Look out for saabpo!

In truth, you don't need to be scared of saabpo himself.

But he may be a pioneer of darker things to come, like the fictional rule-abiding robots who spawn others that go on to destroy humanity.

Saabpo is almost certainly a bot on Party Poker (if you didn't know already). You'll find tons of discussion about saabpo in this thread.

Saabpo plays $20+$2 sit-n-go tournaments and has a very simple strategy: he either goes all in or folds preflop.

Fortunately, saabpo sucks at poker. I know he placed in the money a few times on Saturday, but I have a hard time believing that saabpo is a winning player.

It was funny watching saabpo's tournaments -- there were a few dozen 2+2ers watching the game and talking about saabpo. Any time saabpo moved in, there were shouts of "Call! Call!"

I only saw one showdown after saabpo had pushed. Saabpo lost with A7s vs. A9.

Many times, players in the tourneys would minimum raise saabpo preflop to steal his blinds. That's almost mean, except for that saabpo is evil.

Most of the discussion has been centered on whether building a better poker bot will be more difficult than building chess bots, which are fairly sophisticated.

There's little doubt in my mind that someone could build a much smarter poker bot that has an answer for most every situation. It's only a matter of time.

Of course, this is a significant danger to the online poker community. It has the potential to ruin its credibility, tighten the games beyond playability and bankrupt many players.

Our only hope is that poker sites step up their vigilance of bot surveillance and enforcement, but I'm not optimistic.

A well-programmed bot could appear to behave like a human player, and it would be hard to detect.

Even an obvious bot like saabpo was still playing all day long Saturday without interruption, despite e-mails sent to Party Poker.

Links:
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