[admiralfluff]

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Gramps, do you not understand game selection? You keep saying "not even once in x # of hands" etc ... if someone is disciplined and understands game selection, why would they even once sit with another shark?

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Arggghhhh. I wish people would stop citing this crap as evidence. There is no way FTP banned an account for not playing with other accounts. It is certainly grounds for suspicion, but it is not evidence.

I'll lay it out:
First of all, no real player is that disciplined, and you usually have to play with someone to know if they're a shark.

Why it's suspicious:
The bot accounts are NOT selecting games based on opponent skill, or results. They are selecting games based on an unknown criteria. They won't play each other, but they will play opponents who can, and do, beat them all, and who would show higher earn in a datamined sample. So the 'bot' accounts are specifically choosing not to play each other. A simple explanation would be that they are real people who all know each other, and agree not to play against each other. Evidence thwarted. Does that mean FTP made a mistake? NO. No one ever said they banned the accounts for never playing together. FTP is using some other form of evidence.

The only potentially compelling piece of evidence that has been publically discussed are the timing tells. For example, if any (or all) account exhibited the following behavior:

Hero raises preflop, villain 3bets, hero waits exactly 4.3 seconds and hero calls.

If this account is a real player, he must have a 4.3second timer that is automatically set in this situation, and he clicks call when it trips. This should be unlikely enough that this account is deemed a bot beyond reasonable doubt.

Now imagine how many possible detectable elements there are to a bot program. Right now the botter has no idea how FTP detected him. That is why beatme came to the forum to make a big stink. If FTP told the botter: 'we know you're a bot, and this is how', the botter could fix the problem, and sign right back up. Right now, there is too much risk of immediate detection for the botter to sign up again.

This should clearly illustrate why it is so important FTP not divulge their detection method.

I'm guessing that most of the people who demand FTP make the method public do not play MHHU on FTP, and thusly do not think it will effect them one way or the other. In the short term, they are probably correct. In the long-term, they are not.