First the bad news – poker bots do exist. But what are they? Well, they’re programs – of varying sophistication – that play poker for you while you’re on the toilet. Or in bed, or whatever. Some bots are terrible – generally the ones you can download for free – and some can actually play the game. But there are two inherent problems…

1. Current levels of AI simply aren’t good enough, even for low-level games. We downloaded one of the more infamous poker bots – Win Hold’em – at a cost of $100 and let it loose on the 50c-$1 tables. We gave it $100 to play with and by the time we went to bed – four hours later – we were up by $15, despite some truly horrific plays. We dreamt of overflowing cash registers but woke up to find that our bot had gone on virtual tilt, losing all but $13 of our money in the space of five hours. In a bid to salvage something – anything – we stuck him on a no-limit table where he went bust in four hands. We reckon you’d lose less money if you trained a chimp to play for you. In fact we’ve proved it over the past six months in our regular Beginner’s Luck feature.

2. Online operators are very good at tracking anyone using bots and, if you’re caught, your account will be frozen and your information shared across operators.

It all comes back to the same point. If someone had programmed a poker bot that was good enough to win lots of money, would they sell it for $50 online and risk it getting tracked by every operator under the sun? Or would they hook it up to a PC and let it work for them while they went off yachting?