Shanky’s Holdem Poker Bot – Can It Defeat The Sharks?
The most numerous poker bots you will find on the web are available for free. Variously called holdembot, pokerobot or similar, they are essentially the same simple creature, repackaged to serve the marketing purposes of various poker sites. Each time you download one you will typically find that only one (different) poker room is supported – my assumption is that this is the poker room sponsoring that particular version, in order to get more users registered and collect up the rake they generate. Their screen presence is very simple and their abilities likewise. They are commonly only able to play cash limit games, so any form of tournament or no-limit game is out of the question. Their playing style can be tweaked somewhat along the scales tight to loose and aggressive to passive, but along the whole range the basic style is tight and weak – waiting for the best hole cards, then folding them at the slightest hint of domination. At least they play consistently, don’t make major errors and don’t have emotions to get in the way. In other words they play better than 50 percent of human players out there. But my experience is that they don’t play well enough to overcome the rake except on the occasional very weak table.
At the other end of the complexity level is the Holdem Poker Bot produced by Shanky Technologies. The vendors have even produced a poker programming language to make the performance of the bot completely configurable. The bot plays a reasonable cash game right out of the box using default settings. Alternative settings can be downloaded from the excellent support forum to tweak the bot for single and multitable tournaments and various types of cash game, but the default tight aggressive performance of the built-in settings will work until you get used to the system. The interface is very basic until you open up a few menus and then you see the wealth of options available to you. But it is never going to win any aesthetic prizes for the main screen.
This is the only bot however that I would trust to play in an overnight tournament with over 100 players and have some hope of finishing in the money by the morning. It automatically handles the changing of tables and stakes and varying numbers of competitors with no problem at all. Unfortunately, I have a way to go in finding the right parameter set to ensure consistent performance on the tournaments with larger fields. But the support I have had from the vendors has been excellent and a very active and useful user forum is hosted at their site. So far poker rooms are limited to Full Tilt, Bodog and Ultimate Bet, but these are among the biggest and best anyway. Because of their background in bonus clearing blackjack bots, the developers are very savvy about how to manage money, including rakebacks, bonuses and so on in the poker world. Every aspect of the program evidences real poker fan input, rather than a developer-driven project. While typing the above, my little VPS-based Shanky bot has seen off 90 players of a field of 180 in a multi-table tournament, with most of my stack intact. This product is one of my favourites of all of the bots in any category, despite my just having come across it recently. Reasonable price (and there’s a free trial for a few hundred hands), excellent features and very good support – what’s not to like?
More info from the Shanky Holdem Poker Bot site. Find more reviews of every variety of trading and gaming bot at The Botfarm.
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