Well, I'm here to tell you that online poker bots are 100% real, and I know this because I've built one. And if I can build one, well. Anybody can build one. What's more, over the course of this multi-part article, I'll show you how. But first, a teaser (click on the image for a larger version):
Poker bots, underground online poker boiler rooms, and collusion are a reality. That doesn't mean online poker's not worth playing, just that it pays to be educated about what's possible. Furthermore, there should be public discussion regarding what to do about it because one thing's certain: computers and programming languages aren't exactly going to be getting less powerful. The rise of the poker bots is a virtual certainty. I'd like to see the major online poker venues open up their famously vague "bot detection" and "anti-collusion" strategies to public scrutiny, as cryptography and security providers learned to do years ago. The best security algorithms and techniques all have the weight of public review behind them and I don't see how online poker's any different.
Basic poker bot responsibilities
At a very high level, the poker bot is best analyzed according to the classic model of information handling: Input, Processing, Output.
You'll find that your programming tasks decompose rather nicely into these three basic stages.
Input. The input to the system is the poker client software itself, including all its windows, log files, and hand histories, as well as internal (often private) state maintained by the running executable. The goal of the input stage is to interrogate the poker client and produce an accurate model of the table state - your hole cards, names and stack sizes of your opponents, current bets, and so forth.
Processing. The processing stage runs independently of the other two stages. It's job is to take the table model assembled during the Input phase, and figure out whether to fold, check, bet, raise, or call. That's it. The code that performs this analysis should (ideally) know nothing about screen scraping or interrogating other applications. All it knows is how to take an abstract model of a poker table (probably expressed as some sort of PokerTable class) and determine which betting action to make.
Output. Once the processing stage has made a decision, the Output stage takes over. It's tasked with clicking the correct buttons on the screen, or simulating whatever user input is necessary in order to actually make the action occur on a given poker site/client.
These are just excerpts from the complete tutorial over at http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-poker-bot
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