Poker Calculator Report: Poker Stars Gives the Boot to Bots

Most online players already know that Poker Stars is the runaway market share leader for online poker sites. They consistently have the most tables running, the most tournaments running and send the most qualifiers to live major buy-in tournaments.

What a lot of players may not know though is that Poker Stars also leads the way in defining security, safety and fairness for its players. So much so that other sites generally follow in fashion, trying to keep up with the strict policies that the security staff at Poker Stars diligently design in these increasingly important arenas of online gaming security.

You can imagine that Poker Stars would have their hands full of internal gaming issues to take care of, but security also involves third party software that either extracts database information or offers BOT-like recommendations to players rounding the tables at Poker Stars. “Bot” is a poker term used for assist software that makes a check, raise, or fold suggestion to the player using the software. Robot is the key underlying suggestion here, and to Poker Stars, software that removes the human element and runs purely on the calculating prowess of some fantastical, mathematical, electronic HAL, well is simply not fair play.

You might wonder why Stars may be concerned about BOTs given there isn’t a truly profitable BOT machine out there that is beating games online anyway. (Oh sorry, you mean you fell for that underground poker ad?) The problem Stars is mainly addressing right now is BOT like features within otherwise acceptable poker software. Take Magic Hold’em for instance. This software, seemingly another copy of a generic Mathematical Poker Calculator with some nice graphics thrown in was recently banned from Poker Stars because of a single feature it added to its software.

That feature is a Check, Raise, or Fold recommendation to the user. Exactly the same thing a full-fledged BOT would conceivably be doing. I can see why Magic Hold’em wanted to add some value to their otherwise homogenous product as it would be tough to claim it was any better than any other out-dated mathematical poker calculator. The problem though, is that they didn’t consult the big sites before they did it. Poker Stars doesn’t want to shut out third party software completely, but they have a vested interest in keeping their tables - fair play tables.

Thus, that one single feature has got Magic Holdem on the prohibited list at Poker Stars, and now its biggest challenge will be to get removed from that list. Notwithstanding the BOT feature has limited use and success anyway, Magic Hold’em could likely make it easier on themselves to recreate and rebrand a new product altogether, as getting removed from Stars’ prohibited list is something that hasn’t been done before.