How to Spot & Crush Poker Bots Before They Beat You

06 Sep 2025

Beginner

This material is for beginner players

Online poker has always been a battlefield between grinders and recreational players. But in today’s game, there’s a new opponent at the table: bots. They aren’t just rumors or edge cases — bots are actively shaping the online ecosystem, and knowing how to deal with them is essential if you want to protect your win rate.

In this guide, we’ll break down:

• What poker bots are and how they operate.
• The different types of bots you’ll encounter, from profile bots to RTA-driven programs.
• Practical ways to spot, report, avoid, and even exploit them.

Whether you’re grinding the micros or fighting through mid-stakes, understanding bots can mean the difference between losing EV and outsmarting the machines.

Bots aren’t a modern invention. In fact, as soon as online poker launched more than 20 years ago, bots followed. And it’s not just shady offshore sites — bots have appeared across multiple major networks.

Today, the problem has evolved. We’re not dealing with just one or two isolated programs. Instead, entire bot rings and advanced software solutions are running in parallel with human players, changing how the game plays out online.

Technically, bots are against the terms and conditions of every poker site. The difference lies in how seriously each operator enforces the rules. Some networks have strong, well-trained security teams that can quickly detect and remove suspicious accounts. Others, however, are notoriously slow and ineffective, creating obvious bot infestations that leave regular players questioning whether the site is doing enough — or even whether it benefits from artificially boosted traffic.

#1: Profile Bots

A profile bot makes decisions based on preflop stats. It essentially builds a HUD on you: VPIP, PFR, fold-to-3-bet, fold-to-4-bet, and so on. Once your tendencies become clear, the bot adapts its strategy to exploit your leaks.

It’s important not to confuse a profile bot with bot profiles. Many commercial bots come preloaded with different “styles” (tight, loose, aggressive, passive), but those are just settings. A true profile bot actively collects stats on you and tailors its play around them.

#2: Pool Exploit Bots

A pool exploit bot doesn’t adjust to individual players. Instead, it uses a static strategy designed to exploit the population as a whole. For example, if the average player pool folds too often in a certain spot, the bot will hammer that weakness again and again, regardless of who’s sitting across the virtual felt.

#3: Bot Rings

Perhaps the most dangerous form of all, bot rings are groups of bots that share data. If ten bots are running on the same site, each one contributes to a shared database of stats on you — meaning they’ll have a much larger sample size of hands than you do on them.

This gives the ring a clear advantage: while you’re trying to adjust to one “player”, they’re pooling knowledge across many accounts. Bot rings can also use techniques like card removal collectively to improve decisions, which crosses the line into outright cheating.

When multiple bots share information, it crosses into collusion — something that has no place in poker. Players (human or not) should never have access to each other’s hole cards. Yet bot rings and shared systems create exactly that kind of unfair edge.

#4: RTA (Real-Time Assistance) Bots

An RTA bot — often called a GTO bot — uses solver outputs to make decisions in real time. At first glance, this might seem like the ultimate tool: play perfect, unexploitable poker. But the reality is more nuanced. Bot operators want win rate, not perfection. Just like humans, they’re after maximum profit, not just theoretical soundness.

Exploitative bots often earn more. A profile bot or pool exploit bot can generate a higher win rate by targeting population mistakes. RTA bots are harder to exploit, but not invincible. They can still be countered if you recognize their patterns. So while GTO bots are powerful, they aren’t necessarily the most dangerous in terms of raw profit.

#5: House Bots

The most disturbing possibility is the house bot. Unlike other bots, these aren’t operated by cheaters in the player pool — they’re run by the poker room itself.

Why would a site deploy house bots:

• To inflate traffic numbers, making the games look busier.
• To pad the rake and keep tables running.
• Potentially, to cheat players outright, if the bot has access to hole card information.

If house bots exist, they represent the worst-case scenario. A site-controlled bot with inside access would be virtually unbeatable. To date, no poker room has admitted to using them — but the concern remains alive in the community.

Grinding Patterns and Volume

One of the first giveaways is unnatural playing volume. If you constantly see the same screen names no matter what time you log in — even after taking a few months off — there’s a strong chance you’re looking at bots. While some human grinders put in massive hours, this level of constant presence is far more typical of automated accounts.

Timing Behavior

Human decision-making is inconsistent. Some hands are snap decisions, others take longer. Bots, however, often display rigid timing patterns — taking the same amount of time for every action.

There’s also the flip side: frequent timeouts. Bots are often run in virtual machines, sometimes with too many instances open at once. When system resources get stretched, bots fail to act in time. While humans can time out too (especially multi-tablers), repeated timing issues combined with other signs should raise red flags.

