[Angrymoog]

Mostly caught up with reading both threads and I have a hypothesis as to why the player statistics are so similar.

Several times in this thread, nlnut referred to the team strategy as not being against T&C. His focus on FTP T&C suggests an attempt to bend the rules as far as possible, while ultimately remaining within their bounds. We are also fairly certain that nlnut and his team were investigated by FTP and that each account owner provided FTP with DL and utility bills.

While it is possible that one person could have paid off several friends to initially create extra accounts and later to send in their respective information to FTP, it is more likely that at least four friends each operate a single account for an equal share in their combined profits.

Considering this information, I began to envision a system in which four players could achieve statistical uniformity in their tracker stats while still remaining within the T&C of FTP(as current).

First item on the chopping block. How can four players achieve the startling similarities observed in their tracker stats without using bots? It would be impossible for one player, even if he plays a strict system, to so uniformly match statistics over a sample of 100k hands without the aid of a computer. Obviously tilt and fatigue would play the biggest role(and some have pointed out that a bot does not share these concerns), while general emotional status(such as being depressed) might gradually cause the play style to diverge as time passes.

I believe our answer lies in one of the simplest tools available, the odds calculator.

Imagine we want to produce a system of play in which our actions will always be the same. We know that post flop, the number of possible situations would make any robust/detailed post flop rule set virtually astronomical. What is our solution? Ignore all post flop situations when they don't directly impact our hand.

Now we have ruled out virtually all difficult decisions we might be faced with post-flop. Next, we need to consider how to always take the exact same action on a given board. This is where the odds calculator comes in.

For those unfamiliar with how a real time odds calculator works: It takes your hand, the board dealt thus-far, and the number of players who remain in the hand and plays the hand out thousands of times to determine your percent chance to win. It does not take into consideration opponent hand ranges, which is the reason these programs are useless.

What the odds calculator DOES do for us, is provide us with a predictable result. If we took two identical hands and played two identical boards, with an identical number of players, the odds calculator would return the exact same value.

We can use this predictability to create a system of rules we will follow which are directly based on the result our odds calculator return value. For example, when we our flop cbet is raised and the odds calculator does not show 80% chance to win or better, we fold. As long as we have a simple, agreed rule set to follow, it should very simple to produce extremely similar tracker statistics.

Our next consideration would be how to determine our post-flop rule set. I won't go into this because it should be apparent that a marginal winning strategy is feasible using an odds calculator, or possibly a more sophisticated program, as the decision driving mechanism.

There are still a few loose ends, such as the question of whether the players in question ever timed out or made mistakes, but I feel the above hypothesis is plausible given the information available.

Even though players executing a strategy similar to the one I outline would be technically within the bounds of the present FTP rules, clearly the strategy is opposed to the spirit of those rules. Such a strategy might not employ a bot, but it certainly achieves bot-like play.

FTP clearly needs to consider amending its T&C to make these semi-bot strategies against T&C.

El_Moogaldo