Great article. I built a poker bot (see my submissions for more info) and can safely say that if your original intent was to build one too, you would have been

Great article. I built a poker bot (see my submissions for more info) and can safely say that if your original intent was to build one too, you would have been way better off screen scraping. It's not nearly as elegant or as cool, but it gets the job done with minimal effort. One note, which you all might find interesting. A lot of people have tried to do what daeken has done, not necessarily for botting purposes but in hope that the decrypted traffic would contain your opponent's holecards. I had a program at one point that someone built that decrypted about half of the incoming traffic. Not very useful, but cool nonetheless. A few people succeeded in decrypting the entire thing and discovered, to their dismay, that it doesn't contain holecard information. Go figure. When a hand goes to showdown, the loser can muck his or her cards, meaning they don't show it to the table. Anyone seated at the table can view the hand history and see what the mucked cards were, but its hidden from people observing the table. The people who cracked the transport algorithm were able to extract this information, meaning they could log all the showdown hands for every game on PokerStars. I'm not sure what they did with this ability, but they could made some money quietly following around high stakes players, recording all of their hands and mucked cards, and selling it to their competition, who could use the information to decypher and exploit their weaknesses. I wonder what PokerStars will do now...