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I read that online poker sites disallow certain applications to be used during play. I'm not experienced with poker but I do play regular games and I assume these are the equivalent of "wall hacks", "aim bots" etc, right?
So what do these apps do? How do they help the player gain unfair advantage over other players? I'm not interested in a specific app, but just in a general explanation of what these apps are usually used for
There is certainly a number of applications that constantly scans the screen eg. the game tables, offering real time percentages for anything you might think, winning percentage, push/fold situations etc.
That is mostly, screen grabbing then computing the images grabbed with pre-grabbed images to find out what the current screen says. This can translate from community cards to stack sizes to active players in table.
I myself developed such a program not while ago that could grab the community cards, then compute me a percentage of winning based on my hold cards.
Things can't be really more complex since serious applications (like Pokerstars) don't give any other information, except their log files but that's legal to utilize eg. Pokertracker uses these logs files, doesn't do any really complex stuff like DLL injection and such.
Restricted apps like, say, Texas Calculatem do exactly this etc. screen grabbing+. Older SNG Wizard version (newer ones are supported) had a mechanism where one could create a scenario for push/fold where Pokerstars didn't liked. I didn't found it on newer versions.
In short, if an application goes the screen grabbing way and calculate real-time statistics is probably considered cheat.
You referred bots. These aren't so different by the way, they do exactly the same thing, although some AHK mechanism is in order to make them behave like humans. They're also considered cheat since they're basically AHK + screen grabbing application.
Personally i don't think they're worth the effort and $$. The information you get from them they can really be learnt.
Another way these cheating apps can provide an unfair advantage is to suggest to the player what action to take in a particular situation, using the statistics it gathered against those opponents.
For example, if someone goes all-in, the app might say "You should call this, you'll win in 75 % of cases" or it might say "You should fold, the player is very tight so you're probably not a favourite here".
In these cases, playing poker is more-or-less playing on auto-pilot: you're just clicking on what the app tells you to click, without any thought whatsoever.
From a mathematical / statistical point-of-view, in the long run you'll win this way. This, combined with the fact that no particular skills are required to play like this, is considered to be cheating.
