Online Poker's Bot Problem: How to Detect and Combat Automated Cheaters

The online poker community is grappling with a significant threat from bots, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect. The main types of cheating in online poker include collusion, bots, and assistive software, with bots being one of the most prevalent issues.

Bots in online poker are created with human expertise and have made significant progress in the last 10 years. The main danger for poker is fully automated bots that exploit the field and win more money due to their mass deployment. Many poker rooms are infested with armies of bots, as seen in recent forum discussions.

Operators are often uninterested in combating bots, focusing more on attracting players and user experience. Effective bot detection requires collecting data and using machine learning infrastructure. Contextual detection and gameplay analysis are combined to differentiate bots from human players. Exploit bots are the most common and are created by poker players with GTO as the base, but with deviations for maximum wins.