Pokerbots, the truth from the source

[kornman17]

Hello,

I would like to start with two remarks.

First one is to the 2+2 users: I know I do not look trustworthy with my huge amount of posts (one), but I cannot magically do that. I will also be hardly able to reveal information proving what I write (without endangering myself), so the bottom line is - decide yourself if you want to trust me or not, and leave it at this.

Second one is to the moderators of the forum. The facts that I bring here (or from your perspective – “the claims”) are somewhat sensitive. I did my best to take care explicitly and have my writings acceptable and suitable for this forum and I hope the message overall is positive and valuable for the poker community to not deserve a ban.

OK, enough of disclaimers. The thing is that I am a former employee at one of the top 3 biggest poker site. Not just any employee. I worked in the so called black-belt investigation team, which is very technical team, close to development, but not visible/known neither to them, nor to other teams dealing with these matters.

The usually email signs you know “security team”, “investigation team”, etc. are most often just the primary offshore support, they have no clue of account related security. If your account is marked as a “bot” and your account is frozen, they will call you and read you the license agreement: “you have used out software in conjunction with 3rd party software which is in violation …” and if you interrupt them with “I have not used 3rd party software, I wrote the bot myself completely from scratch” they will stop, wonder how to proceed, tell you “ok, “sir”! We are going to escalate and re-investigate etc.”. This does not pass the next level thou.

Out team was the last level. There has to be top level escalation first, in order something to reach us. We were (when I say were – I mean the team still are, just I’m not part of it any longer) interfacing with no other department or team. So now I talk about some internals, that I believe you don’t know.

There are often nowadays discussions about poker robots. Here is the truth about them (at least in my former company, but I believe the others run models based on similar concepts, as that’s what simply make sense):

No one care about poker robots as such. The thing is that the company care about their own earnings (obviously) but next to that is the poker ecosystem. You would say how they can care for the ecosystem if they don’t care for the bots. The thing is that there is numerous number of losing bots that come and go. These feed the ecosystem as any other fish do. And these are really a lot, people try out stuff, changing it weekly, and still losing. This was eventually roughly 90+% of all the bots. The site makes money, and the poker ecosystem flourishes. On the other side, a winning bots (certainly there were such), and especially huge outstanding winner bots are enemy. Not only them. A consistently winning player, playing a lot, with somewhat high BB/100h is the same kind of enemy. They suck up money with speed sometimes faster than the site does (on the relative amount of tables), which destroys the ecosystem in some time (I believe you can do the calculation but these calculations and analysis we had done in details). These (real players as well as bots) were under fire. If it’s a bot, it’s killed right away, no issue. If it’s a real player, it’s randomly killed too (relation to fraudulent account etc.). You may again say – not much is heard about this in here, I don’t know the exact reason, I believe fair amount of the top winning players are 2+2iers, but you will actually more often here from killed bots in 2+2 as a way to get it back to the sites than from real players (maybe note also a major difference, if real player is killed, his account money are returned, bots are seized).

As for the bot detection, the technology is there. I know all of you (user, moderators) will get on your nails ready to delete my post. I won’t post details here “in order to educate the bot developers”. Just say that you may educate the bot developers as much as you want, bot detection lies on fundamental concepts that hardly can be exploited (they for sure can, as several of the major ones are client based, or joint, but this is of utmost complexity even for people that write the bots personally). Therefore, I can safely claim that 99.7+% of the bots used on the site were known to the site. If you wonder why often support leaves impression that your reports about bots are ignored – it’s simply because they are ignored, bots are known already. And if you “insist” too much on killing a bot that is a losing bot, site can eventually kill it (although undesired and has no point in doing that, just for the sake of keeping players calm. They will also kill a real player if you accuse him being bot and they get complains from too many people, it’s about having the players content and the overall ecosystem live).

Not only bot detection, but there are numerous ways to track fraudulent activities. I’m not talking here about totally clueless winholdem users, bot developers that develop everything from scratch, etc., they stand no chance. Just as a simple fact, 60+% of them cannot cope with the most obvious analysis you can imagine (just think of it straight – that’s it).

PM me if you want to spin off discussions on the sensitive info, I won’t discuss it here.

R.
Indy

[Ron Burgundy]

Could someone translate this post into English plz?

[DMoogle]

Kind of makes sense, except for some glaring holes: winning players keep tables going (if what you say is true, no poker room would ever ever hire prop players), and big losing players are generally much less profitable to the sites than big winning players.

[fnord_too]

[ QUOTE ]
Could someone translate this post into English plz?

[/ QUOTE ]
1. Bots exists
2. Most Bots are losers
3. Sites can effectively detect bots
4. Sites don't care about losing bots
5. Sites do care about winning bots and winning players and try to get rid of either

[ChipFerFree]

Only salient thing for me in this post is really the ecosystem concept.

I believe OP is correct in assuming the casino dislikes extreme winners regardless of whether they are human or software.

If it upsets the natural balanced flow of the revenues from those that they want to lose more slowly (don't scare the fish off) to those that should not be winning as fast -- aka outside some actuarially derived number of standard deviations from the norm -- it's bad for business.

Wow am I rambling now?

Here's a real example -- Party Poker once shut my account down when I'd won 13 consecutive SNG's. These were not the little 6ers I'm playing now -- they were 50s 100s and 200s.

They sent me a message that said basically -- yer account has been closed because we suspect that you are either using player profiling or automated software to attain your current win rate. I WAS using PokerProphecy -- hardly a significant advantage, and simply getting more lucky than normal.

I had to promise them I wouldn't use PP anymore and send them a copy of my DL with a fat apology before they would open me back up. I was freaking out. I literally begged them to open it back up.

They did reopen it and I guess the only reason I mention this is that it seems like a combo of what I think OP's original statement might be -- Casino doesn't care if yer a fantastically great player or equipped with dyno software -- don't win outside some calculated high end norm or you jeopardize our business.

It even seems almost reasonable...

[ChipFerFree]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Could someone translate this post into English plz?

[/ QUOTE ]
1. Bots exists
2. Most Bots are losers
3. Sites can effectively detect bots
4. Sites don't care about losing bots
5. Sites do care about winning bots and winning players and try to get rid of either

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok ignore my previous post -- this is shorter by far and says the same thing...

[PBJaxx]

At a glance, this is very reasonable. Except for the spy/cia/ninja stuff, but whatevs. Even if this is fictional, it is actually very logical and seems like a strong possibility.

[whangarei]

[ QUOTE ]
It even seems almost reasonable...

[/ QUOTE ]

I wouldn't say reasonable. Poker is a game with simple rules. Games are fun because they're pure competition within a well-defined framework (rules). Being punished for playing the game too well (arbitrary meta-rule) is unfair and unreasonable.

[Hawklet]

This would explain why Shaundeeb plays so much BJ cover play now.

[tangled]

Two things jump out at me, (if everything that you say is true,which even you recognize we can't know for sure). One is that this is good: Pokerbots are not really a threat to winning players because sites can detect them and get rid of them whenever they want.

The second thing is you just fed the - its rigged crowd. Since sites care about money being taken out of the poker ecosystem, and winning players do that, well ... you get the point. To the conspiracy minded, once you have a motive, you must have fact.