Two Plus Two Newer Archives - Bots in PartyPoker's 6-max Limit games?

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Bots in PartyPoker\'s 6-max Limit games?

I am not a very frequent poster in these forums, I mostly lurk in the MHSH. I introduce myself as an online poker professional since 2 years ago. My main game is short handed middle limit hold'em. I now strongly suspect that my biggest fish pond has been infected with poker bots, and I need to do something about it!

I have found a bunch of players with close to equivalent stats in party's 10/20, 15/30, 20/40 and 30/60 6-max games (They might exist in other games as well but these are the only games I am interested in). I believe these players are non-human bot players. It is hard for me to find concrete evidence since the tools for me, as a regular user, are very limited. I have datamined, played with, observed and tried to chat with these suspicious players. Nothing so far has told me I am wrong.

What caught my attention in the first place was that these players always delay a few seconds before they act pre- and post-flop, except when they have an easy fold decision pre-flop. An obvious example which come up rather frequently: Pre-flop. Player A raises, Bot 3-bets and Player B caps. Player A calls, Bot thinks for a few seconds before it calls the cap. This is an obvious call for pretty much all poker players, but these "bots" _always_ thinks for a few seconds in these spots. Strange me thinks..

I have tried to chat with many of these players, they have never replied.

I have played HU with two of these players. On these occasions I played one hand, sat out, sat in, played one hand and so on for maybe 20 minutes. The "bot" was always ready to play instantly.

I have noticed that these players have a habit of 3-betting with less than stellar hands pre-flop (T7o, 85o etc) in the big blind versus steal raises. But once I cap they always seem to play very straight forward post-flop. One time I exploited this strategy for approximately three hours straight against one particular "bot", but it never adapted. An otherwise good player would?

These are some of the possible bots that I have found in my datamining (I use a custom background picture):
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/1083/botsquadig5.jpg

Starting from the upper right corner, the numbers represents:
VPIP, PFR, Avg aggression factor, number of hands played
WTSD, Won$@SD, Att. to steal blinds
Flop, Turn and River aggression factors. Win rate in BB/100
Flop, Turn and River folded to bet

On the other side of the player box the upper number is folded SB to steal and the lower one is folded BB to steal.

As you can see their stats are all very similar. Since the sample sizes are pretty small the stats will probably converge better after more played hands. On the other hand I assume that bots can be tweaked in any way their users want, and therefore their stats may never fully converge.

I have stopped playing at PartyPoker since a month ago. I now only datamine the games. I log on to my Party account about twice a week, and each time I see new players with these stats and slow pace playing style. I have also noticed that some "bots" play no more.

Let us say these players are not bots, where do their playing style come from? I find it strange that suddenly a significant portion of the (assumed) winning players at PartyPoker play a style that, as far as I know, is not widely advocated anywhere.

I have contacted PartyPoker about these observations of mine:

"Dear Henrik,

We thank you for contacting us.

With reference to your email, please note that an investigation has been initiated into these accounts and we assure you that appropriate action will be taken if the accounts are involved in any suspicious activities.

We appreciate your efforts in helping us maintain the integrity of our site.

Contact us anytime, we are available around the clock to assist you with your account related questions and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Logan Nichols
Investigations Team
[email protected] "

I don't know how urgent matter this is for PartyPoker in these days though, and bots do a good job starting up new tables and keeping them running around the clock.