Many years ago when playing poker online in the USA was still legal, I decided to try and make a poker bot. I chose Poker Stars as my first target and began my quest on the creation of this bot. Along the way I learned about: DLL injection, trampolining, and basic windows programming.
I never fully completed the bot, but in its current state it was capable of:
- Logging in
- Getting a list of tables
- Join a table with players, but that is not full
- Click on betting buttons
But I never got around to writing the actual betting logic. Eventually, I learned that Poker Stars started fighting back against botters like this one that used DLL injection, by renaming their internal functions and such. Also you will notice I named the project "test2", as an attempt to skirt bot detection by checking out running program names like "pokerstars-bot.exe".
This bot will probably not work at all with current day Poker Stars. It relied on some things like the table-list window size having particular proportions. From what I remember, Poker Stars didn't use the default Windows classes -- they inherited them and changed things around, I assumed to make it harder to identify things like which sub-window was the table-list. I got around this by checking dimension proportions compared to the main window size. Since the table-list window took up XYZ% of the main window, I could just loop through all the sub-windows and find it that way.
Have fun!