who was it? you can divulge his name no?

Schwein, you should seriously look into doing some kind of consulting type work.

So confirmed Ongame is safest? Doubt the guys who own the bot will insert it in stars, ftp, 888 and ipoker, but miss out on ongame... They probably tried but got banned

The latest reply from Pokerstars as its a generalised answer I'll publish here. I take note that what they are saying makes sense. This is not going to be a quick investigation.
> Thank you for your email.
>
> I can only confirm that the investigation is still ongoing. Once a resolution has been reached, it will be communicated to players accordingly. Any players deemed to have been harmed by unfair play will also be notified and offered compensation. I realise that this isn't very informative, but I hope you can understand that I'm simply unable to comment on an ongoing investigation. I'm afraid that I'm unable to provide a timeline either as there are many moving parts that can be unpredictable. I can however say that it is unlikely a resolution will be reached within the next several days.
>
> Additionally, as we have chosen to be based in a strong regulatory regime, a high standard of proof must be satisfied, and accused players must be given the opportunity to defend themselves. This helps to ensure that players rights are protected, and that legitimate players such as yourself do not have their accounts wrongfully closed, or their funds wrongfully seized.
>
> I regret that I'm unable to provide you with the answers you seek at this time, but I assure you that we are working to resolve this in as timely a manner as possible, and moreover, to reach the correct resolution.
>
> On another note, thank you for your feedback on permitted third party software, which will be taken into consideration while we re-evaluate our rules.
>
> If you have any other questions or concerns in the meantime, please let us know. Thank you once again for your continued patience.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Ian Y
> PokerStars Game Integrity Team
>
> >

You should also consider creating a simple wordpress like blog similar to that of the late diamond flush if you feel that you aren't getting the results the issue deserves.

So what will stop them from coming back with new accounts? I see that people asked this question a few times.

The following system could help.

A) I would create a database with distribution of HEM stats for every player on Stars. Lets take the postflop Aggresion as an example. Thats how it looks like for one of the DBs I have.



Such DB should be updated on regular basis to account for changing demographics.

B) Next things to do is describing every single botter that was caught. By describing I mean creating a record with screen name and statistics. For the statistics I would use the value from HEM and add a percentile rank, from the DB described in point A), to each of the statistics. The ones that are below lest say 10% percentile or above 90% are extremely useful (lets call them outlier stats).

C) Once A) and B) are ready I would create a giant spreadsheet with all the stats for everyone that plays above a certain numbers of hands. Now its easy to check if any of the known bots is being run on another account. Its enough to filter the spreadsheet for the outlier stats and we will get a really short list of suspicious accounts that can be checked manually.

Its not a complete description of a system, just the gist of it. I didnt write any specifics here but I do have a lot of ideas how to build something like this. If done properly it could be extremely powerful.

When searching for botters on other rooms I did the poor mans version of it. Uploaded the hands from Party, 888 etc. Opened the opponents tab, filtered for everyone over 10k hands, saved it as a .csv file. Then I uploaded the file to google spreadsheet. Filtered it by WWSF, postflop aggresion, fold to flop Cbet and 3bet/sqz ratio and this left me with around 30/500 names. Checked those manually. The opponents tab is awfull because it cant be customized and I had to use the stats that are there and not the most useful ones, still it went pretty smoothly.

I have mentioned in my earlier posts that I was emailing Stars with patterns or stats that are rather unique to the botters. Basically those patterns were outlier stats and I found a good number of those.

Schwein, if Stars would hire you, I'd sleep much better.
Thanks for your outstanding work.

really feel hem should change this. Would make it so so so so much more easier imo to catch "clusters" of potential botters. Infact why do they not allow you to add more stats/filter between stats?

Schwein in my opinion should be paid some kind of fee for helping out other players but by also saving Pokerstars anymore embarrassment. It took Schwein and his statistical results to literally get at least 2/3rds of these bots removed. You have saved the integrity dept in the long run a lot of money and undetected without your work the compensation would be huge and I have no doubt a hell of a lot more bots or colluders starting up. This is not just a stars thing as its across most online networks. I think any account that can play 100,000's of hands per year with a steady incline needs looking at from now on. It's scary that they crush PLO and this is by far the game with the most variance of any game. Limit Holdem has been cracked and no limit Holdem not far off but PLO? I still think real time hole card collusion sharing is a major part of this. I've gone through a load of algorithms thinking how can this happen and I'm not even close to thinking we have such an intelligent BOT. My guess is data key logger or compromised accounts? Idk we have to wait and see what the findings are.

Thank you Schwein, Richas and Oink et al.

Schwein do we know the statistics or are able to find out what these "Bots" all-in" stats are.
1) pre-flop all-in
2) post flop 4th and or 5th card all-in against Rec or Reg.
3) the EV of those all-ins or say 30%bot VS 70% hero and Bot wins both runs?
4) need stats on how far disadvantaged bot is on both runs versus Hero's 90% odds and bot ends up binking both runs?

I don't have the RPTR data you have or I'd try and emulate it myself. But this PLO Bot thing is one hell of a headache as just when you think you might have solved it, another variable comes Along and start again!

This.

Stars should pay schwein a high salary too

cleaned up some posts from this thread.

dandan, quality > quantity. you might not realize that you post a lot, but you do. so tone down a bit please.

I am as fascinated as the next guy with progress but today we are at a very different stage to when the story broke. We had a situation where there was inaction and public discolure of the scale of the issue was important, where getting other players to help was a key part of taking the invstigation forward.

