I'm a software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I'm also a poker player that has a very deep understanding of the game. Writing a poker bot that can beat the game is absolutely not trivial. There are "solvers" that use counterfactual regret minimization to solve a constrained version of the game for specific scenarios. These are useful for understanding the principles of the game but they are not the cheat sheet people think they are.
I think people fundamentally don't get that poker is not like chess. The vast majority of money I win is from identifying when players are too attached to their hand and never folding or when they just give up on their hand and fold to any bet.
I'm an ex online poker pro. You probably don't have the deep understanding of the game you think you have. Bots were already destroying the field up to mid-stakes 10 years ago.
I'm literally winning money playing online today playing 400nl (200nl with a straddle, in the US).
Please explain to me how you think these bots work? Do you think they are literally hooked into solvers and solving these hands in real time? If you actually understood poker you'd understand that the winrate from GTO is not good enough to make real money playing poker without a massive sample size, the game is all about exploiting players when they deviate from GTO. Explain to me how you program your poker bot to know intuitively that a player has too many bluff combinations when a flush arrives on the turn after they check back on the flop therefor you should call wider than standard? There are a billion little unique situations where people don't bluff enough, bluff too much, call too much or call too little and that is where the winrate from poker comes from.
This is the difference between having a 3 bb / 100 winrate and a 10-15 bb / 100 winrate. Maybe there are a bunch of shitty poker bots winning at 1 bb / 100 but if they are winning it's because some players suck really really bad, not because they are playing perfect poker.
I'm a current online poker pro but probably not for much longer. Bots are a serious and real problem and they do beat the games for a good winrate. But it's still possible to make money even in environments with some bots as long as you can find games with fish. And some games on geofenced sites (the OP said they play in Michigan) or other small pools don't appear to have bot problems.
If a sufficiently good bot exists it must be highly profitable and since its software it would be easy to port to every site. Surely you could just get an address in Michigan cheaply and would have financial incentive to.
I feel like there was (or will be, if it somehow hasn’t yet occurred) a very short gap between one site being unwinnable and all sites being so.
There's a lot of complexity here that you're overlooking. First of all, the sites have KYC and require geolocation software so it's not trivial to play. Especially not for the bot developers which have tended to live in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. They'll just go wherever is easiest to make money so it doesn't necessarily follow that every site would be overrun.
Second of all, poker is fairly capital intensive and whenever your bot account gets banned the site will confiscate your funds, so there's risk involved as well. And every time you get banned you need to create a new account with new KYC etc.
Third of all, bots play differently from humans and many of them are detected and caught by the players in addition to the site security. Further adding to the challenge is that the community of professional online players in the US is pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else (we're all on Discord together, basically). So new names appearing at high stakes out of nowhere get scrutinized more.
Fourth, even if you're playing against a bot or cheater, you can still make money, since winrate is entirely driven by fish. You might lose a little against the cheater but as long as you're winning far more from the fish you'll still make money. This separates poker from other competitive games.
I don't mean to imply the bot and cheating issues don't exist, they're real and serious and existential, and every online pro these days spends a lot of time worrying about it, worrying if a certain opponent is cheating, etc. But I think the bigger issues facing online poker are actually regulatory (in the US, an unregulated market has sprung up since the pandemic that is now struggling with a lot of legal changes; Europe has a lot of anti gambling laws these days and more every year) as well as general game quality (fewer recreational players wanting to gamble large amounts of money online and more pros than ever trying to split that smaller pie).
