Sloe Times

So I went and had a read of the MSNBC article on poker playing programs and basically I have to say I'm not too impressed. A proliferation of bots, if it were to ever come to that , would just leave us at that state of the game where everyone is great and the poker rooms take everyone's money with the rakes. Bots would also be a bad thing even if that were not the case. Talk about having an ability to over-fish the population. If bots eat all of the fish, the only thing left will be a bunch of sharks staring at each other and trying to figure out which end to eat first. I appreciate the AI opportunities in programming a really good player, but to build something like this and sell it so that others who are not good players can automatically become good players is hokey at best, but more likely just plain wrong. It's bad enough that people collude and cheat in other ways, but being able to drop a bot into an MTT, go to bed and wake up in the cash is not what the game is about. This is as bad a form of cheating as any other. It's not you that's playing but you're trying to reap the benefits. Maybe that's not such a big deal. What would be a big deal IMO would be someone using a bot to win a WSOP or other live tournament seat and getting a vacation so they can go dump their chips at the tournament on day one.

Maybe bots are not that big of a deal, but they offend my sense of right and wrong.