Whether the bot is homegrown or commericial the detection for both are, in my opinion, the same. My bot has to communicate with the client in the same ways the commericial bots do. There are only a few methods to do this and Party did their best to deal with each method. The commercial guys just do not have the time to deal with each sites individual detection methods as they probably have their hands full with clients wanting new playing strategy features. “If you do not want to get caught then play somewhere else” was the common response I saw. Well Party was the biggest game in town and I was not about to be denied entry.

Party was one of the easiest sites to conquer. For many years you could just get the hole cards from the hand history file..a major mistake that took them years to fix. They practially begged bots to play.

But your are right in that with a Commerical bot they know what to look for as they can just buy it themselves and see how it works.

The PartyPoker client is a real piece of spyware..god knows what they are doing now.

In my own defense I did distinguish between commercial bots and homegrown bots. If your bot is homegrown then beating Party’s detection might be easy for you. In part, because they aren’t looking for you. You aren’t a commercial program that hundreds of people are using that they can gather data on.

Bill

They have quite a few different techniques to detect the bot. Process scans run every 5-10 minutes as I recall and it emailed any suspicious entrys in list (along with screenshots although I was never able to verify that). This scan also triggered (along with playing for long hours) the famous pop-up dialog asking you to enter number/letter string displayed in a graphic that is so common nowadays. If you didnt enter it correctly in like 90 seconds it automatically sat you out. The other thing they implemented was testing that a human actually clicked their buttons and not a computer.

All of these anti-bot methods where not difficult to get around. Most programmers just didnt want to deal with it and moved on to other “easy” sites. This was great for me as the games where better with less bots in the mix.

On another note. Any bot that you can buy is not worth a dime as they are not customizable enough. There are so many different and difficult situations to program for that it all must be hard coded. I spent years watching it play thousands and thousands of hands and just when I thought I had seen it all I found a situation that I had not programmed for. Any bot can play the nut hands but the real money in poker comes from how well it plays the marginal hands..and this is where programming can get complicated. How likely was the board to hit anybody? What is my position to the preflop raiser? how many players am I facing? Who bet into me? etc.
There are so many factors involved in making a correct poker decision that it took me about two years before I was confident it could handle any situation. The only way to debug a poker bot is too watch it play for about a year and collect data..fixing every bad fold or call one by one. Most people dont have time for this and this is why most bots are not very smart.

The winning combination is a great poker player and a good programmer. I sent all of the bots data to one of the best internet limit players in the world. He took the time to correct each hand which took over a year. Some of the programming challenges where quite difficult. Getting a machine to think like a human is not easy.

Did the bot win thousands and thousands of dollars? Nope..not even close. I barely made a living but it did pay the bills for quite awhile. One thing that many people dont realise is that there are not that many good games to play. The best players only play very loose tables and pick their tables carefully otherwise it is probably a break even situation at best. These tables are hard to find. I was lucky if I could have 4-6 tables running at a time and my bot was capable of playing an unlimited number at once. Table selection is everything.

Bot running is a real grind..its like watching the stock market and it can get very frustrating at times. The law passing was actually a godsend and I am much happier with a job I took. I got tired of being around the house all day too.