[BluffTHIS!]

dave,

Thanks for that explanation. Yes your idea though good, would seem to impose do many difficulties on the user and the play of the client, that the sites wouldn't want to implement it.

From what I understand in reading threads on bots, the bot sites have to make updates for their bot users (who are basically just script kiddies). I presume this is in response to graphics changes in client updates that the sites do. But focusing on the process of the screen scraping, I alos presume the process is read the screen memory addresses and then compare the bot's hole cards and the board to a table of images to determine the card values.

Would it be correct to then presume again that they simply acquire that table of images from the client files that are installed on a user's computer in the client's directory? It would seem that would be the most likely avenue. Could not then the sites delay the bot writer's updates by encrypting those image files (perhaps they do already??) so as to make the writer have to capture all the images from the play on the screen and parse same for the table? And then for the site to have a weekly update for graphics file with changes? Obviously the question I am getting at is whether there is a way for the sites to update less often than daily but still significantly lengthen the time for the bot writer to adapt to changes and make him constantly have to maintain and update his program, instead of a more leisurely situation where he only has to do so once a month or even longer. Anything like that seem possible to you?

Since screen scraping is basically similar to OCR, I am also asking whether it can be made not only more difficult but less reliable as well and produce errors. Most OCR programs I have seen operate fairly well with modern typefaces, simply because the type libraries are readily available. But with historic documents like newspapers and docs from a myriad of old typewriter faces, they don't seem to do as well. Thus if the bot writer can be denied the easy route of access to those image files and has to implement some type of fuzzy logic to get his image table, it might induce a certain error rate.

A related idea to that would be for the poker client to randomly "smear" the card graphics with a fractal algorithm, but not where the product was unreadable to the player. Just one card from the combination of the hole cards and board, intead of all of them at once being screwed with at once like a captcha image.

Any promise in these ideas or I am still just dreaming?