Now we have investigations under way, we also have potential criminal prosecutions/investigtions to consider. Now the balance of benefit from further disclosures has changed. Details on who - and how they are being detected has lots of interest to us as spectators but it is not in the public interest to let mere curiosity win out over all else.

Giving those being investigated a running commentary can only help them not cheated players. Stars has legal and regulatory rules to follow and that includes confidentiality for the suspects and on the whole investigation. Schwein is rightly working within their constraints too.

There are a shed load of VERY GOOD reasons not to have a running commentary and not to disclose further suspect IDs here. I will not go in to all the why's here...that would make me guilty of jeopardising the investigation with mere idle speculation but if you have a think about it I'm sure everyone who has read this far can THINK of a few good reasons NOT to give a running commentary on the case now.

This is of course different to full disclosure of the outcome later, likely much later...as in years not months, weeks...never mind daily or hourly.

Schwein, you should get a statue. Keep up the awesome work. You're really helping the community here.

Yeah +1
Thanks a lot!

God this is depressing. I'm looking through my database and thinking how many bots could have colluded against me on winning poker and party too.

Really appreciate your support guys. I am almost done here, so lets wrap things up a little bit.

In my previous post I have briefly described a more systematic approach to finding other clones of a known bot. It was a 3 step process that included calculating the distribution of stats, finding the outlier ones and creating a spreadsheet with all the frequent players on a Pokersite. Then its enough to filter the spreadsheet for the outlier stats allowing for a margin of error. The list of suspects will be really short. Once we have the list of suspects its time to calculate how different they are.

Lets go back in time a few years to 2010. http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/bot-ri...erstars-13513/ PTR uncovered a NLHE bot ring with the help of players. The PTR guys have written down all the major stats for the alleged botters, calculated the Euclidean distance and came up with a very rare outlier stat to further proof the bot theory (the outlier stats was raise/folding from BB if there were limpers, it was over 99% for all the now banned botters). Sounds familiar?

A much more interesting challenge is finding botters if we dont have any idea what they may look like, but that can be also done fairly easily as long as there are at least 2 of them in the player pool.
Once again I would create a giant spreadsheet with stats for everyone that played above a certain number of hands. Now I would substitute the stats for the percentile ranks.

If a stat has the normal distribution then its much more likely for a couple of guys to be within the the blue part, then in the red part of the picture below simply due to large size of population in the blue part. Outlier stats once again!



I mean having the C/R flop within 2% of another guy is one thing if its a common value, and a lot of accounts have it so close, and its another thing if its also within 2% but its an outlier value shared by only a couple of accounts.

I think the method I have used in my OP is good also, but the one with percentile ranks would be way, way better. I have considered standardizing the stats in few other ways but the one with percentile ranks is by far the best one. The question, what kind of stats to use is an interesting one. Better not to make such suggestions in public.

So now that we have a standardized spreadsheet for everyone its time to compare accounts in pairs (calculate the squared distance). Afterwards we sort the list bottom-top. I dont know what kind of value would mean that its 2 botters and what value would mean that its 2 humans playing similar by coincidence, but there is one thing I do know, the pairs that made it to the top are definitely worth looking at. If the top looks like account A similar to B, B similar to C and A similar to C then its very likely that its a cluster of bots.

My conclusion:

I have talked to a guy that is knowledgeable about database coding and creating software that would do what I have described above would be really cheap and simple. Once again I dont want to go into any specifics, but the possibilities are endless and the amount of common stats that converge quickly is fairly big also. There is no such thing as human stats or botter stats, but the thing is that running the same bot on 2 different accounts will produce a lot of identical stats and that is why its so useful to look for clones.

I know that the sites catch plenty of botters and have really sophisticated systems of detecting them, but it looks like they lack tools for proactive statistical analysis of the field. If they had such tools, the 2010 case or the one here with PLO bots would never happen. Or maybe the sites do have such tools but not good enough ones and really need to step up their game. I strongly believe that online poker can be extremely safe due to the high transparency and enormous amounts of data on everyone.

Excellent job Schwein.

The following is purely anecdotal so please delete/ignore if needed, but I swear I've seen some new Russian accounts pop up with grinder stats in the last few days. Am I alone in seeing this? Very good chance I'm just more observant/paranoid now and they are longstanding accounts.

I've noticed two "new accounts" within the last week, that I'm following closely

+1 Schwein, you deserve a big payday from Stars, hope they give it to you
+1 Dandan dont post in this thread

I hope there are now tools to identify possible botters even with 10k hands or less, and if thats true its gonna be too big of a risk for botters to make new accounts and deposits if they get busted early and are unable to cashout.

anyone that played with the affected accounts on 888 contact support or anything over this, i played a tonne of hands with the accounts as did a few regs there at the time, chavukk was pretty decent but did do some bad things, it was suprising how similar some of the bots play was tbh especially after reading over the account names, funny i didnt think much of their game but chavuks and even then i thought he was a bit spewy ha

What about the other networks? Are known bots still playing?

accounts looking to cash out that are new and play more than 1 table of PLO should be looked at in detail

Pokerstars should investigate deposit/withdrawal patterns the same way they should be investigating correlations in player statistics. I am not privy to how the majority of high volume players manage their online rolls, but I'm guessing botters are maintaining skeletal rolls and frequently withdrawing/depositing/transferring to reduce their loss if they get caught. The only way for them to disguise this behaviour is to reduce their cashout frequency and thus increase the amount they lose/players are refunded when they get caught.

I'm not sure it will bear fruit, but it's worth looking into.

what about this: if PS decides to return some of the bots' funds to the cheated players 10% of it goes directly to Schwein? I think he deserves at least some kind of compensation for his great effort.