What's the purpose of the database? Are you hoping to calculate odds based on the past moves of the individuals at the table, or something like that? That could be interesting.

In any case, that's the easy part, if you can get the data. That'll depend on how it gets to the browser. If it's an HTML element being updated with Javascript/Ajax, you might be able to write your own little Javascript app to run in the browser and watch that element, watching for new lines that show up in it and saving them somehow. But if it's Java or some other kind of self-contained application, that won't work.

If you just wanted to save the info for future study, I guess you could do a video capture of that part of the screen and run it through OCR software later. But you want to write a bot, which means you need to get the data as it happens so the bot can act on it quickly. Another possibility would be to sniff the network traffic and pull the chat text out of that, assuming they don't encrypt it. Setting up a proxy server and having your browser connect through that might give you another place to grab it.

I would have guessed that they tried to design those sites/apps specifically to prevent bots from playing. I played for a while in very low-stakes game and determined that I could consistently make a few dollars an hour just by playing safe according to some simple odds, because most of the players are impulsive and bad. Not enough to make a living, and it was dreadfully dull. But if I wrote a bot to play for me, it could make that few dollars 24/7. So if they didn't prevent it, I'd think there would be lots of people doing it.

Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

In reply to Re: Poker Datamine by aaron_baugher
in thread Poker Datamine by bennierounder

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