I am an affected player as I play[ed] the alleged accounts on a daily basis and I vote for you to stop posting here.

Seriously, calm down. You and I don't know what Stars are doing on this. In a huge sample a few false positives is possible, offering them some more rope is also possible.

You would not be offended if Stars (or say Party) had found a few cheats and like the police watching criminals in all other areas decided to carry on the investigation not warn the suspect.

For gambling sites one of their big problems is the same as banks with money laundering. They are legally obliged to report their suspicions but also legally bound not to "tip off" the person they are shopping that they are a suspect.

This rule is a nightmare for banks as they get liability up the arse both ways. They are liable if they process money laundered money but also liable if they tip off the suspect by saying no. The legal form book for the bank is - refuse customer but also serve customer.

Now for a bank it gets worse, they have flagged the account, now the account wants to do something that by their normal rules would be refused - what do you do? If you say yes then you are breaking your own rules to prevent money laundering, if you say no you risk tipping off. What does the flag really mean in terms of what the bank does?

If you know the answer to that little connundrum then there are a few banks willing to pay you lots of money, it is a classic Catch 22, they get stuffed whatever. As soon as anything goes awry, it is their fault - just ask Coral and their criminal who lost £100k. If they report too late, guilty, if they carry on serving, guilty, if they stop serving, guilty if their VIP programme takes the whale to the races, guilty in the court of pubic opinion, if they don't guilty to the regulator. Now in that case Coral were not on the ball but they got roasted AFTER submitting suspicious betting reports on him to the police/regulator. Roasted not just by the regulator but in parliament and in public too.


If Stars or Schwein detect more accounts - they should not be listed here, that is the only sure thing in this legal and regulatory maze. We have the attention we don't need to mess up the investigation by giving them a running commentry and "tipping off".

You are getting upset about some named accounts. I put it to you that the unnamed or uncaught accounts might be more of an issue so chill, the list here is not the whole picture

"Russian machines steal MILLIONS of dollars from white Americans".

lol

I thought the opposite was true, i.e that they most likely don't holecard share? At least there hasn't been anything posted in this thread that indicated it right?

I think he has a point, a huge entity like Stars will take longer to act. There's definitely been some very worrying signs from them that they aren't taking it as seriously as they should, but still seems a bit early.

I thought the 'hey they might even be innocent' comment was sort of said with a 'in theory' qualifier attached to it. Still, there's a lot of people accused, having someone innocent get banned and their bankroll confiscated, would be an absolute tragedy.

Also, if they are unbanned why are they not playing more? I've admittedly only played a couple of thousand hands this month but I think it's the first time I wake up in the morning and don't see 4somnaire grinding away, in a very long time. Especially 2 days in a row, unheard of for him :s

Its just disguting look at the last answer I got from ps as was talking them about the bot case and they answer aside speaking of a predict card program I wasn't refering to.... And they conclude of course the players incriminated did nothing wrong.

---->

Thank you for contacting us. Your email was escalated to me as a member of the PokerStars Game Integrity team.

It is a misconception that there are programs which can somehow predict the cards to come. This is simply not true. On the other hand, there are tools and services which we deem to give players an unfair advantage, and they are prohibited at PokerStars. For example, a program which recommends to a player on how to act given the current circumstance would be deemed as an unfair advantage and as such be prohibited. However, such programs cannot know the cards to come before they are dealt.

I can assure you that no player knows what cards are coming, what other players' cards are, or is able to manipulate the deal. There is no such hacking software. We have not been given any indication or evidence that such a program exists.

We have state of the art defense against and detection of hackers. For details, please see our integrity page at:

http://www.pokerstars.com/security.html

As to the player using a prohibited tool, please rest assured that we do not tolerate the use of prohibited tools here on PokerStars. We have an extensive arsenal of detection tools in order to ensure that each player is a human being and playing prohibited tool free.

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 programmers who will then use that information to avoid detection), I can assure you that
this player had been reviewed and shows no indications of using prohibited tools whatsoever.

Further, as a precaution, I did of course examine this player to see if they may have been able to obtain any abnormal winning statistics. However, I found absolutely nothing of concern.

More information regarding prohibited tools can be found on our website, located at:

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/prohibited/

Again we thank you for your report, as we would always rather check such players out and know for sure. I wish you the best of luck in your future games, and thank you for playing on PokerStars.

Regards

Pokerstars Game Integrity

The data I've seen didn't suggest holecard sharing, as has been mentioned in this thread; however, Stars are in a much better position to analyse this, knowing all players holecards.

4somn and Samanta were both playing 200z briefly yesterday, but TianYuan is right, their volume seems to be much reduced recently (almost to zero; at least in the last few days, since I've been back from my holiday). Quite what this proves, I have no idea.

Also, quite what taking this "story" of hardly any interest to the general population to a ridiculous right-wing British newspaper (Mail) with an anti-gambling stance that hates anything not to do with shopping, telly or pets is going to achieve, I don't know

Games get tougher when you cannot use a bot to tell you what to do.

this - obviously

Oh, i think they are taking this very seriously. I am sure they are very busy disccussing this whole issue and what stance to take. Whether or not all of the accounts were bots/will banned is not a matter of just facts.

The more I think about it, the more I think that there is a good reason why they changed their ToS AND didn't ban these accounts for good. I suspect that what they used was not a bot per say but more of a program along the lines of what Skier intended to do, this way they were respecting the ToA or ToS but to me whether it is the bot completing the action or a human being it's pretty damn close to the same thing.

I just don't understand why would pokerstars not ban players like these when it's clear they were not playing 100% on their own as Sweing convincingly demonstrated.

