Whatever happened to the idea of playing poker as a personal skill? With increasing talk of the threat of online ‘bots and automated collusion one could be forgiven for thinking that some of the character is being bled from a great game by advancing technology.
Take the latest product to be launched on the poker playing public – The Poker Advantage. The seller of this new tool, CMM Enterprises openly punts it as gaining an “unfair advantage when playing poker,” describing it as a stealth software that makes winning at online poker “a lot more fun amd profitable.”
The company claims that its product is a highly sophisticated odds calculator, hand strength indicator and learning tool. It automatically reads all visible cards on the table in real time. This enables the user to instantly know their hand strength so that they know when to fold, check, call, raise or re-raise.
Using a highly advanced algorithm, the Poker Advantage let’s the user know how their opponents are playing; passive, aggressive, profits and losses and errors they have made. This apparently “… helps players ‘read’ their opponents.”
The Poker Advantage additionally keeps track of hand history up to twenty hands for both the player and his or her opponents. It graphs each player, play so that the user can visually see what each player has done for the past 20 hands at a quick glance. One happy customer is quoted as saying, “What I like best is the hand history. It gives me a pretty good idea of what kind of players my opponents are. In my opinion this is a big advantage, especially in online poker play, where you cannot see your adversaries.”