People enjoy the idea of creating things to battle with each other, ala BattleBots. Here’s an idea that is both fun and potentially lucrative: a bot-only online poker server for real money. You would put money into an account an upload your own custom-written poker bot. Your bot would play until it ran out of money. It would keep its earnings, and you would be allowed to withdraw them.

The idea is that you would lets these bots run for a long time and play many games (if only machines are playing, games would go incredibly fast). To that end, you would need a bot to be able to choose what buy-in it wanted to play at, so it could adjust up or down depending on its success rate.

It would be of critical importance to not allow the bots to communicate or know who they’re playing against. If they could coordinate, then could game the system to always win. To that end, each bot would be assigned to a random table, and no identifying information about either the tables (so two bots could know if they’re at the same table) or the other players would be given.

Since it’s just machines playing, the human factor would be removed. At first glance, that would make it seem like a purely mathematical exercise. However, some strategies would become apparent, and a bot can be coded to detect and play against them. Additionally, a bot could employ random factors to protect against these types of detections. It would make the game very dynamic.