Online Poker Sites Trying to Deal Out Poker Bots

A poker player sits hunched over his computer, frantically trying to read the behavior of his opponents, looking for all-too-human habits and weaknesses that will give him the edge in betting. Unfortunately, the opponent he's trying to read could well not be human. Welcome to the world of poker robots, commonly known as poker bots.

Even since the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and Watson won Jeopardy, the ability of a robot to dominate a human in a game has been increasingly obvious. Now, poker "bots" are for sale over the Internet. They allow anyone with a PC and the ability to follow directions to set up a bot to play one of the panoply of on-line poker sites such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and PartyPoker.