Pokerbots profitability
From PokerAI
One of the first question of every new real-money pokerbotter is "How much you can make out of poker botting?". This article consolidates relevant information on the profitability of pokerbotting.
Percentage of winning bots
Quoted from [1]: "Winning pokerbots are not common. It is a common opinion that 85-95% of all poker bots are losing bots (which is about the amount of losing poker players in general). We launched a small project to find out if this is correct. The early indications are, that it will be confirmed. The approach used to verify the hypothesis is fairly simple. One of the upcoming features in stealth (but not coming soon, as of the implementation complexity of the runtime generic data collection) is to detect computer aided play based on playing patterns (and other patterns that can be extracted from a standard hand history). We started such analysis over initially collected set of datamined poker hand histories (at the present moment this is about 1,5M hands). The results so far (and this is not even close to being statistically significant) indicate confirmation of the above numbers. So, 9 out of 10 bots, need to try it harder. As a by-product of this research, we will also aim to verify the hypothesis that the percentage of winning bots is higher on PokerStars. This (as discussed several times) is due to the specific strategy of pokerstars to freeze accounts and steal money of bot users (and the victims of these efforts are actually the losing bots). The full results with partial disclosure of the data as well as description of the method will come once a statistically significant results are available, however, this will not be available for general reading in here. "
In a open survey done on PokerAI portal, the people reported the following about their bots:
- Winning at microlimitis 36.5%
- Break even 26.9%
- Losing at all stakes 26.9%
- Winning at all stakes 9.6%
There are frequently honest reports on win/loss on WinHoldem Forums, for example the following by a notable member Nick Coldhand [2]: "I can honestly say I have less money than one year ago, but I’m on the right track now, and finally in a positive trend. Of all the money I lost before this inversion, I can safely say that they’re 90% due to bad scrapers, bad hardware (network caused bring disconnections), bad software (yes, WH before “seated” symbols was not good for sitngo), bad bots (bugs caused by my low skills in programming), and only 10% to bad bot strategy. What’s actually easy with Winholdem is coding a 97% bot, a 98% scraper, and leave it alone with a 95% hopper to work for you. Bankrupt is guaranteed. You need a 100% bot, a 100% scraper and, if you want to leave it alone, a 100% hopper to even think to win money, and that’s the hard part. And when you reach some stability, something changes (the site updates, WH updates, Winscrape updates, now even Bring updates, lol). It’s a bit like trying to catch something moving at light speed."
Price of a winning bot
Ray Bornert attemps to give estimation of what is the value of a winning pokerbot (or a winning formula for a pokerbot engine) [3]: "The standard market value for a winning pokerbot is 5000 times the average daily single table take. A bot that can average $1/day at a given table is worth about $5k."
Reported winrates
Highest reported winrates out of poker botting reach about 200k$/year. Several cases reported such profit based on high stakes bots, and others reported in this range based on creation of many accounts and multi-accounting medium limits. More than 80% of the winning pokerbots make profits in the range of 10-30k$ per year, due to several independant factors (thresholds). Crazymike (aka as mrGatorade on 2+2) claimed that in the last year more than 1.7 million $USD were won by bots on one particular casino alone.
See also
Links
- PokerAI Article on Pokerbots profitablitiy
- Value of a winning pokerbot, from WinHoldEm forums
