We thought it was time to take another look at our competition. Now I must admit that we have never been afraid to do this, because quite frankly there really isn’t any. Consequently when we examine the other products being sold on the internet that call themselves poker bots, we really have to use the term loosely to categorize those products with ours.
But that doesn’t mean their sales pages cannot get ranked on the first page of the search engine results for that term. Unfortunately, being good at getting your website ranked high in the search engines doesn’t necessarily mean that the software they are selling is any good. With that in mind, let’s take a look at our so-called competitors who the search engines seem to be in love with lately.
1. Pokerbot-online.com. This is an OPI bot. If you don’t know what that is, OPI stands for Online Holdem Inspector (which comes under the umbrella of a product known as Online Poker Inspector). This is a software program that reads the cards and action at online poker rooms and gives a recommended play when it is your turn to act. It is not a bot, as it takes no actions. However many bots (such as this one) have been made to click the buttons at poker rooms to take the actions that correspond with the signals that OPI generates.
This means that you need to purchase Online Holdem Inspector in addition to purchasing any bot that relies upon it as a decision engine. However that is not the problem. The problem is that OPI itself is extremely limited in what information it can take in to make it’s decisions with. It’s pretty much just the hand you hold and whether or not there has been a bet or a raise on the current betting round. It cannot read opponent bet sizes or take into account previous round betting action. The last time I tried it, it didn’t even know how many opponents were still in the hand on the flop. Needless to say the profiles that are developed for it are very weak and can really only effectively be used to try and break even in the lowest stakes Fixed Limit Holdem games (in an effort to earn a small amount of rakeback).
2. Pokerbot-software.com. Also an OPI Bot. This is apparently the same exact software as Pokerbot-online, just packaged differently! A search of the sales page backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer reveals links from pretty much the same sources. The interface is almost the same and the price is close and the name of the product is very similar (and stupidly generic). So it looks like both these are owned by the same person who has discovered some good SEO tactics and is determined to dominate the top search engine results. This is a clever marketing strategy, but it still leaves you with an unprofitable poker bot.
3. Smart Poker Bot. This one is an independent piece of software that plays by itself. Unfortunately it plays very badly and there is nothing you can do to make it play better. Sure it has three or four slider bars (that pass for settings) which you can adjust to tighter, looser, more aggressive, etc. But from our experience they don’t seem to affect it’s terrible play much. These types of software programs that do not let the user define what exactly the settings do are useless. You have no way to make it stop folding to a min-raise after you bet with middle pair plus a flush draw, and no way to make it stop calling off your entire stack to a large all-in raise when you hold top pair weak kicker. (Also, after examining the website’s backlinks it appears that this product is also now owned by the same people selling the two OPI bots mentioned above!)
4. Advanced Poker Bot. This one appears to be an outright scam. It is also an independent piece of software like Smart Poker bot, and has the same problems of not being user-configurable. They try to sell around this by saying it learns the more it keeps playing! That way they can always tell you to let it keep playing so it can “learn to get better” when you complain that it is playing bad and losing your bankroll. Scam, scam, scam. No such technology exists and there is no “artificial intelligence” behind it. They also appear to have not updated it in almost a year, which means there is no way it works with all the poker rooms it claims to any more.
At least the first two on the list above are working programs that the user can adjust somewhat and create profiles for, albeit the variables are too limited to make a decent profile for anything but micro-stakes Fixed Limit games. The last two on the list above are complete garbage, if not outright scams.
Now let’s compare our software. Shanky Technologies poker bots actually take in enough information from the game to be able to create winning NL Holdem profiles. (Many people have done it and these profiles are available in our support forum.) Just read through the variable descriptions in the PPL Guide that comes in the free demo download. You can see opponent bet sizes, your own stack size, the current pot size, how many players are still in the pot, how many started the hand, how many are sitting at the table, what the bots previous actions were, and know what all the previous round betting action was.
All of that information can be used in an easy, user-friendly manner to tweak the bot to play however you like for any poker situation. That is the real key. You can specify exact poker situations for every betting round that include all the important details of the game and tell the bot exactly what to do in each situation. That is why so many solid profiles already exist for our poker bots.
As I said at the beginning, there is no real competition. This is why we have an active support forum that anyone can join, because we have nothing to hide. Just try doing that with one of those other products mentioned above. Most of their customers end up buying our software eventually anyway. Why not save yourself the trouble and just buy it in the first place.
