Our web site is called pokerOCR.com . As you can see, it consists of two parts - poker and OCR . What is poker, of course, is a card game whose goal is to win bets, by collecting the highest possible poker combination using 4 (the old classic version), 2, or 5 cards, or forcing all opponents to stop participating in the game. The following discussion focuses on poker online , i.e. about playing poker over the Internet.

     With this kind of poker game, the poker room tables behind which the game is played are located on the player’s desktop.

    What is OCR? OCR is an abbreviation of Optical Character Recognition or an optical character recognition system. In general, the work of modern OCR looks like this: having selected objects that may turn out to be letters, images or other graphic objects on the scanned image, the system calculates a certain set of parameters for each of them (such as, for example, the density of black dots along the diagonal). Then the obtained values ​​are compared in turn with the standards - the sets of the same parameters calculated for known symbols. Depending on which reference the difference of parameters is the smallest, the system decides which class the detected object belongs to.

      Our team has set itself a task - using OCR technology to develop a software package that reads all parameters and objects of the poker table and generates a hand history in real time while being on another computer or another operating system.

     In relation to our topic - the software package ( further PC ) should solve 10 tasks :

1. In real-time mode, read information about the current state of all graphical objects of the poker table and transfer them to OCR recognition, obtain recognition results from OCR;

2. OCR should receive a graphic object, recognize it and send back the recognition result;

3. To form a complete hand history at the time BEFORE each move of Hero - this is the way to designate the player's name (synonym for "I");

4. Send hand history to specified resource. This can be a clipboard, a local or network folder, a remote web server, waiting for a message on a specified port, or third-party software in order to get instructions on what to do in this situation;

5. The PC must be located either on another computer or on another operating system. It is necessary that the room security service could not determine the presence of software that helps Hero in making a decision and thus not putting it in an advantageous position in front of other players;

6. The graphic objects of the poker table must be read through a standard remote desktop (RDP), this requires two computers or from the desktop of the operating system installed on a virtual machine on the same computer, this requires one computer ;

7. The whole process from the moment of receiving the image of ALL graphic objects until the formation of the final hand should take no more than 3 seconds.

8. The PC should work immediately with 4 poker tables;

9. The PC must support Texas Hold'em: Cash, SnG, KO, Tourney and ALL limits;

10. The PC should have less than 0.05% of both logical errors in the construction of hand histories and recognition errors. The percentage of errors can be much more after the programmers change the poker room the location of the poker table elements. The PC team in the shortest possible time should re-train and post the update. The update should be performed automatically at the time of starting the PC.

     Taking into account the tasks set out below, the solution developed by our team is presented. Team PokerOCR.

The PC consists of two separate programs:

1. PokerRecorder (hereinafter PR);

2. PokerRecorderOCR (hereinafter PROCR).

PR – solves problems numbered 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 (see above);

PROC – solves problems numbered 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 (see above);

And PR and PROCR hemselves can be installed on computers located in different parts of the Earth. Reference materials on the PC you can see in the section Reference.

Anyone can try our PC for free.

The distribution kits of the trial version of the full PR and PROCR can be downloaded in the section Download.