As already recommended, the book Theory of Poker is a truly invaluable source of information for playing the game as well as for building an AI. You should probably buy it as it does not cost that much.
University of Alberta resarch group does the state-of-the-art at the moment, though they have stiff competition emerging every now and then. (Not all poker bots and AI research in the field is public because of the temptation to use one's results in internet poker, though that's forbidden.)
First you should decide what sort of poker are you going to tackle first. two player hold'em is pretty much solved, though the best humans still put up a real fight with the best AI's available. The AI has the main advantages over humans by having an unlimited flawless memory of past hands, flawless analysis of the patterns based on that and as they are machines, they don't tilt like almost all humans occasionally do.
Fixed Hold'em is probably the easiest to crack, so you might want to start with 1-1 fixed hold'em and then decide what you want to do next.
Here are some aspects which change the correct strategy (and your AI):
- A cash game is different from a
tournament
-The number of players
makes the decisions different.
- Hold'em
is not the only poker. Omaha, Stud
and others exist and are widely
played.
- Fixed Limit is different from
Pot Limit, which is different from No
Limit.
- To beat the best you need to cover a lot of very subtle things the best players think about when they play. To beat a low-stakes amateur game, none of these things count.
If you decide to go for No Limit Hold'em, you might want to check out three-book series Harrington on Hold'em and a book No Limit Poker - Theory and Practice. Having read quite a many books on poker, I can say these books combined with the Theory of Poker are quite enough.