Bots Take The Fun Out Of Online Poker

The government doesn’t need to kill online poker. Bots will do it for them. Feel like chancing your money with an arithmetic machine? Neither does anybody else.

I have my opinions about online gambling – and gambling in general. I’m not a gambler because I learned my lesson fast: gambling equals less money. However, I don’t feel the government has the right to make a moral judgment for you, and that goes for online moral judgments, too. (And let’s not get into the government hypocrisy of the issue, either.)

Regardless, Freakonomics blogger Ian Ayres reports that untraceable poker bots are on the rise and may run many online gamblers offline faster than the DOJ.

[T]he rise of gambling bots may soon depress online poker participation for a very different reason. In the very near future, online poker may become a suckers’ game that humans won’t have a chance to win. Bots are quite scale-able and it will be virtually impossible to prohibit computer or computer-assisted online playing.

Yikes. That’s bad news for poker-lovers. Worse news for online casinos. Looks like it’s back to catching cheaters the old-fashioned way – by checking their sleeves