Reading hole cards/#players/current bets?

[baronzeus]

Hey there,

I'm trying to write some odds/advice software for myself. I have lots of experience programming, and I am a CS major at my university.


I'm having trouble figuring a way to approach this problem
I need to find a way to record the (my) hole cards, the # of players at the table, the size of the pot, position, and the current betting situation.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to approach this? I will gladly share my software with the forum if I can finish it.

[Schwartzy61]

I think you will have to make it like a calculator, in that you have to manually input all of that stuff.

I don't think you are gonna be able to have a program break into and read that information from the poker software in real time. If you figure that out, you will probably be able to read all the others hole cards as well...

[Orpheus]

It's not the same thing at all.

If you examine the packets being sent to your client, you'll find that no information about your opponent's hole cards is sent to you ata all. There is nothing to "crack".

On the other hand, your OWN current hand is obviously sent to you. Depending on the site you are playing, this info can be read from the screen by character recognition (the most complex appraoch), from the packets to the client (possiblt problematic, depending on the coding and your TCP/IP skills) or read the hand history files line-by-line as they are written (easiest, since history files are just text file)

I believe that there are other approaches, too, but I'm not familiar with the details of that many sites.

Most sites use the same handful of software packages, and there are quite a few "advisor" or calculator programs like Texas Calculatem that can auto-read YOUR hole cards from a long list of sites. I wasn't terribly impressed with their advice, though. Most just run thousands of random draws and summarize the results. If you manually punch the exact same hand into Texas Calculatem (for example) 20-100x, you can get probabilities that differ by +/-2% (very significant for any hand that isn't an easy decision) and while I'm sure it was freakish luck, I saw a difference of over 5% between successive re-eentries when a friend asked me to look at the program. Needless to say, I chose not to use the program for actual play!

Still, I can understand the appeal: it's easy, and reduces your workload dramatically, allowing you (in therory) more time to think about your hand and read your opponents. As a practical matter, however, it's more likely to misadvise you, make you lazy and slow your learning/analysis skills. It's just too darn easy to blindly use the number as given, even though poker is really a people game played with cards, not the other way around.

Of course, nothing prevents you from writing your own definitive and accurate code.

[Phogster]

What poker site are you considering mining, and which programming language are you using?

[LoveMyAces]

[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone have any ideas about how to approach this? I will gladly share my software with the forum if I can finish it."

[/ QUOTE ]

If you will go to this web site the program does a good job of reading the cards and has a developers pack that passes the information to a C++ which you code as dll file to the main program. The only drawback is he has it fixed to where you must submit the product to him for porting to the main program. He says to keep anyone from writing bots. I would get and understanding as to distribution if I was going to write a good program or how you could use it for personal use if not. PM me when you get it written.

http://pokerpal.buzzworkz.com/plugins.html

[baronzeus]

I'm considering just for the party skins right now.

I'm writing in Java right now, but I'm might switch to C++ just because I'm much more comfortable with ti.