A (few) word(s) of caution
Effort
This is a lengthy manual, and for good reason. This is a complicated hobby with a steep learning curve. If you are reading this and coming into this hobby for the first time, and you have the expectation of running a profitable poker bot tomorrow, then we kindly suggest you close this manual and look elsewhere. This hobby is very rewarding, intellectually, academically and monetarily, but that reward does not come without effort. Maybe one of the $20 pre-packaged bots will meet your needs, if truly all you want to do is to MakeMoneyFast. You will find a list of interesting software for example at http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/prohibited/.
Scams
There are people who will try to sell you partial or complete OpenHoldem-based poker bot solutions. The same warning applies to these offers as to the $20 click-Setup.exe-and-go poker bots. Ask yourself how much you would sell a complete poker bot for if it was profitable and made you money every day, even while you were sleeping? A simple calculation should clarify this point:
- Say you have a pokerbot that makes $2 per table per hour.
- Most sites allow you to run 4 tables simultaneously without issue. This equates to $8 per hour.
- Further assume you run your bot 6 hours per day to better model human play. That gives you $48 per casino per day.
- If you then run your bot 5 days per week, you stand to make $12,480 per year.
Multiply that by the number of casinos you play at, and you have a reasonable target selling price. Would you be willing to pay that amount of money for an unproven, "complete", "winning" poker bot? How much do you think a $100 or $500 "complete" poker bot is really worth?
There is a long history of people being scammed out of hard earned money for "winning" poker bot solutions. Sometimes lots of money. Don’t be stupid...the age-old maxim applies here: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Gray area
The hobby of poker botting is arguably a legal and moral gray area. While other online real money activities actively allow and even encourage the use of bots (stock trading, currency speculation, sports betting, etc), online poker has taken a somewhat unusual stance on this topic. Some casinos will attempt to detect your bots with various means, including spyware-like actions of scanning your hard drives and taking screen shots, statistical analyses of mouse clicks, post-analyzing hand actions for consistent behaviors and so on.
What this means, however, is that one must take caution when poker botting to ensure that you protect yourself, your money balances, and your private information on your computer. All of these anti-bot detection attempts can be defeated, and this will be discussed further in the stealth section.
On the legality question, the legality of poker botting has not been court-tested to date. Even if it was, some of these casinos believe they operate above the law and can do whatever they want to your account at any time.
Elaboration on the fine points of these arguments is beyond the scope of this document, but a vigorous discussion can be found on forums online, including PokerAI (http://pokerai.org/pf3/viewforum.php?f=80). The truth is that as long as casinos need to display the game state on your computer screen, there will be a way to use a bot to play the game. Simple fact.
Document generated by eLyXer 1.2.5 (2013-03-10) on 2015-03-29T21:54:48.875000