[icey]

I'm sure I have a lot of room to improve my game; I've only got around 125k hands logged and haven't played seriously in 4 or 5 years.

That being said, I'm fairly certain the article was not talking about no-limit. The vast majority of poker bots play limit, where there is a clear advantage from playing the mathematically correct way.

The idea that you can play winning poker with "spontaneity" and "feel" is exactly how these bots make money. I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain it to you. If you really care, spend more than 30 seconds reading up about the mechanics of limit poker.

I would suggest starting here, since it has a reasonably compact rundown of the math behind the game:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Poker-Professional-Player-Teach...

[danenania]

There is at least as clear an advantage from playing 'mathematically correct' in no limit. It would be a much more difficult bot to write because adding the bet size variable would greatly increase the complexity of the math, but it could also probably outperform human players by a much greater margin for the same reason.

An objection that could be raised is that psychological factors carry more weight in no limit, especially short term psychology (recognizing when a player is on tilt), but I see no reason why a sophisticated program couldn't integrate these factors better than a human. Psychology in online poker is really just pattern analysis.