Poker Gods/Bot Hunters: If you saw the following, what would you do?

[apefish]

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Thanks...I honestly feel like such a prick now that I know MrX is just a grinder. If I could apologize I would as what I said wasn't cool in light of my education.

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From the description given he shouldn't be that tough to find.

The only dumb questions are the ones not asked.

And some by EricW and Dids.

I really wouldn't sweat it much.

[dibbs]

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A cynic would think that Gatorade only gets fired up about busting a 'bot' after it takes a few k off him, but we all know his heart is pure -- he will be on this. His only goal is to rid the world of bots.

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Original post said something along the lines of "SIC MR. HATERADE ON EM" but I thought it was too cynical, glad you covered my slack for me [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[PokerStarsJeff]

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NH PSJeff.

Spaggy, don't feel too bad. Yes, you may have been pwned, but I have to say this is one of the best bot accusation threads I have seen here. You did a good job of explaining what made you suspicious, and you were open-minded when people provided you with explanations.

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Thanks...I honestly feel like such a prick now that I know MrX is just a grinder. If I could apologize I would as what I said wasn't cool in light of my education.

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Hello Spaggy,

First, a side note. If you really would like to pass along a private message to "MrX", send it to me in an Email to support@pokerstars.com from your validated PokerStars Email. Put "For Jeff" in the subject line. It will get to me, and I will pass it along to him on your behalf after editing out your Email address.

Again, please don't feel pwned. That truly wasn't my intent. Reports of bot suspicions based upon "I saw MrX playing at N tables, and no human can possibly be doing that" are as common as can be and have been around since 'RaiNKhAn' first demonstrated that extreme multi-tabling was possible.

Such reasons are probably the number one justification cited in player reports of bot suspicions... and they're almost always incorrect, so much so that we have a "canned" answer that we use in response to such Emails (after a thorough review exonerates them):

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Thank you for your email. I will do my best to address your concerns.


There are a handful of players on PokerStars who play a seemingly impossible number of tournaments at once. However, we do have an extensive arsenal of detection tools in order to ensure that each player is a human being. Please rest assured that we do not tolerate
automated players (bots) on PokerStars.


While I cannot detail each of the tools we use to make this
determination (we don't want our methods to fall into the hands of bot programmers who will then use that information to avoid detection), I can assure you that we have reviewed this player and s/he is most definitely not a bot. It is a human player on all counts.


Massively parallel play is not by itself a reliable harbinger of a bot. There are reasonable explanations as to how players can play such a large number of games at once. The most tables I've seen concurrently played (and we've seen it in the flesh), is 31 tables on a single 17" notebook computer... and that player did this without timing out.


There are players capable of rapid-fire decisions and quick precision mouse clicks out there. Many of these players are previously trained or experienced in online video games such as StarCraft, where as many as 120 decisions and clicks per minute are required! To reduce that to a mere 20 to 40 decisions per minute as would be required for a couple dozen poker games would be quite simple for such players.


If you have any further questions, please let us know.


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I also meant what I said earlier. It is very important that as players, you're comfortable with and confident in the security of PokerStars games. It wasn't pwnage I was going for, but to inspire that level of confidence in our ability to keep the bots out, both in you and secondarily in readers of this thread.

I really wish I could show you some of the cool stuff we've developed since the TeddyFBI's mom case demonstrated to us that we needed much better tools for bot detection, both for reacting to reports like yours, and proactively hunting them down on our own. Let's just say... Mr. Gatorade would be rather pleased, and that these tools are a primary reason that Gatorade's list of "known" bots has yet to include a PokerStars player.

If anyone got pwned, it was and is those who think they can run a bot undetected on PokerStars. Will a handful get away with doing so? Surely -- we have no illusions of perfection, and there will always be those few bot developers who have thought about detection evasion as much as we have thought about detection.

But they're drawing very nearly dead.

Best Regards,

Jeff
PokerStars Game Security

[gtpitch]

Well said Jeff. Thanks

[mayday4379]

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you guys are retarded with bots. They can't play 20+ tables. They need to screen scrape the tables and the tables need to be 100% visible. They also need to press the buttons on the poker client and trying to press 5 of them at the same time would cause it to freeze up (I"m assuming if you're 20 tabling that 5 tables need attention at the same time.)

No PC can handle the CPU usage of trying to 20 table a bot. Jesus.

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Now I'm far from an expert on bots, but I disagree with this. I would imagine that any bot that gets past security would be connecting to the poker client via a remote desktop. Given that shared processing power is available for rent (and through botnets like Storm), wouldn't it be possible for a whole gang of computers to be sharing the load from the host computer?

Look at things like click fraud - IIRC correctly something like 25% of all search engine clicks are estimated to be fraudulent, and I know personally of networks capable of generating millions of pageviews and clicks across thousands of sites - all without any human interaction. Working at an ad network has exposed me to some coding/automated setups that go beyond what I thought was technically possible with current technology.

Look up Storm Worm (and how it works) if you want to see what's already out there (teh rize of teh masheens!).

This is a little off topic, but to say that it's impossible to have a computer setup that's automated and can play 20+ poker tables is, in my opinion, wrong. Does that mean somebody actually has one and is using it right now? Not at all.

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Yes, VM Ware can be used to create multiple sessions, but the issue is that you can't open stars up multipler times, it will only allow you to log in once. You log in from one VM session and start playing...you open up another VM session and try to loginto stars and you'll have issues.

[sparky3474]

PokerstarsJeff or Pokerstorm, glad to see you guys are on the job. I just wonder if you say a word about the $47K incident with pokergirl, I realize FT is your competitor and you probably won't or shouldn't say anything derogatory about them but how can you do something in minutes that takes them weeks? or maybe just some sanitized point of view about everything that has taken place so far.