Unusual Lobby Behavior

Bots don’t just play hands strangely — they also behave oddly in the lobby. For example, I once identified a bot ring that was only coded to play 5- or 6-handed poker. The moment a game went 4-handed, every bot at the table would instantly sit out.

This made their behavior painfully predictable: if the lone recreational player left, all the bots would immediately sit out as well. Humans don’t act in perfect unison like that — but scripts and programmed logic do.

Other lobby-related signs include:

• Bots that avoid playing against each other.
• Accounts that seem to “soft play” one another.
• Coordinated table selection or seating scripts.

These behaviors fall under the umbrella of unnatural lobby patterns and are strong evidence you’re not just dealing with regular players.

Clusters by Nationality or Region

Another sign of a bot ring is when a group of accounts shares the same nationality or regional origin — for instance, all appearing to be from Eastern Europe or Asia. While operators can mask locations with VPNs, this adds complexity and risk since most poker rooms explicitly ban VPN use. So when you see multiple accounts from the same region displaying identical patterns, suspicions rise.

Identical Unusual Stats

What really gives away a bot network is when players share specific outlier stats. For example, in most pools, the average flop raise versus c-bet is about 10%. If you encounter one player with a 25% flop raise stat, that might just be an aggressive regular. But if you find five or six accounts, all with the same inflated stat, playing similar volume, and appearing at the same stakes, the picture becomes much clearer.

Bot rings don’t usually overlap in just one stat. Once you start digging, you’ll often see they also share:

• The same 3-bet percentages.
• Nearly identical VPIP and PFR ranges.
• Consistent behavior across other metrics.

Individually, these numbers might look close to normal. But when a group of accounts has both one or two highly unusual tendencies and nearly identical “normal” stats elsewhere, it’s a near-certainty you’re dealing with a bot ring.

So you’ve identified what looks like a bot network. The players are likely linked, running automated strategies, and operating as a group. The next step is deciding how to respond.

Step One: Explore

Don’t rush to quit the site or fire off a security complaint right away. First, take some time to study the bots:

• What kind of strategy are they using — profile, pool exploit, or RTA?
• Do their tendencies look static or dynamic?
• Are there obvious leaks that you can exploit?

The reason is simple: not all bots are unbeatable. Some are rigid enough that a sharp human can consistently exploit their patterns. Before deciding, weigh whether it’s more profitable to report them or just grind value from their mistakes.

Step Two: Decide

Once you’ve gathered information, you really have three options:

• Report the Bots. File a security report with the poker room. This makes sense if the bots are strong and difficult to exploit, and you believe the long-term EV (expected value) of removing them is higher than battling them. Keep in mind, though, that poker sites often take a long time to act — if they act at all;
• Avoid the Bots. If you don’t want to deal with them, table selection becomes your main weapon. You’ll have to actively dodge bot-heavy tables. This is often a temporary solution, since reporting and resolution can take weeks or months;
• Play Against the Bots. If your analysis shows that the bots have exploitable weaknesses, you might decide to keep them around. Exploiting bad bots can actually be more profitable than playing against strong regulars — at least until the operators update their scripts.

In theory, reporting bots might seem like the “right” thing to do. But let’s be honest — poker rooms don’t always act quickly, and sometimes they don’t act at all. From an EV perspective, the real question is simple:

Is it more profitable to fight the bots or to try and get them removed:

• If the bots look unbeatable or the ring is huge, the logical move is often to quit the site, at least temporarily.
• If the bots show leaks, then reporting them is unnecessary — because playing against them could be highly profitable.

Yes, it might feel a little unethical to knowingly battle bots. But consider this: the people running them are already breaking the rules. Bots aren’t going away anytime soon, so treating them as “just another opponent type” is a perfectly rational mindset.

While bots are generally bad for poker, they can be an absolute goldmine if you uncover their weaknesses. In fact, finding a flaw in their coding or logic can turn a bot ring into one of the softest fields you’ll ever face.

Common Exploitable Traits

Most bots suffer from rigidity. Unlike human players, they don’t adjust dynamically — they stick to whatever strategy they were programmed with. That often leads to:

• Overfolding or overbluffing in certain spots.
• Static pool-exploit lines that don’t account for counter-adjustments.
• Predictable betting patterns or frequencies that repeat across the ring.

The trick is to treat bots the same way you’d treat exploitable human opponents — identify their leaks, test counters, and hammer them relentlessly until they adapt (if they ever do).

If you ever come across a bot ring programmed to overbluff in these spots, the counter is straightforward: widen your bluff-catching range and let them hang themselves. But let’s assume we’re dealing with something more sophisticated — a profile bot or even an RTA bot. These are tougher opponents, yet they still share a fundamental flaw: bucketing.

