Poker tools, is it Cheating or just about Gaining an Advantage?

With the invention of the computer no one could forecast the role it would come to play in our lives to the point where now some would say that we cannot live without them! Simple tasks once carried out by the nimble minds and fingers of a human being are now performed by computers with ever increasing speed and computers now assist us in virtually every part of our daily lives.

Poker has not escaped the computer revolution, the most obvious being the creation of the online poker game now played by thousands of people each day. People can now sit in the comfort of their own home and join people from all over the world around a virtual poker table playing the game they love. Dollars, Pounds and Euros are digitized as players join sites like Pokerstars and Partypoker now offering amazing game play as advancements in software make poker easily accessible to the world’s population.

I ask the question, is advancement always a good thing?

Poker is a game played between friends, colleagues or just random people sat around a poker table. Well at least it used to be! Recent advancements in technology have seen the emergence of ‘poker tools’, a group of computer applications that provide the user with vast amounts of data and information about his own play and that of his fellow competitors around the poker table. The software is designed to give the user unlimited amounts of data to enable them to make more informed decisions before playing a hand. Perhaps best described as computer-aided poker.

While great poker players are able to calculate considerable amounts of statistics throughout a game judging preflop and pot odds while looking for reads and tells in the faces of their opponents, no matter how good they are these computer applications take data collection to a new level! Software like ‘Holdem Indicator’ and ‘Poker Edge’ provide the user with information above and beyond the basic odds of a pot or their chances of winning.

One function amongst many is its ability to make observations about a competitor’s style of play, be it tight loose or just plain suicidal. Not stopping there some can now even assess a table before you join, providing information on the style of play and if there are any poker virgins that are more likely to be separated from their chip stacks. What’s more these computer packages allow all these statistics to be applied to multiple tables something the brain would struggle to do effectively. Surely this is not playing the game, just using a computer to make money?

I wonder if I were to take my seat at the World Series of Poker, pull out my computer and poker software just how long it would take until players and event organizers raised an eyebrow before kicking me out of the tournament for cheating? If it is not allowed in live play why should it be any different with online poker? These packages are not about teaching or improving a player’s game, they are quite obviously designed to increase a person’s chances of winning.

Is that fair, gaining an advantage or is it just plain cheating?

Doesn’t the introduction of a computer into the game remove the human element from it? Poker is a game fundamentally based upon the decisions of players whether to call, fold or raise a hand in order to win a pot, one of the principles being that the best cards need not always win a hand or tournament. Anyone who has watched live poker will have seen some truly auspicious moves as a player holding nothing more than a high card forces a player with a far better hand to fold, bluffing their way to success. Surely that is soon to be a thing of the past if everybody is being told what to do by computers and their statistics. Could the game become less about ability and more about who has the better software? It is hard to say if this is cheating or just not playing the game of poker with a spirit of gamesmanship.

The problem is as poker continues to grow in popularity so do the prize funds and the hopes of some at winning big and retiring to a tropical island on the tournament winnings. While many accept that this will probably never happen. In others this breeds temptation, the temptation to gain an advantage, an edge that probably won’t but just might give them the chance of fame and winning millions in prize money. Poker tools have that potential to give players an advantage but does that stop poker being a game and make it a mathematical formula offering you a return on your initial investment. To me it just feels like someone trying to smuggle a cheat sheet in to a school examination hoping the teachers don’t catch them.

Many of these computer packages claim to have approval from the different cards rooms so if technology is so advanced then perhaps it is the responsibility of the card rooms to either limit their use to certain games or make other players aware that they are playing against a cyborg terminator, part human part computer poker killing machine!

This is my view, I wonder what others think and invite your views. Is it just advancement or the equivalent of steroids to a 100M runner, an unfair advantage?