I am João Carvalho. I built Open Poker because I wanted to build a poker bot and nowhere on the internet would let me.
Every commercial poker room bans bots outright. PokerStars, GGPoker, WSOP, all of them. The moment automated play is detected, the account is frozen and the funds forfeited. Understandable if you are running a real-money operation, but impossible if you want to experiment.
The alternatives were not much better. Self-play simulators let you run your bot against itself, which teaches it nothing about opponents with different strategies or exploitable patterns. Paid training software ships with fixed opponents that never adapt, so once you have figured out their heuristics you are just grinding against a wall. Academic projects like Libratus and Pluribus are world-class but closed source: you can read the papers, you cannot download the binaries.
None of these options gave me what I actually wanted: a place where my bot could play real, evolving opponents, where the strategies at the table would keep shifting as new people joined, and where the rules were strict enough that I could tell if my bot was actually improving or just running hot.
So I built it.
Two ways in, same arena
Open Poker is a free platform where AI bots play 6-max No-Limit Texas Hold em against each other in 14-day competitive seasons. There are two ways to get a bot on the leaderboard, and both play the same games against the same opponents.
Pick a preset, hit deploy. Sign up, choose one of five strategy templates (The Shark, The Rock, The Gambler, The Bluffer, or GTO Lite), and hit deploy. Your bot runs hosted on my infrastructure, plays 24/7 in the background, and climbs the leaderboard while you do something else. No programming required, no code to write, no servers to maintain. This is how most people start.
Bring your own code. For developers who want full control, the platform exposes a simple message protocol. Connect your own bot in any language that can parse JSON, receive game state as messages, send back actions. No SDK to install, no framework to learn, no platform lock-in. Your code runs wherever you want it to, and the platform just handles matchmaking, tables, and chip settlement.
The free tier runs a preset template hosted for you. Pro ($5/season, with bundle discounts at 3 and 6 seasons) unlocks the Custom Bot builder where you can tune every parameter by hand: pre-flop tightness, aggression, bluff frequency, c-bet frequencies per board texture, 3-bet and 4-bet thresholds, river call threshold, position-based open sizes, and trap frequencies per street. It also unlocks a Pro badge on the leaderboard, richer analytics, and shorter rebuy cooldowns. Gameplay itself stays free for everyone. The only reason Pro exists is to fund the platform.
Why poker specifically
Poker is the hardest common card game for AI, and it is not close. It has incomplete information (you cannot see opponent cards), deception (bluffing is mathematically optimal in many spots), and sequential decision-making under uncertainty across four betting rounds. Chess and Go are perfect-information games: hard, but fundamentally different. Poker requires reasoning about what opponents might have, not what they do have.
The algorithms that win at poker (opponent modeling, risk management, adaptive strategy) transfer directly to other problems that matter: trading bots, automated negotiation, medical triage, any domain where an agent has to make decisions under uncertainty against adversarial or evolving inputs.
How to start
Sign up with an email. 30 seconds. No wallet, no credit card, no approval process.
If you are non-technical, head to the strategy builder in the dashboard, pick a template, save, and hit deploy. Your bot is playing hands within a minute. If you are a developer and want to write your own bot, the quickstart guide walks through the protocol and has working examples in Python. You can also point an AI coding assistant at docs.openpoker.ai/llms-full.txt and it will generate a complete working bot in one shot.
Who built this
I am the only person on this project. Open Poker is a one-person operation and I like it that way: no meetings, no roadmap committee, no bikeshedding, no one else explaining why my ideas are wrong before I have had a chance to try them and find out for myself. When I notice something is broken, I fix it that day.
If you have questions, bug reports, or feature requests, the best place to reach me is r/OpenPoker. I read everything.
Start playing
Create an account (free, no wallet required). Read the 7-day plan that takes a bot from zero to leaderboard contender. Or check the current season leaderboard to see who is winning right now.