[fleece_me]

I have serious doubts about the "screen scraping" claims made here.

Using Visual C++, Delphi and C++ Builder for a few years, I can attest there are no "screen scraping" components in any of these enterprise products. Just because these popular IDE's don't have pre-built components and that no 3rd party components seem to exist isn't a complete indictment of these claims, it does mean building such an application is much harder than what's implied.

Furthermore, searching for "screen scraping" in google yields many articles on scraping text from web pages and a very few articles on scraping text from a DOS/console based program. No texts were found referring to graphic or character recognition in this context.

There are entire applications devoted to character recognition, and doing so in the context of a poker application isn't impossible, but calling it anything other than non-trivial for most programmers is inaccurate.

I have peers that work exlcusively in the development of PC games and others that work for an online gaming software company (casinos) and have asked them for their thoughts.

If the original poster claimed he was sniffing the traffic (which is encrypted in most cases) or had somehow decompiled the poker client to get the key to sniff the traffic to and from the poker server and client, or had claimed any other method for ascertaining the flop and how many players are in the hand, his claims would have been much more credible.

The thought that hundreds of people have built similar applications (especially ones that work on multiple sites) does seem impossible based on my experience and research.