What is Bucketing?

Bots rarely operate with smooth, nuanced strategies the way humans do. Instead, they break decisions into fixed segments — or “buckets”. Take flop defense as an example. A bot might have one response plan for each bet size range:

• 0%–25% pot.
• 25%–50% pot.
• 50%–75% pot.
• 75%–100% pot.

This creates sharp edges in its strategy. If you bet 10% pot versus 20% pot, a strong human player would recognize the subtle difference and adjust accordingly. But for the bot, those two bets may fall into the same “bucket,” meaning it reacts in exactly the same way to both sizings.

These rigid edges are where the biggest leaks tend to appear. By deliberately targeting the margins between buckets, you can force the bot into making systematic mistakes. The strategy that was designed to be airtight suddenly crumbles under pressure, because the bot’s logic tree doesn’t handle nuanced adjustments well.

Let’s say a bot has two distinct defending ranges on the river:

• One for bets up to pot size;
• Another for overbets between 100% and 175% pot.

Now imagine you bet 101% pot. Even though that’s basically the smallest possible overbet, the bot treats it the same way as a 175% pot shove. In other words, you’re getting the same fold equity for far less risk. That’s the essence of why bucketing creates exploitable edges.

You might think real-time assistance bots (RTA bots) would avoid this issue, but many of them rely on pre-solved game trees. If your bet sizing doesn’t exactly match one of their pre-solved nodes, the bot defaults to the closest available strategy. That means your “off-size” bet forces the bot into a suboptimal response — something a strong human reg wouldn’t fall for.

Years ago, I found a bot ring with a massive hole in its 3-bet and 4-bet logic. No matter what size the raise was, the bot used the same defending range. That meant min-3-bets and min-4-bets were absurdly effective. I could apply pressure cheaply and get folds I had no business getting against competent human opponents.

Unlike humans, bots don’t “adjust” in real time. But bot operators do update their code. Once a glaring leak becomes obvious, they’ll patch it. That’s why these opportunities are usually short-term goldmines — make the most of them before the fix arrives.

One of the key things to look for is any player consistently winning large amounts of money from bots. Observing these patterns can reveal how opponents are interacting with the bot in specific situations.

Some bots have what we call a kill switch. This means the bot will avoid giving action to certain players. For example, it might fold frequently pre-flop against a particular opponent or even sit out entirely when it detects a player with an effective counter-strategy. Once you identify a potential exploit, you often have a limited window to maximize its value.

Some bot exploits can be extremely lucrative. In certain cases, you could be beating a bot ring for 50 big blinds per 100 hands or more, depending on the weakness you’ve found. Because of this, it’s often necessary to engage in long sessions to capitalize on the opportunity.

While marathon sessions of 12–24 hours aren’t sustainable or healthy long-term, the goal is to extract as much profit as possible before the bot either activates its kill switch against you or the programmers upgrade the code to patch the weakness.

Real-World Experience with Bot Rings

I’ve personally done this in the past. After identifying weaknesses in a bot ring, I’ve played extended sessions to maximize profit. I’ve also seen programmers respond in real time—adding me to kill switch lists so that any time I sit at a table, all the bots I had exploited would immediately sit out.

While these are extreme examples, even subtle weaknesses can be exploited over longer periods. Occasionally, you’ll find groundbreaking leaks in a bot’s strategy. Unlike human opponents, bots will continue using the same strategy indefinitely, losing money until a bot owner intervenes to analyze or deactivate them.

When it comes to RTA (Real-Time Assistance) bots, finding a groundbreaking exploit is less likely. You might uncover smaller vulnerabilities in how these bots are programmed, but there’s a real chance that an RTA bot isn’t beatable after rake.

Even though an RTA bot doesn’t play perfect GTO (Game Theory Optimal) poker, it may be close enough that any weaknesses are insufficient to overcome the rake. This creates a situation I refer to as MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction. In other words, playing against a strong RTA bot often results in both you and the bot losing to the rake, or the bot making a tiny profit post-rake while you still lose.

This is why the analysis stage is so important when identifying bot rings. You need to be realistic about which bots are potentially beatable and which are not. If a bot is too strong, the best approach is to collect data and report it to the poker room rather than trying to exploit it.

Solver output can also help understand these bots. While solvers are not perfect, they provide an ultra-weak solution to the game — technically beatable under certain conditions. Unfortunately, poker will likely continue facing bot problems for the foreseeable future. However, there are two main strategies to combat them:

• Report bots to the security team to get them removed;
• Exploit weaknesses to take enough profit that the bots are no longer viable on the network.

Both approaches can be effective, but understanding the strength and limitations of the bot is critical before deciding how to act.

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