After I started writing about Polaris, I got a lot of emails from people asking about the poker bots that are being used to cheat at the online poker rooms.

The bots that you will find on the internet poker rooms are not nearly as advanced as Polaris.

A quick search on google will show you that there is several poker bots that you can buy to try to use on the poker rooms. The most popular bots can be purchased for just over $100.

If you are looking for a poker bot or you are interested in the subject, there are a few things you should know. First, your accounts will likely be banned and all of your funds will be taken if you are caught using a bot at one of the online poker rooms.

Second, most of these bots take some knowledge to set-up and there is often a catch to whatever deal is being offered. A lot of the sites that try to sell these bots will tell players that in order to gain access to their software, you will have to download the poker room software and make a deposit...of course earning them a small commission.

A lot of the emails I received asked how people are caught using these bots, so here is some of what I can tell you.

It wasn't until about 2002-2003 that people started discovering these bots often enough to suggest that there was a problem. This was partially because of the advancements in statistical poker tracking programs and an increase in the amount of people who are willing to put time into analyzing the results. Just by looking at win rates and other statistics, it can be relatively easy to find poker bots. The majority of the bots that have been discovered (which the community knows about) have been found by the players themselves.

The large poker rooms also take a proactive approach towards eliminating the poker bots. Once the security teams have discovered bot software that is being run on their network, they are usually able to combat the problem very easily. However, this just causes the poker bot's software developers to go back and refine their programs so they are once again undetectable.

This has become an on-going game of cat and mouse between the bot developers and the security teams.

It's important to note that the only bots that you really need to fear are the ones that are designed for the limit holdem games. All of the other games are far too complex for a bot to become effective without some human input.

However, the AI software behind these bots is starting to become more advanced. I know that I said that they are not as advanced as Polaris, but that's because Polaris is on the cutting edge. A lot of the major universities in the U.S. have groups working on projects similar to the Polaris poker bot. "Fell Omen II" is another program that has become pretty advanced. This one was developed by professors at UC San Diego.

I expect to see the bots that are discovered in the poker rooms become much more advanced over the next few years. This doesn't mean that they won't be discovered just as easily, they will just be harder to beat in the time period when they are able to operate.