Last weekend I got a phone call from a friend (a guy I’ll have more to say about later), informing me that How I Built a Working Poker Bot, Part 1 had hit the front page of Digg, reddit,, and other sites, and that Coding the Wheel was getting enough traffic to occasionally throttle the server. Why are so many people interested in building bots? After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood. Building a bot is basically the programmer equivalent of joining a Fight Club.Ī guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. If you’re new to poker, and particularly if you’re new to programming, this will be a little bit of a trial by fire. Bayes Theorem, probability distributions, confidence intervals, and other goodies. How to reverse engineer poker client applications and the network data streams they rely on.

In general: forcing Windows to do what you want. Code injection, API hooking, kernel objects, multi-threading, DLLs. How to generate an appropriately timed and positioned stream of mouse moves, clicks, and keyboard input. Expert EV-driven poker strategy as it exists today, at the tables, in books, and on the forums. Neural nets, genetic algorithms, rules engines, decision trees. In order to build, or learn how to defeat, such a contraption, we're going to have to cover a lot of ground:

We're going to discuss things like bot collusion not so we can (all of us) go out and build colluding bot rings, but because these are the techniques people are using right now, today and tomorrow, to gain an unfair edge in online poker. As a long time poker-player, I absolutely don’t condone cheating people out of their money by colluding in online poker or any other game. NOTE: While I believe building and running an online poker bot to be neither cheating nor unethical, building a ring of such bots is a different story. We'll be discussing everything necessary to build what's quickly becoming the de facto standard in online poker botting: a sophisticated parallel processing rig incorporating collusion AI, massive hand history databases, and real-time information flow to dominate the opposition.

This series is both a detailed manual on how to build and make money with an online poker bot, and a story of how two guys from the Dallas poker underground managed to realize such a bot in practice. This week, we'll discuss how to get started building your own bot, address some specific bot-building techniques, talk about the woeful state of online poker user privacy, respond to a few reader questions and comments, and close out with some recommended reading. Last week, I posted about how I built a working, real-money online poker bot.

Code the wheel poker bot