The two get lumped together in forum threads and ban announcements, and they should not be. A poker bot is software playing an account with no human in the loop. RTA software is advice to a human who makes every click. One is fraud under most gambling law and banned on every site that exists. The other is banned on public rooms and a house rule everywhere else.
What a poker bot is
A bot reads the table, decides, and clicks. Fold, call, raise, sizing, timing, table selection, sometimes the login. The player is asleep. Commercial bots sell a fixed policy, usually a GTO approximation with a little randomisation to hide the timing, and they are run in farms: dozens of accounts, one operator, collusion as a side dish. Rooms catch them by timing signatures, mouse paths, frequency matching against solvers, and by the fact that nobody plays 20 hours a day at identical speed. When they are caught, balances are confiscated and, in several jurisdictions, charges follow. We do not review bots on this site and we would not link to one.
What RTA software is
Real-time assistance shows a human a recommendation during the hand. The human decides, clicks, times the action, and can ignore the advice. The tools range from a chart on a second screen to software that reads the table and shows two solver tables on an overlay, which is what GTO MAX AI does from a browser tab. The full taxonomy is on what is RTA in poker.
The legal status differs because the human does. Public rooms ban RTA during real-money play as a terms violation and treat it as cheating against the other players; GGPoker and PokerStars publish their closures. Private clubs and home games set their own rules, and many allow study aids at the table. A bot has no such grey zone: it is prohibited everywhere because the account is not being played by its owner.
Why a bot plays worse than a coached human
This surprises people. A bot runs a fixed strategy: it cannot read that the player on its left has just lost a big pot and is tilting, cannot weigh a note, cannot decide that tonight's table is too soft to leave. A human with a real-time coach gets the equilibrium baseline and a model of the specific opponent, and then applies judgement the model does not have. Exploitative poker is a human skill with a numbers engine under it; it is not a policy you can freeze.
The coach's part of that is measurable. GTO MAX AI keeps a per-opponent model with a confidence for each tendency and shows a pure GTO table and an exploit table side by side, so the human sees how far the evidence says to deviate. A bot would have to pick one number and commit. A human sees both and the sentence of reasoning, and decides.
What the rooms actually ban, in their words
- GGPoker defines RTA as "any external assistance which provides users with an unfair advantage over their opponents, influences their decision making in real-time, or allows them to play in a manner they otherwise would not be able to replicate", and in October 2026 banned all third-party software beside its client, HUDs included.
- PokerStars runs a zero-tolerance policy on RTA and publishes enforcement numbers; its terms list prohibited tools and services separately from player assistance practices.
- Bots are named in every room's terms as prohibited automation, and operators share detection with each other.
Where that leaves you
Do not run a bot anywhere. Do not run RTA on a public room. If you play in a private club or home game that allows study aids, a real-time coach is a legitimate way to play better and learn faster, and that is the market the browser-based tools on our comparison are built for.
Why the search terms are a mess
People type "poker bot" when they mean "poker AI", "RTA software", "GTO assistant" or "poker coach". Vendors ride the confusion both ways: some RTA tools advertise bot-like "autoplay" they should not, and some bot sellers call their product an "assistant". Our test is simple and we apply it on every review: does a human make every click? If yes, it is RTA and belongs on this site with its room rules stated. If no, it is a bot and does not.