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I used to work as a full time freelance programmer. I made a solid income of around $2000/month working 10-12 hours a day. In my past time (few hours a day) I played poker online. It was a great way to forget everything and just concentrate on competing against other players. It was nothing more than a hobby, but before I ever made my first deposit I read tons of books regarding NL Texas Hold’em. David Slansky soon became my favourite author – seriously, those books by him are a threat to poker as the game becomes harder for you every time a new player does his reading before doing any real money deposits.

It only took me a few months to climb my way up to playing on no limit $.50/$1 tables. For those of you who don’t know, it can take years for some people to reach that level. I multi-tabled on four tables (my 19″ monitor couldn’t handle any more) making a nice $10-50 on average per day – some days won $100, some days lost $50. Back in the day my game wasn’t that solid but I didn’t care that much – as said, it was only a past time activity for me.

I continued doing this for some months, until the doomsday. As all poker players know, you should never come playing poker if you aren’t in a “motionally stable mood”. So after breaking up with my ex girlfriend, I was drunk and thought myself why not play some poker; it will help me forgetting about her. As I got more drunk, I got frustrated losing with something like AA KK and QQ as my starting hands (which I would never normally do; Badbeats are frustrating but shit happens to everyone from time to time). This is where I made the biggest mistake of all time – I started playing on higher stakes I should have. If I wasn’t so pissed, drunk and on tilt, I would have never moved up on stakes as it is certainly the way to lose your entire bankroll fast as hell. This is exactly what happened – lost my whole bankroll (around $10k that time) IN ONE NIGHT. Just imagine how I felt when I logged into this poker client (which shall remain unnamed) and took a look at the “Cashier” – $0! Unbelievably stupid, I thought. Fuck poker. I left it for a year.

About one year at the local pub I had a chat with a friend of mine about poker. He mentioned that he had a friend who makes decent money
with a poker bot. Botting on online poker, must be a joke I thought. He then showed me a short video which his friend had sent him of his custom made poker bot in action – I got to admit it, I was very impressed. So as soon as I got home, I fired up firefox and started googling for poker bots like a madman. Most of the bots I found were just complete waste of time – they either didn’t work at all, or were playing pure stupid. Then I found myself in this forum – that shall remain unnamed as it is irrelevant – that provided a platform for making a poker bot. It had an OCR for reading the cards
and all. It costed something like $100/month and after a not so serious consideration, I decided to skip it and stay focused on freelancing.

I again forgot about poker for some time. Then I suddenly read a post of a guy who was bragging how he made tens of thousands of dollars per month on auto with this poker bot. I don’t know if it was just a way of advertising the bot by its authors but it sure got my attention. I shall name the bot here because I doubt it makes any difference, most of you who started reading this thread already gave up on the second paragraph. So the bot is called Holdem bot by Shanky Technologies. Just to make this clear: I am in no way affiliated with Shanky Technologies and therefore to prove myself I will provide a crack for it at the end of this post.

Back on topic. I bought this bot as it was only $100 one-time-fee at the time. I was quite satisfied with it supporting what was called
“custom profile coding”. The scripting language wasn’t very advanced around that time compared to what it is now. It didn’t take many wasted bucks before I realised I have to code my own profiles just to beat the other bots on the table. Coding your own profiles is pretty much a neverending task as there are always some parts of the game – especially post-flop game – which can and should be adjusted. The unadvanced scripting language didn’t really help the task. It took me good few months before I had a succesful break-even (after the rakeback of course) poker bot in my hands. It was very frustrating times as I was so dedicated to perfecting the gameplay of the bot that I didn’t have the time to do freelancing anymore but yet the poker bot didn’t bring me home any bacon.

Months passed, and finally I had a winning bot which made me around 2BB/100 hands on NL holdem. I regularly visited the support forums and one day I got a PM from the creator of the bot inviting some botters for beta testing a new scripting language for the bot – called Poker Programming Language (PPL). It was a huge step forward for the bot – the scripting language was far more advanced than the previous “custom profile coding” it used to be. We had this secret forum in which a handful of us “hardcore” botters shared our winning profiles with each other. We made suggestions for PPL and most of our suggestions were implemented. It was great time for the few of us lucky enough to have the access. Around those times I advanced to the level of banking few hundred dollars per day. Some of us were making more – a lot more. I was however more interested in developing the language than making huge bucks. Time passed by and the private forums got more and more quiet – PPL was released for the general public and the few of us pioneers just got greedy and didn’t share anything anymore. I still however chat with these guys on our private IRC channel from time to time.

I got an unlimited license for the bot for as a thanks for my contributions towards the bot. I immediately took advantage of it and rented 10 windows VPSes. I also created ten more accounts on various poker rooms the bot supports. Needless to say, these days I joined the legendary four figures per day club.

That is about it. The old saying “it’s not the destination, but the journey” proved itself once again. I have nowadays a new girlfriend and I can spend almost as much time as I want with her. I still do some freelancing, but nowadays it’s more of a hobby than a job.

It may sound like the whole journey was a piece of cake. Quite the opposite, there were times I almost gave up on this but never did I do such thing. Neither should you, whatever you decide to do in your life.

Like I promised, I am giving you a working crack for the latest version of the bot. As an added bonus I am also sharing my 2BB/100 hands on average profile with you guys. Note that it’s not the one I use currently obviously, but an earlier implementation of it. It is called “the grinder” because it is meant to steadily build up your bankroll. Have fun with it and remember to read the manual to the bot before even considering using it!

I can give you some limited support here if you need help with anything regarding the bot. If you have coded a custom profile on your own, in the spirit of sharing, please post it. I an perhaps others can make suggestions to make it better.

Oh and as far as I know, every poker room the bot supports takes players from the US.