Yeah. Poker isn’t actually hard to play perfectly if you’re writing a bot. The hard part is making it look authentic and not emit any patterns or other signals that could be detected in the data.
Hmm… there are multiple variants of poker, at least one was weakly solved in 2015. I guess one could implement their algorithm. But I don’t know if the weakly solved variant of poker is popular?
It's exceedingly hard to play perfectly. Nobody knows how except in limited toy games, like heads up at 7BBs or less. And perfect play varies drastically from opponent to opponent, this isn't blackjack.
The best human poker players are able to calculate pot odds in their heads. Much of gambling is understanding when the risk of any given bet is actually worth it. Reading people and playing the other players is less important than understanding the likelihood of drawing the card you want and how that compares to the percentage of profit you’ll make on a bet.
So it's a cat and mouse game like most things, except the spread between the cat and the mouse is quite high but is still (somewhat) in favour of the mouse as the online poker world currently stands?