And this is why bots don't have to be world class players to clean up. We humans mostly make money in poker on other people's mistakes and blunders, not on our superior play. Bots never tilt and presumably never make costly blunders, a phenomenal edge.

What was the first indicator that this 6 accounts might be bots?

Wasnt it, that you were going through your stats, find huge above EV runs of one/two alleged "bots", and then compare to any other stats that are close matches and then came up with bot theory??

It is not unlikely that there is/are PLO bots, especially on lower levels on various euro sites. However it is unlikely to put not one or two sophisticated bots on site, where there is not that much action in which they could get lost, but put right on 6 of them, and not vary their tendencies (which would be very easy, especially one of your "indicators" which is timming here).

Your sample size is also too low to analyse stats effectively, same goes for EV disparity, therefore we cannot thoroughly compare their betting/calling/folding tendencies on various board textures, that could/would occur over higher sample size.

As was mentioned before - given the fact presented are inconclusive at least, I am more inclined to "same coach/stable/guidelines" theory at this point. However I do not say it is not possible that these accounts are in fact bots.

I am not sure about ipoker's safety measures - I would assume they are close to nonexistent. Therefore with this impression I've got, it wouldn't be that hard to get a bot running on ipoker for a long time.

Also +1 to bots not needing to play perfect poker. Their consistency is what gives the edge over humans. I switched to pokerstars a little more than a week ago and I can say the games are very different. You are getting into a much more nuts over 2nd nuts situations that couldn't have ever happened on ipoker against these players.

There's 400k hands of Anarkii and 150k+ hands of everyone else. Not enough of a sample size?

I have personally found the games very different on ipoker compared to Stars. I thought maybe it was just sample size / variance + increased rake, but this makes me question whether there's more to it than factors attributable to me.

^^ my mistake,,,was assuming that the number of hands shown on the 1st pic was their total database. Did not catch the total hand numbers in the 2nd file..

do they not use auto-fold ever? seems very odd for a normal player.

These guys could be making algos in trillion dollar financial markets but they chose to make a bot that plays small stake poker. lel

if you think financial markets are anywhere close to as 'beatable' as small stakes poker, maybe. thats pretty delusional tho.

nope

or they were smart enough to test out the waters at lower stakes and see if they went undetected....possibly google searching their own botnames etc

given that many sites still reward volume (iPoker still does?) this is where the meat is for a budding botter. to show that they care, sites offer the same absolute amount of rewards for lower as for higher stakes games.

here is a stack off by stonecrusher. maybe he was tilted but a winning player wouldnt stack off there...makes it more likely he is a bot?

***** Hand History for Game 1111111111 ***** (IPoker)
€100.00 EUR PL Omaha - Sunday, September 28, 10:31:19 ET 2014
Table Aggius (Real Money)
Seat 3 is the button
Seat 1: Player1 ( €414.36 EUR ) - VPIP: 24, PFR: 18, 3B: 11, AF: 3.1, Hands: 912
Seat 3: Player3 ( €91.00 EUR ) - VPIP: 28, PFR: 19, 3B: 6, AF: 1.9, Hands: 164
Seat 6: Hero ( €100.00 EUR ) - VPIP: 36, PFR: 21, 3B: 8, AF: 3.0, Hands: 19536
Seat 8: Player8 ( €103.70 EUR ) - VPIP: 29, PFR: 21, 3B: 8, AF: 2.4, Hands: 2828
Seat 10: Player10 ( €48.95 EUR ) - VPIP: 24, PFR: 18, 3B: 11, AF: 3.1, Hands: 912
Hero posts small blind [€0.50 EUR].
Player8 posts big blind [€1.00 EUR].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ Qh Jd 8h Qd ]
Player10 folds
Player1 raises [€3.00 EUR]
Player3 calls [€3.00 EUR]
Hero raises [€12.50 EUR]
Player8 folds
Player1 calls [€10.00 EUR]
Player3 calls [€10.00 EUR]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Qc, Th, Js ]
Hero bets [€20.00 EUR]
Player1 calls [€20.00 EUR]
Player3 raises [€78.00 EUR]
Hero raises [€67.00 EUR]
Player1 calls [€67.00 EUR]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 9h ]
** Dealing River ** [ Ad ]
Player1 wins €289.00 EUR from main pot
Player1 shows [3s, Ks 5c 9c ]
Player3 shows [7d, 8c Td Ts ]

if there are several bot accounts at one table, the bots - if they are 'connected' - could have a huge advantage sharing the hole card information. as mentioned previously itt, maybe some real players have some sort of program, that will them tell, what to do.

e.g. a program, that reads the HUD-data and the hole cards from the 'other bots' and gives you additional infos.

