poker bots?

[paymaster7]

I've heard of poker bots as devices that basically play poker online for you when you're away. How on Earth does that work? Magic? That's incredible, lol. Cheers,
john

[FreeZey]

It works like this:

A new poker site opens. I download their client application. I then reverse engineer the protocol the client application uses to transmit and receive information from the game server.
I can now write my own client application to play on their poker site. They don’t know it’s my client application I’m using because the information is coming in exactly as if it was sent by theirs.

There’s no potential for cheating here. The server never sends out information about other players hands or the deck (so I can’t snoop) and it only trusts its own record of what the client cards are (so I can’t change my hole cards).

But here’s what I can do:

Rather than sending the game information to a graphical application that displays cards and buttons for me to click on, I can send it to poker bot.
A poker bot is just a program, like a black box, you tell it game information and it responds with actions. There is no need for human interaction.

So I run it, go to work, come back and it’s won the WSOP....No. But against poor and average players (which are abundant) it can play a solid game with positive expectation. A poker bot understands pot odds obvious but they can also implement the concepts of player modelling, game theory, correct bluff frequency and risk management. They also don’t eat, they don’t sleep and they don’t care that you’re taking all their profit.

[monkeymagic]

I think I read someone on these forums that one of the posters had written a poker bot for a dissertation. Can't seem to find the thread now though..

Anyway, if that person is reading is there any chance of putting the disseration online somewhere? As a huge poker fan and programmer myself (Java, php) I'd find it a very interesting read.

Failing that, I may write one myself one day... I like the idea of leaving it with a few quid and getting it to play 10 tables simultaneously - playing the odds and winning a good percentage of the hands...

[FreeZey]

I think I read someone on these forums that one of the posters had written a poker bot for a dissertation

It was me, but the poker bot wasn’t that big a part of the dissertation which covered the creation of an on-line multiplayer poker game.
If I can find the softcopy (it should be on the “H” drive dump I took before I left uni’) I’ll host it on my homepage.

I'd find it a very interesting read.

Don’t bet on that.

Failing that, I may write one myself one day... I like the idea of leaving it with a few quid and getting it to play 10 tables simultaneously - playing the odds and winning a good percentage of the hands...

You’ll probably find that coding the AI is easier than getting it to work with a real site. If your just interested in building a working poker bot though, there’s an open protocol here.

[monkeymagic]

You’ll probably find that coding the AI is easier than getting it to work with a real site. If your just interested in building a working poker bot though, there’s an open protocol here.

Thanks for the link.. Just checked it out. Looks very interesting.. I like the way the software is supplied with an API for creating your own poker bots compatible with it's software. (Mentioned on this page: http://www.poki-poker.com/value.html)

Pretty pricey to buy though: $99.50 ..

Might be an interesting programming competition to see who can write the best Poker Bot.. Enter them all into a tournament using the Poki Poker software and see which one performs the best..

By Open Protocol, do you mean the Poki Poker software that provides the API that allows you to code your own bots for their software, or is there another download that I missed?

Thanks
Monkey

[FreeZey]

I must admit that I’ve never really looked at the Poker Academy application they sell. I was attracted to them from a poker bot point of view because their free game servers meant I wouldn’t have to code up a game engine myself and I could play my bot against others rather than just me and other versions of itself.

The protocol is a communication template for sending and receiving player instructions to and from their game server.
With an open protocol you can write any client you want to connect to their game servers. It might be a GUI for human players to play with or a “black box” poker bot that prints out diagnostic and statistical information to the console about the hands it’s playing.