Poker-AI.org

So I was thinking about ways to get the I/O operations of a poker bot and the pros\cons of each.

OCR - A bit less risky than DLL injection and less mucking about in the assembly code. Somewhat unreliable for certain situations or rare occurances.
DLL Injection - A lot more information and accuracy than OCR, but is easier to detect than OCR. Problematic when offsets change with a program update and you got to go find them again.
Custom Client - ??

If you wrote a custom client then that would eliminate most detection methods. Maybe not in cases where the server expects a particular response after being processed by the original client. For example, a captcha request or a cryptic string response. Anyway, I am not certain how hard it would be to write a custom client. I would have to guess it is based on how cryptic the messages between the client\server are. So what I am asking is, has anyone done this and was it worth it?

I have never done it, but I assume it's very hard. You will have similar problems as with writing hooks, but even more of them and additionally all the network traffic things.