It is almost impossible that they use something like Skier´s software. Skier´s software is just ok with current ToS as it is basically a program to navigate through charts very fast and efficient. As the use of charts is ok / cannot be permitted his software was found ok.

There are some things which make it very very unlikely that the plo-guys run a software that does not violate the ToS because of a lot of reasons:

1) You cannot put PLO in simple charts as there are far too many hands and far too many combinations regarding postflop. HU-SNG´s are a lot less complex

2) Skier´s software has already been approved by Stars. If their software worked the same they would not need to hide that. But in fact seregaxx explained here that he is not related to any of the other accounts and refused multiple times to explain why the stats could be identical.

3) Stars would have had enough time to review their software by now if it was provided and would have approved it already by official statement (as they did in the Skier-case pretty fast)

From what I understand, Skier's software was only PRE-flop which was allowable. And PS is now discussing changing PRE-flop tools (and in game tools).

The bots with their POST-flop stats so similar were clearly using something POST-flop that was illegal (lots of people use a HUD and don't have the exact same POST-flop stats, so it was not in game legal POST-flop software).

If bots they broke every rule.
If human using software, they broke POST-FLOP rules.
Either way they broke a rule and cheated. Period!

Its actually the opposite, they adjust perfectly to bet sizes.

The whole idea of playing GTO is to be unexploitable. So what does it exactly mean when it comes to being bet size sensitive? If we find a player that plays the same against a 60% pot size bet and a 70% pot size bet we can bet 60% with all our bluffs, because we will get the same number of folds anyway. With all the value hands we will bet 70% and get the same number of calls.
Someone who isnt bet size sensitive at all can be absolutely murdered by betting small into him with bluffs and big with value hands.
Someone who is overly bet size sensitive can be exploited by bluffing him with larger bets and value betting him with bit smaller bets where he will call everything.
Thats theory of poker, no secret knowledge by any means. The thing is that no human can get this perfectly right.

Now I will start guessing again. My intuition tells me that a perfect player will have the bet size sensitivity on flop around 1. Which means that if we bet double the amount into him we will get twice as many folds and vice versa. Lets see what Fedor thinks.

I have created 3 brackets for facing Cbet 40-50%, 60-75%, 80%-100% pot size bet. The biggest sample size is for the 60-75% bracket and I will use the value as the theoretical one. Fedor folds 32.5% vs 60-75% sizing, which means that he should fold 21.7% vs 40-50% size and 43.3 vs 80-100% size.



I had temporary problem with posting images, its all good now
It looks like Fedor and the rest of the crew have the bet size size sensitivity on flop equal to 1.

Schwein, can scientifically through statistical tests/methods be proven that the stat correlations between the accused players are not possible without the use of a software? I am asking this because in my opinion if they are still active that means PS is struggling banning them because the only evidence they have is the stat resemblance. I strongly assume that the alleged bots are real players who have a second fully segregated machine next to them and they just implement the suggested action by the software. In the bot forum I posted some weeks ago they were talking about a hardware connected to the second PC that captures the screen and recreates the action thus the so called "extensive arsenal of detection tools" from PS cannot detect them.

If i remeber KBE said smth that his professor is kinda interested into this topic, so may he can chime in and help us with this statistical prove?!

I know it's somewhat different, but statistical methods are used to catch cheating in chess (link to non-technical article) and give a very high level of accuracy.

No idea what methods Stars use, but I bet they're not this sophisticated yet.

That is a tricky question, one I am trying to answer from the beginning of this thread.

Let me start with an easier version of your question. Can statistical systems be used to prove that a player possesses a certain information? Absolutely. Someone with good data and proper statistical tools can calculate the exact chance of it. On a side note this means that its possible to construct a system that catches people data mining. I have started a new thread about it here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...ining-1543867/.

So for example a statistics expert could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Fedor knows the exact rank of his hand on every possible flop. He has to know it, because he folds a precise % of hands against various bet sizes. Post #1388.

This brings us to another question. Could he simply memorized charts for every single starting hand and every single flop? I would say that it is unlikely and its more probable that he has a program that feeds this info to him in real time.

So the goal should be to scientifically prove that Fedor has way more info then he could possible have if he used his own head and a HUD or any other legal program.

EDIT:

My view is that being extremely accurate is a sign of having info from computer program or precise charts for every situation. There are no charts for postflop PLO so it has to be a program that allows 27 people to be that accurate and close with their stats. This is something I am rambling about starting with my OP.

Just saw sussain briefly playing 100plo

Shimmy can you check the non showdown winnings of a bot when another bot is at the same table?

I checked data, including non-showdown winnings, before over a 300k hand sample of more than one bot at the same table and there was nothing unusual (they're losing 14.37 bb/100 in NSDW). They run slightly over EV, but nothing significant. Also, their winrate is lower with another bot at the table, as would be expected with another big winner at the table. Schwein has seen these results too.

They don't have to prove anything, to ban someone. They banned accounts before stating they don't have enough evidence to prove any wrong doing.

Ivanhoe wasn't even accused of anything afaik, they just didn't want him anymore :P

They run slighly over ev. I think that could be significant imagine they use the blockers and the card sharing in a smart way so lets say they will share the nut flush blocker 10% of the time when they play together. They sure will run all slighly over EV but nothing unusual.

^ this is just bs speculation that adds nothing, wish ppl would stop talking about using blockers when a) hardly any evidence for it and b) the possibility of the bots using blockers doesn't really change anything so stop wasting your time

Haven't had an explanation up until this date, and don't think I'll ever get one. I have not been accused of anything, they just concluded that I had to be banned for..something. Still the most frustrating situation in my life by far.