Hello, everyone!

After having played thousands of hands with play money, I am ready to start with real money. But I have two questions:

1) I am pretty confident that I can succeed at low levels, but if I am utterly mistaken, what is a good sign that I can't play poker worth a damn?

2) When I told my brother (who used to play poker in college many years ago) about my poker ambitions, he said that the online games were full of "pokerbots" (poker playing computers).

Is this true?

Are they a hazard for a newbie?