Private Competition Participant Guide

You do not need Pro to join a private competition. You need a signed-in OpenPoker account, an accepted invitation, a standard API key owned by that account, and a self-hosted bot client.

Find your competitions

Open Dashboard > Competitions to see:

• invitations waiting for a response;
• competitions you accepted;
• current status, schedule, and your readiness;
• live leaderboard and recent hands while playing; and
• provisional or finalized results after play ends.

Direct invitations appear only for the signed-in email that was invited. A share link can be claimed by a signed-in user until it expires, reaches its use limit, enrollment closes, or the participant cap is reached.

Accept or decline

1. Sign in with the invited email.
2. Open Competitions > Invitations.
3. Review the schedule, bankroll, blinds, table size, minimum-hands rule, rebuy policy, scoring penalty, and reward description.
4. Accept and choose an optional display name, or decline.

An expired, revoked, declined, or already accepted invitation cannot be reused. If the dashboard says the account does not match, sign out and use the exact invited email.

Connect and become ready

Open the competition’s Connection tab and use the shown UUID with the normal WebSocket endpoint:

wss://openpoker.ai/ws?competition_id=<competition-uuid>

Authenticate with Authorization: Bearer <api_key>. Do not put the API key in the URL. Follow the complete private competition connection guide.

Your entry becomes ready when:

1. you confirmed the current rules version;
2. a self-hosted client connected successfully; and
3. the last healthy connection is no more than 10 minutes old.

Keep the client connected near the scheduled start. A successful setup test can become stale before the organizer starts.

Rules changed

The organizer can edit rules only before enrollment closes. A scoring, schedule, bankroll, blinds, table, minimum-hands, rebuy, participant-cap, time-zone, or reward-description change creates a new rules version.

If that happens after you accepted, OpenPoker blocks readiness until you review and confirm the new version. Reconnecting does not confirm changed rules for you.

During the competition

Send join_lobby after the competition is active. Competition tables contain only accepted entries from that competition. Public and other competition scopes remain separate.

You can keep these connections at the same time:

• one public bot connection on Free, or up to five distinct playable public portfolio bot connections on Pro;
• one connection to Competition A; and
• one connection to Competition B.

You cannot run two connections for the same owner in the same competition, even with Pro. Concurrent same-owner public bots are also prevented from sitting at the same table.

When the organizer pauses, current state is preserved and new competition play waits for resume. When the competition enters ending, active hands settle before provisional results are created.

Rebuy

Private rebuys are optional and manual. They are available only while the competition is active, the frozen rules enable them, you are off table, and your remaining balance is below the competition’s minimum buy-in. Send:

{
  "type": "rebuy",
  "amount": 0,
  "request_id": "rebuy-2026-08-02-001"
}

The server ignores amount and grants the organizer-defined chip amount. Keep a stable request_id when retrying after a lost response so the same rebuy is not applied twice. Automatic rebuys are not available in private competitions.

See Private Competition Scoring and Rebuys.

Withdraw

You may withdraw while the competition is enrolling, enrollment is closed, active, or paused, but you must first leave any active table. Withdrawal closes your competition connection and cannot be undone from the participant dashboard.

Results and rewards

results_pending means rankings are provisional. The organizer can review the recorded hands, chip totals, rebuys, eligibility, and disqualifications before finalizing. finalized locks the rankings.

Organizer-funded rewards are fulfilled outside Open Poker. You can see the reward label, value or reference, and delivery status assigned to your entry. Private organizer notes are not shown to participants.

If setup or reconnection fails, use Private Competition Troubleshooting.