Open Poker Decision Protocol

Version 0.8, Nov 2007

This document is published and available under GNU Free documentation license.

Authors

Indiana, http://pokerai.org

[others to be included]

Chapter 1. Goals and Overall Architecture

The Open Poker Decision Protocol  is a client/server protocol specification that address the following major goals:

• Specifies language independent, machine readable message exchange format
• The specified message format describes request and response for poker game decisions
• Every client request message encapsulates all necessary information for the poker decision to be taken and response to be returned
• The protocol is flexible to handle poker cash as well as tournament games and extendable to all forms of poker

Some of the possible applications of the protocol are:

• Allow AI researchers to build poker decision engines and offer this as a service in a standardized way, without giving away their intellectual property of the bot logic.
• Allow pokerbot frameworks to integrate with pokerbot engines in standardized way (e.g. frameworks like WinHoldEm or OpenHoldem can integrate via specific whuser.dll bridge)
• Allow end user applications to be build against pokerbot engines (e.g. website giving advice on play situations)
• Allow for feasible contracts between AI developers, resellers and eng users.

The following picture gives the overall architecture and highlights some of the possible applications:

Chapter 2. Protocol specification

[Draft, to be defined as part of the specification group]

Establishing connection:

• Socket connection to backend host and port is configured and specified in the front-end bridge. For example, it will be simple configuration file provided to the default whuser.dll bridge.
• The first thing that the frontend need to send to the backend after establishing socket connection must be a single message containing single 256 bit integer. This is used for the purpose of identification.
• The backend will reply with 64 bit integer representing a session ID.

Each request message of the protocol provides all information available to the frontend about the current poker hand [This has to be defined in details, as part of the working group]:

• Session ID (64 bits)
• Game description (String, any optional information)
• Game type
• Game ID
• Bet size / Limits
• Button
• Position (of the "hero" - the player to act)
• Number of players
• For each player: Player name and bankroll at start of the hand
• Hero's hole cards
• Community cards (Flop, Turn, River cards)
• List of Actions since the beginning of the hand (each action in the list contains Player Name, Action Type and Action Amount

Each response message of the protocol contains [This has to be defined in details, as part of the working group]:

· Advised action: fold, check/call or raise (amount)

Notes:

· Posting blinds, automatic blind posting, waiting for big blind, etc. are not poker decisions and are not specified as part of the protocol.

Chapter 3. Reference implementations

This chapter contains a list of publicly available reference implementations and bridges of the protocol.

Front-end bridges:

• WinHoldEm whuser.dll bridge to open poker protocol [reference]

Backend implementations for end users:

• No-limit Single Table Tournament bot [reference]
• Bluffbot heads-up poker bot [reference]

Backend implementations for developers:

• C++ API representation of open poker protocol [reference]
• Java API representation of open poker protocol [reference]

References

http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/webgames/poker/bots.html

http://www.iguanarama.com/programming/poker_bot/network_bot.html

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~pokert

http://winholdem.net

http://www.pokerprofessional.com/

http://openholdem.org

http://bluffbot.com/

http://pokerai.org/pf3