Facebook Poker Chips Blog

Posts Tagged ‘facebook poker bot’

The most frequent comments and emails I receive are probably about facebook poker cheats and whether I know where to find them. The second most common question I get is about facebook poker bots or zynga poker bots and whether they actually exist. As I’m sure you well know by now, a poker bot is an computer program that completely automates the process of playing poker for you, in theory winning you facebook poker chips while you snooze or clean the house or look at online porn (yea we all know about that). They have been in use in real money poker games on the internet for years now, with some people claiming to make be making thousands of dollars a day or week by using them.

Whether or not these claims are true is irrelevant, as there is simply no way to prove or disprove such claims because anyone who uses these programs would never announce it to the world due to the fact that they are illegal on most poker sites and are grounds to have your account banned if caught using them. These poker bots are extremely good at emulating human play though, so it’s next to impossible for sites like poker stars or full tilt to actually catch the bot users. Since there’s a lot of money in for real money bots there’s a big incentive for producing working programs for these games. But what about facebook poker? Would anyone really invest that much time in to such a complex program that can only win zynga poker chips?

Apparently there is or was a working facebook poker bot at one time that players could download and read about at http://www.botage.com. While I don’t know whether it works the way it claims to, I guess it answers the questions of whether or not someone would really spend the time to make a working facebook poker bot. It probably doesn’t work anymore and I don’t advocate using or downloading bots for poker games anyway, so anything on that site is meant strictly for entertainment or educational purposes.

..not everyone in poker is human.

There are a lot of rumors and misconceptions about bots in Poker, ranging from how they work, to what exactly they are, and whether or not players should fear them.  Bots in competative games aren’t a new trend, they’ve been around for years dating back to artificial opponents in chess.  At its core, a poker bot is a simple program that tracks and translates the cards dealt into mathematical equations and acts (ie. raises, folds etc.) according the odds of each possible outcome.  But they’re far from a ‘set it and forget it’ program to rake in facebook poker chips.

Most experts in poker seem to agree that poker bots are only ever successful in Limit Texas holdem due to its primarily mathematical structure, and that they seem to lag behind human players in No Limit Texas Holdem due to the large “all in” variable that bots have trouble dealing with. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not out there being used in both real money and facebook texas holdem rooms to win poker chips.

No hard statistics exist about just how much bot play might be out there in poker rooms across the internet, obviously because such a thing is nearly impossible to gauge. Most real money rooms ban players accounts and freeze their funds if they’re caught using bots, because players feel that it might give others an unfair advantage to have a computer calculating odds for them. Poker pro Barry Goldstein has a different view on bots in texas holdem however:

“I believe poker sites should allow bots, but only on clearly defined tables. Players should know who the bots are, and have the choice if they would like to play them or not.”

But most regular folks feel that bots offer too much opportunity for collusion, where a bot operator might be running 4 or 5 bots at the same time, sharing hand knowledge between the bots to fleece unsuspecting players who wander into the room. Anyone who has ever played facebook texas holdem poker has probably come across a bot at least once or twice, especially in the mid level rooms. All the tell tale signs are there: mechanical better, never talks to other players, never buys any gifts or drinks, no friends on their friend list etc. The next time you’re grinding in the rooms trying to win some facebook poker chips keep in mind that the disciplined player across the table from you may not be a human at all.