoxpoker, one of the best poker training agencies in the world. The humans were defeated with the poker bot winning two games to the humans’ one. 
 
Smith and Fellows have opposition from a surprising source. He is none other than Dr. Darse Billings, a member of the team that created Polaris. He says that Smith’s assertions are “ridiculous” and goes on to provide some compelling reasons. Poker bots are competitive only at heads up games. Online poker is a multiplayer event and poker bots will be out of their depth there. Also poker bots are not good at No Limit games. If this is not reason enough for the online poker fraternity to rejoice there is better news ahead. Contrary to what Smith says, Billings believes that it is easy to identify a poker bot. Online poker software can be programmed to tell when there is a bot playing. And since all online poker rooms make it clear that using bots it against the rules, those players who use bots will get thrown out, not only from one online poker room but from all of them. Billings cites the example of chess. Any chess player worth his salt can recognize the specific chess program that he is playing against online.

Finally Billings says, “I started the research into poker AI [artificial intelligence] in 1992, and we have had a very large team of excellent researchers working on the problem for many years. We have made a lot of progress over the past 16 years, but I can assure you, the sky is not falling.”