How I Started Botting Pokémon Center in 6.5 Hours

Source: Dev.to

Don’t know if anyone here is a big Pokémon fan 👀
When I couldn’t find anything in stores, I decided to turn it into a project.
So I built a Pokémon Center monitor Ϟ(๑⚈ . ̫ ⚈๑)⋆.

This wasn’t about building the perfect system. The goal was to get something running ASAP. Whether this is a hobby project or a minimal MVP, time can be limited and results mattered.

Below is how I created a working monitor in about 6.5 hours.

Final Result

• If anything becomes available, I receive an email notification.
• Avoids hard blocks like Error 15 / Access Denied.
• Bypasses hCaptcha without solving it.
• Logs runtime, failures, and last successful actions.

Step 1: Establish Stable Site Access

Browser choice

• Standard Selenium → Error 15 / Access Denied (no captcha, just a hard block)
• Firefox → mixed results
• Modified Chrome → slightly better than Firefox
• Result: Modified Chrome worked best.

VPNs, Proxies, and the Real Discovery

• ExpressVPN → helped on longer runs, no immediate difference.
• 2Captcha proxies → helped on longer runs, no immediate difference.
• Cookies are probably the key.

Why Cookies Matter More Than You Think

• Detection is score‑based, not simple allow/block rules.
• Blocking can feel random: blocked 1 out of 10 times, or 7 out of 10 times.
• Captchas usually appear when your score drops below a threshold; raising that score works better than solving captchas.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small data files used to maintain session context and behavior signals. Even with rotating IPs, unchanged cookies can identify you. A browser with no cookies often looks more suspicious than one with normal history.

Quick Way to Test Cookies: Manual Collection

1. Visit YouTube.
2. Visit Walmart.
3. Search for “Pokémon Center” instead of navigating directly.

This reduced captchas to less than 1 out of 10 visits.

Automate Your Cookies Collection Process

• Open random high‑traffic sites.
• Save cookies to files.
• Inject them into future browsers.

Step 2: Extract Product Data

📌 Speedy tip: Test and confirm selectors in the console before moving anything into Python.

• Inspect the page in DevTools, test selectors in the console, and confirm the selector counts match the products shown on the page.
• Once confirmed, move the logic into Python for in‑browser JavaScript execution.

Step 3: Scale Runtime Using an 80/20 Approach

Each increase revealed new issues. To complete the scaling I:

• Added more cookie variety.
• Added stable proxy connections.
• Implemented error notifications and robust error‑handling.

🧱 Watch out: Don’t let scripts keep running while getting heavily blocked. That can burn your IPs and trigger stronger defenses.

Step 4: Add Minimal but Effective Support Systems (hCaptcha)

• Cookies removed about 9/10 hCaptcha cases in the first hour. After 5–7 hours, that dropped to 2–3/10.
• Rotating proxies prevented performance degradation.
• For the remaining cases, I used PyAutoGUI 😂 to click the same hCaptcha location every time.
• This pushed success to ~99 % without external solvers.

P.S. For scalable systems, use Python’s built‑in click methods rather than PyAutoGUI.

Takeaway

Focus first on:

• Cookies
• IPs
• Browser configuration
• Rate limits

P.P.S. Watch me do it here.