The future of online poker.

Whenever I try to make accurate predictions about the future, I can't help feeling like I just got myself into something that far exceeds my intellectual capabilities. When it comes to online poker though, I just have to pitch in my 25 cents, together with the rest of online poker fans.

Obviously, whenever we talk about the future of this relatively new form of online entertainment, the UIGEA pops up into the picture at once. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 certainly didn't help the situation online poker's been in. Its popularity however, remained unscathed, or - according to some - it further grew due to all the fuss surrounding it.

My modest opinion is, that online poker had achieved the status of a phenomenon well before the 2006 act. The only thing that can stop a phenomenon from further developing is decreased interest on the part of the masses that propelled it to this scale in the first place. There is no law, or no other artificially induced factor that can stop online poker from growing further and from engulfing yet pristine areas like Russia and much of Asia.

With rumors that the UIGEA is being attacked from a variety of directions within the US lawmaking apparatus, and the US coming under pressure from the WTO to alter its protectionist approach on the matter, the UIGEA looks more like a minor bump in the road than a sturdy gate to jump for online poker. On top of it all, history proves that whenever the American people were told what they could and what they couldn't spend their own hard-earned money on, they didn't put up with the situation for long.

Things that can seriously threaten our beloved game, come from directions we would hardly ever consider.

In my opinion, the poker botting phenomenon is much greater a threat then anything else at the moment.

You see, the online poker industry depends on masses of fish coming in every day and losing money big at the tables. These guys think they stand a fair chance against the opposition ( and in every honest poker room this is indeed the case, except for the skill-factor) and that's what keeps them going. As soon as the fish are gone, online poker dies.

These guys know nothing about the finer aspects of gameplay, they don't know pot equity, they know squat about rakeback) and they couldn't care less about position. Heck, some can't even spot a good bonusoffer when they see one. Yet they play because they get a fair game.

As soon as they realize they're being scammed and their bankrolls are run dry by an army of computerized opponents against which no human would ever prevail, they'll pack up and leave.

That is why I believe the future of online poker will be profoundly marked by an escalating battle between botters and poker rooms who will desperately try to keep their games fair.

In a way , we can see the beginning of this battle right now.Botters figured out how to run their bots on the same computer the rooms software runs on, but then they were forced to invent something new by the emerging DLL injection technology.

Now they know how to control the software through a remote computer undetectable on the system the room program runs on.

The rooms were quick to answer by implementing technologies which can track player behavior and betting patterns, and filter out botters by that.

Whatever the future brings, we'd all do better to pray that this confrontation won't conclude in favor of the botters, because if it does, we can all say bye to online poker.

Good news is though that the odds are in the multi-million-dollar online poker industry's favor.