Online poker robots are not easy cash machines. Before you begin writing your own code (or tweaking code you've purchased) you should consider that this will not be NEARLY as easy as you expect. Some points to consider...
- You don't know as much about poker as you think you do. I can't stress this enough. I was a winning player before I turned loose my war room on the online poker world. I played at mid-limits up to $5/$10 and $10/$20 online, and higher at brick and mortar poker rooms. However, the first thing I realized was that I take some of my play for granted. I did the right things, but I didn't know why. Imagine trying to teach another person to speak your native tongue. Sure, you speak it very well yourself, but can you explain past-perfect tense? Subjective pronouns? Probably not if you've been out of school as long as I have, but this is a perfect analogy for how you teach your bot to speak the language of poker.
- Nothing with this much earning potential is easy. Expect to spend hundreds of hours creating a bot that makes any sort of profit above the lowest of micro stakes. Read that again...HUNDREDS OF HOURS.
- Don't build a rule set, build a brain. You will never be happy with a rules based robot. Trust me, I've had several. They are a quick way to get up and running but you'll find a nearly limitless amount of situations to be faced in this wonderful game. It is inevitable that you'll miss some and make EV- plays at the table. Instead, concentrate on creating a brain for your bot that uses more information than your hand strength and number of villains in the hand. Any good player will take money from an opponent that can't think above the first level of poker (seeing his own hand only). Your bot is no exception.
- You don't understand variance. I thought I did when I began. I had Poker Tracker. I had tens of thousands of hands recorded of my own play. However, it is a whole new ballgame when you start recording tens of thousands of hands per day of the identical playing style and logic. I've had runs of 100,000 hands at break even, EV-, and EV+ all from the same bot.
- Security is paramount. Don't screw around and get your accounts banned. You are thinking, "Oh, it's just $50 I put in to toy around with penny tables. It won't kill me" $50 loss won't hurt you but take into consideration what that account may be worth in the future. 6 months from now after you've built a killer bot, that account may have a very large earning potential. What I wouldn't give to have all the accounts back that I foolishly squandered away.
- Don't be greedy. So you've built a winner...don't go and ruin it all with 12 hour sessions of 12-tabling. Both the site and the players will notice this. Also, don't think you can farm the micros mercilessly forever. If a human wins at the micros over a long stretch of hands, he moves up limits. Your bot should do the same. Do you expect a site to not notice that you've played 50k hands of $.25/$.50 poker every month for a year?
- Get a second opinion. Post hands to forums for discussion. Get a session review buddy. Do whatever you have to do to get an outside perspective on your bot's poker play. It's very easy to let all of your exposure to the bot influence your own game and theory. Resist the temptation to defend your bot's play automatically. You might be talking yourself into reinforcing a bad habit that it taught you.
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