I wouldn't assume they are close to nonexistent. I am not saying they are good compared to Stars (Stars is very good at this by comparison), but they definitely have them.

Very rarely (I'd estimate 3% tops). One spot in which I think they have a tell is when they are say the BTN and a player in the CO tanks way down and then times out and they still take their regular time to decide whether or not to fold and then fold. This has nothing to do with balancing your timing anymore.

these screen names play different vpips and pfr's from my hand sample on them

Make sure you are filtering for 6 players only and for one stake only.

This is why OP posted Pokertableratings data as well as data from his own database, since this openly verifiable by viewers of this thread. I can assure you the data was unadulterated by OP. I have the same findings in my own personal database.

Surely someone in the 2p2 community has a way to contact playtech directly?

If the skins look into this and notice that these potential bots are some of their biggest rakers then it seems like they would have very little incentive to pursue it further.

This seems to be the problem with the network skins model, its just so easy for them to pass the buck back and forth to maintain the flow of rake and ipoker have shown many times that they couldn't care less about 2p2 being plastered with threads about bots on their network.

If there isn't any action from the skins or from playtech can we elevate this to a regulator? Most of these regulators seem pretty clueless which would make it futile to stick a bunch of HEM stats under their noses and expect them to do something, but if the complaint is that the sites didn't even try to investigate then that could be a good angle?

I guess though to do that we'd have to know what skin(s) the suspected accounts were playing on and ipoker are not going to disclose that information.

I haven't looked at many other ipoker (potential) bot related threads so feel free to educate me about how its all been done before and none of the 'regulators' care.

You can contact Playtech directly as a player:

http://www.playtech.com/contact_us/players_inquiry

I also contacted Pokerstrategy through their main bot thread (German) and Pokerstrategy is owned by Playtech:

http://de.pokerstrategy.com/forum/th...7#post14824977

In addition to this, Paddy insured me that they forwarded the matter directly to Playtech and I don't think that they are lying to me. I think most of the major skins take cheating allegations quite seriously, especially since they have the most to lose from scandals. Some of the smaller skins are in more of a freeroll situation.

My intial reasons to suspect bots:

1)Unnatural timing on several players
2)Matching hud stats on the players with unnatural timings
3)The group of players with matching timing and stats seemed to adapt to my game simultaneously*

After this I combined an alias of the players with similar pre flop stats. I noticed the alias had a significant EV disparity compared to their observed winnings. (This group had more players than the reported accounts.)
High volume iPoker player alias with very different preflop style (vpip >30) had somewhat high EV difference to the other direction.

EV-disparity between these groups is worrirsome.
However there might be natural explanations (selection bias, variance) to it so we don't want to emphasize it.


*Documented case of NL bots adapting as a group
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...-ring-1074250/

at least we are pretty close now to prove that there are still humans at the iPoker tables.

freewilly, can you show NVG that you are not a bot?

pain in the ass to read this hh. whats your screenname on ipoker? im playing the 100plo tbls aswell and dont think that there are any bots underway to be honest

It's mainly PLO 50, but one of the suspected accounts also plays 100.

Speaking of, what is Potato doing at PLO100 alone? Why did I see Anark down at PLO20 this August at peak hours? Is it also part of the wise 'group adaptation' / flying under the radar?

Just because a player is a nit doesn't make him a bot. Also, if these "bot" accts which I'm somewhat skeptical they are at this pt are playing a static 19%vpip/5%3b preflop strat and not adjusting, they should be easier to play against and take less $ out of the games than typical competent ss/ms plo reg. The 50pl games do tend to be horrible on ipoker due to all these rb pro nits playing infinite tables tho

I think the part that is most worrisome is the collusion concerns. The graphs at the end seemed to indicate that could be happening w/ fact that when board is paired they are winning a lot in non-sd, whereas similar accts hemorrhaging $ at non-sd in those spots. Which makes me think they could be using knowledge of extra hole cards to always bluff-raise paired boards whenever one of the blockers to trips was in his partner's hand. But it's a <10k sample size, and also these accts could be in a staking/coaching group or something and have been taught to attack lockdown boards more than typical reg

The possibility they are using some automated preflop software package seems very reasonable too, and don't think that would be against the ToS

Wasn't saying that. What I tried to emphasize was that these players seem to lack certain human errors in their game, which do happen in different games (namely stars) quite frequently.