Thursday, April 19, 2007

Winholdem Drops Free Site Support

As of the 13th of April, Winholdem is no longer maintaining it's catalog of free poker room screen scrapes. I, for one, am quite pleased.

I'm not afraid of many Winholdem users. The program itself, while powerful, is outside the patience or experience level of most that use it. However, I'm pleased to think that less of these amateurs will be flooding the rooms with their junk bots. Can I take money from them? Sure. Most of them, anyway. Unfortunately, though, these new botters often bring heat down upon us all when they reveal themselves as bots to the regulars.


Just last week, a Winholdem update broke operation at some site(s). It was hilarious to watch, for example, particular players timeout at every action then immediately sit back in the next time a flop hit the board. Whether it is a broken screen scrape, or a hackney table-hopping automation, these are the reasons why the low-skill botter is bad for my business. If enough of these guys wave the "I'm a bot!" flag, eventually the fish get wise, the site receives a ton of complaints, and now you've encouraged the site to add tougher anti-bot measures.

Good Riddance!

Ray states, "there are 3 basic opinions:

  1. i don't want to bot and i don't want others to bot
  2. i want to bot but i don't want others to bot
  3. i want everyone to be able to bot "

I guess I fall into #2 at this point in time. I'd be very happy to be the only bot in existence. However, I can see profit if #3 were true as well. I know, I know...everyone is afraid of bots but believe me when I tell you that there are just as many horrible bots as horrible players. If botting ever becomes accepted there will be at least a honeymoon period where every 16-year old with Comp-Sci stars in his eyes will be shoving losing bots into every poker room they can find.

Winholdem hasn't completely abandoned its users, however. They have access to a program called Winscrape that will allow any user to use their WH-based bot at nearly any poker room. While taking a few hours of work, scraping a new site for WH-compatibility isn't difficult. However, like most things surrounding Winholdem, clear documentation is difficult to find.

Official Announcement at Winholdem.net