>That suggests it's not really able to adapt to individual play, which is essential to being at profitable at all but the lowest levels of poker. There are two

>That suggests it's not really able to adapt to individual play, which is essential to being at profitable at all but the lowest levels of poker. There are two main categories of poker strategy: exploitive and balanced (also known as game theory optimal or GTO). With an exploitive strategy, your goal is to find the mistakes your opponents make (eg their tells) and figure out how to profit from them. With a balanced strategy, your goal is to 'balance' the choices you make (eg don't have any tells) so that it's impossible to your opponent to gain any information about your hand. A perfectly balanced strategy will never lose money over a sufficient sample size, but it also limits the amount of money you can win. Exploitive strategies will maximize the amount you can win at the risk of being exploited by other players. From my understanding, your best bet against the weakest players is to play a purely exploitive strategy, and against good human players, you'll want to blend exploitive and balanced strategies. My understanding of poker bots (the Alberta group from the article and PokerSnowie are the best-known) is that their goal is to develop a true balanced strategy. This may not be the way to maximize profits, but as long as humans aren't capable of playing perfectly balanced, the bots will slowly win in the long run, even against top pros.