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Bots at the home poker table: when, why, how

31 May 2026 · 7 min read

Half the group bailed. Two of you actually opened the link. Two players isn't a poker night, it's a chess match in trench coats. The most common reason a regular home game dies isn't lack of interest — it's the coordination tax of getting four humans online at the same time. So pokr now has bots. Here's the case for putting one or two synthetic players at your table, what they can and can't do, and how the implementation actually behaves.

The actual problem

Picture a Wednesday night. You scheduled the game for 9. Sasha said yes but is now in a meeting. Maxim said yes but is putting the kid to bed. You and Roman are sitting at the table at 9:05 and one of you sighs. Two-handed poker is fine for ten minutes but it's not the night you were hoping for. The instinct is to wait — maybe Sasha will be done in 20, maybe Maxim's kid will go down. So you wait. By the time everyone shows up it's 9:50, you're already tired, and you play half a session instead of a full one.

The unscalable cost in a home poker night isn't the cards. It's getting humans aligned. Bots take that cost off the critical path: even with one or two friends actually online, you can run an actual table that feels like a table, with all the seats filled and action coming around.

Why they live inside the club, not in some global pool

We thought briefly about a public lobby of pokr bots anyone could grind against. We're not doing that. The whole point of pokr is private clubs — your group, your stakes, your chips. Bots fit that model when they're attached to a specific club: created by the club owner or a manager, given a chip balance from the club's pool, assigned to a particular table.

Concretely:

• Created by a manager. Players can't spawn bots into a club. Only OWNER or MANAGER roles see the Bots section and have the API endpoints. Same trust model as crediting chips — if you trust someone to issue chips, you trust them to add a bot.
• One table per bot. When you create a bot you pick which table it auto-sits at. You can change the assignment later from the bots list. If the bot has no assignment, it's a sleeping member — present in the club roster, not playing anywhere.
• Own chip balance. A bot has a club balance like any other member. You credit it from the Bots section. If it can't afford the table's buy-in (SNG starting stack, or cash min buy-in), it sits out that table even if assigned. Top it up and it joins on the next human arrival.

The auto-sit / auto-leave loop

The single most important behavioural rule is that bots don't run an autonomous tournament with no audience. They're tied to the presence of a human at the table.

• Arrival: a real player joins a table. The server checks every bot assigned to that table, debits each one's buy-in, and sits them at the first empty seats. If a bot's balance is short, it's skipped — no error, just a silent pass; you'll see it un-sat in the table view until you top it up.
• Play: while at least one human is seated, bots act on their turn like normal players. They get dealt cards, can win pots, get eliminated in SNGs, the lot.
• Departure: the moment the last human leaves the table (explicit "Leave Table" click, or a disconnect grace window that expires), all bots at the table stand up. For SNGs the tournament force-resets back to Registration so the next real player who shows up can start a fresh tournament instead of finding it stuck in In Progress.

That last rule is the one that turned a fun feature into something you can actually rely on. The first version let bots keep playing each other after the human left — the SNG ran on autopilot for ten minutes, blinds rotated, eventually the engine hung in a weird state, and the next human arrival saw Tournament already started — registration closed. Now: humans gone, bots gone, table clean for the next session.

How bots actually play

The bot's brain is small but it's not random clicking. Here's the actual decision tree it walks every time the action lands on it.

Pre-flop hand score

With just two hole cards there's no point running a full equity calculation — we score the hand on a 0–1 scale from a hand-rolled chart and call it a day. Highlights:

• Pocket pairs: KK+ → 0.95, JJ → 0.85, TT → 0.78, mid pairs (77-99) → 0.65, small pairs → 0.50.
• Aces: AK → 0.82, AQ → 0.75, AJ → 0.70, AT → 0.62, A-rag → 0.45.
• Broadway and Broadway-adjacent: KQ → 0.68, KJ → 0.60, QJ → 0.55, JT → 0.50.
• Connectors and one-gappers mid range: ~0.32-0.42. Suited adds +0.07. Wide gaps and low cards drop to 0.18.

Post-flop hand strength

Once there are five cards on the table (your two hole + the board), the bot runs them through the same hand evaluator the engine uses for showdowns. That gives an objective category — high card, one pair, two pair, straight, flush, etc. Strength scores: high card 0.12, one pair 0.45 (with top-pair / overpair / set-on-board refinement), two pair 0.70, set 0.80, straight 0.88, flush 0.92, full house 0.96.

It's a fair representation of made-hand strength. It does not consider draws (yet) — a flush draw on the flop reads as "high card" to the current bot, which means you can run a flush draw out of one cheaply.

The action

• Free option (no bet to call): check most of the time. With strong made hands (≥ 0.65) it bets out about half the time. With medium hands it occasionally probes. Bet sizing post-flop is 50–90% of pot, scaled by strength.
• Facing a bet: for ≥ 0.80 it 3-bets some, calls the rest. Around 0.50–0.70 it calls cheap (≤ 4 BB) and folds expensive. Below 0.35 it folds, except about 40% of the time it'll peel a single BB out of curiosity.
• Bluff frequency: 12%. One in eight hands at random, the bot treats its hole cards as if they were strong. This produces a 3-bet light pre-flop or a stab on a checked flop. Other players read it as aggression.
• Jitter: ±4% on every decision so the same hand in the same situation doesn't always do the same thing.

Action delay

Every bot waits 1.5 – 4.5 seconds before its action lands. This is non-negotiable: the alternative — instant action — reads like the table is on fast-forward, especially when three bots in a row act before action comes back to a human. The delay also gives the action-on indicator and sound a chance to register so the rhythm of the table is closer to a live game.

What bots are not

It would be dishonest to suggest pokr bots are a substitute for a poker training tool or a serious GTO solver. They are not:

• Position-aware. A bot in the button plays the same chart as a bot under the gun. Real poker doesn't work like that. We'll get there eventually but not in v1.
• Aware of draws. Flush draws and straight draws don't yet bump a hand's strength score. Easy fix on the roadmap.
• Aware of stack depth. A short-stack bot plays the same chart as a deep-stack one. Push/fold ranges aren't tuned.
• Aware of who they're up against. No hand-history tracking, no leveling. Same play whether you're a tight rock or a calling station.

For a friendly home night where the goal is "the table doesn't feel dead," all of that is fine. For ranked competitive play it'd be a problem — but pokr is not for ranked competitive play, by design.

Setting bots up: the actual flow

1. Open your club in pokr. Scroll past Tables and Members to the Bots section. It only shows up if you're the OWNER or MANAGER.
2. Pick a table from the "Assign new bot to" dropdown, click + Add bot. The bot gets a random poker-flavoured name (Ace 99, River Bot, Lucky Pro…) and a deterministic robot avatar.
3. Top up its chip balance with the + Credit button. For a SNG you only need the starting stack (1,500 by default). For a cash table you need at least the table's min buy-in.
4. Repeat for as many bots as you want. Three or four is usually enough to feel like a full ring; one is enough to make a heads-up against yourself feel less lonely.
5. Sit at the table. Bots auto-join. Play the hand.

When NOT to use bots

• A serious tournament with a prize pool the group cares about. Don't dilute it with bots — chip pool integrity matters.
• Teaching someone the game. Bot play is mechanical enough that beginners will form bad reads from it. Better to play a small-stakes table with patient humans.
• If your group dynamic is part of the point. Half the joy of a home game is the chat. Bots don't laugh.