Topic: Any poker players here?

I play poker online and offline. I have yet to try the betfair poker. I'd imagine it it full of poker bots already. I did have a long think about making a poker for a normal online poker-sites, but after the Americans really clamped down on visa payment to poker site the whole liquidity dropped out of the market.

I apologize in advance, but this it what I found. The American casual player, pre-clamp down, where of a far lower standard than European online players. Once the Americans when away the liquidity was down and standard went up. To such a extent that I can scrap a small profit, but time is better invested into my betfair bots. Then again - some day by bots.....

I have a friends (offline) poker match on Friday.

Anyway rambling reply over. What ideas ?

Now there's some minor coincidence. I started playing betfair poker about a week ago. I can't play for toffee and have probably lost 95%+ STTs I've been playing. One upside, it's the most enjoyable gambling I've experienced for ages. I didn't realise what all the fuss was, e.g. constant TV advertising for poker sites etc. It's a fun way to lose money. I'm not interested in botting it tho - I don't even know how to win yet lol

Something like:-
http://odds.aminche.com/poker-eval/?game=holdem&pockets=Ks%20Kd%0AAs%20Ad&board=Ac%20Kc&dead=Ah
http://pokersource.info/pypoker-eval.php

I play on Absolute Poker, mainly because they have a Java client and I use linux (realtime plain text Hand Histories as well, birchy). Used to use Paradise under wine, but got fed up of the way it scattered files all over my home directory.
I noticed the same thing as bmsleight just after the US clampdown, the only Yanks who played were sharks prepared to make the effort. I don't think that's so true now though, a lot of fish are creeping back from over the pond as circumvention methods filter down..(I mentioned the football at a ring game the other night and no-one knew what I was on about).
I think the games would have to be much looser than they are before I would risk using a bot to play, but as birchy says, helper apps can be very useful. I used to slap all the hand histories into a database and use that to identify strong/weak players and such. It's very useful for analysing your own play as well, I found I was overplaying KK (used to treat it pretty much like AA), and JJ (ditto, playing it like QQ), and losing a lot on things like KQ and KJ suited when I hit a flush (you only ever get action against an Ace-Rag).
I don't use helper apps now, I would have to alter the code for the new site, and there are higher priorities on my coding time (horesracing bots especially). After this thread, though, it's going back on my to-do list, right under the v6 API upgrade....

Thanks for the guide birchy. I've read a few, but when it comes to the crunch it goes out the window as I'm only playing for fun! Might sink in eventually but I'll probably get bored before then. I wouldn't dream of manually placing bets on sports, I leave that to my bots, but I'm currently finding poker ($2.50 STTs etc) quite entertaining (cheap thrills)

Thanks for the heads-up on Absolute, birchy, didn't know about that.
Packet sniffing on Windows 9.x used to be straightforward (there was some Italian University freeware that was blinding), but NT/W2k/XP was a pain. You needed some MS libraries that were only available for server versions, and I could never get it to work properly on my system.
Recently, MS made their sniffer (Microsoft Network Monitor) available as a free download, but I don't know how good it is.
I use tcpdump on linux which is very good and well established; perl has modules which make it painless, and I would imagine other languages do as well. It is also available for Windows, but I've never used it on that platform.
Anyway, getting the raw packets should be quite straightforward (did it for Paradise about 3 years ago), but I couldn't decrypt them so I gave up. Hope you have more luck.

Heads up - there's an article on slashdot about high-end poker bots
(http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/03/214245),
mainly about the University of Alberta program
( http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/ )
They are the guys who came up with a total solution to draughts, btw, so they know their stuff regarding theoretical game playing.

By the way, Birchy, if you're still tinkering with Betfair's Poker client and ReadProcessMemory, etc., you might want to have a look at this analysis of Skype:
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf

It covers a number of things that can be done to obfuscate an EXE. I found it pretty interesting.

Birchy, I found your Botchy posts on criticalsecurity.net. I've not had much to do with Java applets, but the first thing I'd do is try to enable the log4j logging they've left in there. You'd need to modify the log4j.properties file in pokerclient.jar to set the root category to DEBUG. I've not used log4j with an applet, so I don't know if or where it's able to write a log file; probably outputs to the console, though. After changing the properties in the JAR, you'll find out whether or not you can use a modified JAR on your HDD, or whether they check its hash or something. The logs might give you some ideas or they might be completely useless. Don't know, but it'd be my first step.