JS Poker - Open source poker bots!

TL;DR; I built a automated poker competition (JsPoker) on top of Node.js, Github and Travis, and I’m giving away $50USD via Bitcoin if you write a winning player.

Like many people, I enjoy playing poker and losing money. As a programmer, the obvious next step was to automate this.

Now of course this is frowned upon by most online poker rooms, but I don’t see a reason why willing participants couldn’t build their own bots and play them against each other*, even with human competitors mixed in.

JsPoker - Play poker with a pull request and JavaScript

But building a poker bot isn’t easy, so I’ve done my best to simplify the process of bit using the tools you probably already know - JS, Github and Travis CI.

Rather than start with everyone competing, I’m starting with a bounty to see who can beat the current assortment of bots inside of a closed tournament. The goal is simple, submit a new Javascript bot via a Pull Request, and if the tests pass, you win the $50 bounty (paid to the bots Bitcoin wallet). It’s not a significant sum of money, but I hope it makes it a little more interesting.

When Travis CI runs the tests, your bot will be played against 6 other very simple bots in 50 separate No-Limit tournaments of 500 hands each. You’ll start with $1000 in each tournament and in order for the tests the pass you’ll need to double your money (turn $50k into $100k). This will decrease in the future as competing bots improve.

Once a bounty is claimed, the winning bot will replace the worst player on the table, and the game will start over. I’ll toss my own money at this for 7 rounds, with the goal to create a table of decent open source poker bots for people to learn from.

Where we end up

A while back I built MachinePoker, a Node project that lets you run poker tournaments against any type of opponent. Currently it supports locally run JS bots (meaning you have to trust the code), and remote bots that play via HTTP.

In the next year I want to find a legal way to run a real poker tournament against other players on cheap standardized hardware (eg. Raspberry Pi) for real money (ex. $100 entrance fee).

Or to put it another way, come December i want to be in a tropical jurisdiction with lax gambling laws, watching a bot I wrote lose money for me.

Resources:

* I should point out that this isn’t the first time this has been done. The Annual Computer Poker Tournament has been doing this for years, but the focus is decidedly academic and the competition is probably above the level of novice to average coders.

Image Source: http://shirt.woot.com/derby/entry/66939/robots-playing-poker