Still think is online gambling legal in uk needs to come with stronger bot prevention requirements, but that's probably wishful thinking.

Maybe the bots have gotten better at mimicking human timing patterns too?

The issue isn't bots - it's that human players have genuinely gotten much, much better. The skill gap between pros and recreationals has shrunk dramatically.

Also, remember that variance in poker follows a complex distribution where standard deviation σ = √(variance per hand × number of hands). Over 10,000 hands, even a 5bb/100 winner can experience swings of ±40 buy-ins within 2σ confidence intervals. What feels like bots might just be the cruel mathematics of variance combined with tougher opposition.

Don't underestimate how much the game has evolved in just the past two years.

Found a guy who limped pocket aces. When's the last time you saw a bot do that?

Been crushing £0.25/£0.50 on the 888 app for three weeks straight. Small sample size but promising.

Or maybe I just ran good. Hard to tell the difference anymore.

Besides, if you're losing to bots, at least you're losing to superior play rather than variance!

At least with Book of Dead I know I'm just fighting RNG, not some AI that's read every poker book ever written.

Still think we're fighting an uphill battle against the machines though.

Take it with a grain of salt, but this is based on 18 months of observation across different stakes.

I've heard Paddy Power Poker actually has better detection than some of the bigger names, but their player pool is tiny.

Poker used to be about reading people. Now it's about memorizing charts.

To an outside observer, his play would look impossibly robotic. But it's just hyper-optimized human play with software assistance.

@ukgambler99 You might be onto something about the generational shift. These kids have access to training that cost thousands when we were learning.

Meanwhile I'm still getting emails about "Responsible Gaming Week" - how about "Responsible Bot Detection Week"?

I've actually started doing better against these "perfect" players because they're predictable in their perfection. Sounds backwards but it works.

I've been profitable every year since 2019 playing £0.50/£1.00 cash games. The key is table selection and avoiding the obvious regs. When someone has a name like "GTO_Crusher2024" maybe don't sit with them?

EV = Σ(Pi × Ri) - C

Where Pi = probability of each possible outcome, Ri = return for outcome i, and C = cost of the action. A bot running Monte Carlo simulations can process this calculation across millions of scenarios in milliseconds, giving it an edge human players simply can't match through intuition alone.

The real question isn't whether bots exist - it's whether human creativity and psychology can still overcome raw computational power.

But anything above £1/£2 is basically a shark tank. Even tried some of the smaller online poker sites uk thinking they'd be softer, but it's tough everywhere.

That said, there are definitely some suspicious players out there. Had one guy at £2/£4 who played 47,000 hands with exactly 24.3% VPIP. Who plays that consistently?