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When SukitTrebek offered up the results of his analysis to the Full Tilt staff, they promptly locked the accounts in question . . . and then re-opened them a few weeks later. After two days of furious criticism, Full Tilt responded by announcing that, "After careful consideration, the evidence did not warrant the seizure of funds and permanent account closure." IOW, one of the top poker sites on the web can't or won't bar suspected bot players because they can't prove they are bots.

Darse Billings, lead designer of the Vex Bot recently told MSNBC he believes the odds are better than 50-50 that programmers have secretly unleashed bots on commercial poker sites. "Of course [their] results were inconclusive," he said. "Short of having a video of them cheating or using spyware to find a bot program on their computer . . . there's no way you can have 100 percent conclusive proof that they were botting."

Of course other poker sites, namely PartyPoker and PokerStars, have their own solution to the bot problem: they install spyware on the player's computer, which snoops around while the player is online to see if any bot programs are running.

But Billings doesn't think that's much of a solution either, "From what I understand even this can be easily circumvented."

I'll second that: the bot spies will only catch out the amateur botter. Anyone with any experience as a programmer or systems manager will be able to disguise the bots presence and will almost certainly be able to fool whatever rudimentary spy mechanisms the online sites install.

So what then is the solution? Since it's already too difficult to get conclusive evidence that bots are running from play records, that job won't get any easier when, not if, the Full Tilt bots pick up the tricks that Hurwitz/Marwala program has recently learned.

So there's only one real solution; and that is for sites to develop and enforce more invasive spying on player activity. Even then at best they'll only catch out the amateurs.

The pro botters will almost certainly continue to fly under the radar if and when they put their minds to it. Given the amount of money to be made it's pretty much a safe bet that they will.

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