to me the showing up and playing for a couple hours here and there suggests testing new software - probably trying to vary each bot in certain spots to make it hard(er) to detect but still winning (even if at a smaller winrate)

I don't know what to make of this, are you for real?

Pokerstars bot detection sucks. Pokerstars thinks their bot detection is awesome. The former is true, the latter is not.

besides that if this would be an inside job/house bot, why they are all located in russia or ukraine or whatever and not complete random .... also a small winner or break even player might be a far better house bot, b/c money stays longer in the system and would be raked ... seriously dear rigged-tards, the thread is so derailed and i guess this makes the work for schweini and others really hard

On a side note looks like down sizing your cbets would be effective in gaining some value.

You do some awesome work, glad there's people like you out there questioning things.

Edit: so it's pretty much established there's hole card sharing going on aside from the bots?

Jesus Christ dandan is back with a vengeance

dandan's "wife" IMO

It tells us that there's this thing called WSOP going on at the moment, and most PS pros who regularly play these stakes (Roy, Lex etc) are there and thus unable to participate.

Please for the love of god stop talking out of your tender parts, your useless rants are just lowering the credibility of the work Schwein put in.

dan stop posting your god damn nonsense and giving out deadlines etc. like you are the one in charge of this case. i said it before, nobody chose you (or any other random who is not even directly involved in this) to be the players' spokesperson.
give stars their time, as they announced it is not a matter of days to investigate all of this. multiple users have been told by email that they would be informed once stars knows more and made a decision, until then just stop derailing this thread. if stars decision is unacceptable then we still have the option of going to media etc. but not now, ffs stop the deadline nonsense.

this is one of the dumbest things i've ever heard. "yeah let's make our bots look like bots and give them the same countries". just stop the inside job bs

I get why people are angry enough to be talking about civil action vs Stars or launching some media campaign but people need to just calm down. Take a deep breath and consider where we are and what our expectations are. Especially what expectations are reasonable in terms of time.

This thread where we first got traction on this started on the sixth June. Less than a month ago.

The best comparator I can think of that has been through a proper process end to (nearly) end, rather than Stars chucking out some unverified amount of compensation and it being case closed - which is not exactly a perfect outcome anyway - is the Darren Woods case.

That case of muti-accounting collusion cheating first broke on these forums thanks to a similar bit of player sleuthing in September 2011. That is a fairly simple case in many ways, it was Woods with a bit of money laundering assistance by his dad. Simpler than this, complicated a bit in that the cheating happened from the UK on non UK licenced sites but simpler than this.

It was December 2014 that Woods was convicted, January 2015 that he was sentenced and had £1m seized. It was May 2015 that 888 paid some compensation and i-poker still have not as far as I can find out paid any. Woods got 15 months but as a first time non violent offender he is likely out on a tag now. 3 YEARS+ to conviction, nearly four for any compenstion.

Meanwhile I'm still seeking clarity on how compenstion was calculated, why i-poker seem not to have paid it, how adequate the compensation was, whether Skrill and 888 and i-poker took first dibs at the money to get rakeback and commissions refunded to them before looking to refund any players, what lessons the UKGC draw from the case, what guidance on future actions will the UKGC offer as a result of the case.

Now with luck we might get some sense of closure via proper information disclosure on that case some 4 years after the storm broke, personally I still expect to be chasing up on it at 5+ YEARS.

In comparison here we are at about 5 weeks. The investigation is still active and ongoing. Stars and the UKGC are hamstrung in telling us anything of real interest in part because of data protection laws and the reasonable privacy rights of those accused but also because the investigation is ongoing so anything said might jeopardise the investigation or mess up some enforcement options.

Now I'm sorry if that all sounds a bit depressing. I hope that with Stars involved not 888, with the UKGC licencing them from the outset and so more actively involved in the process we can get that down, especially the time to first compensation payments (not final) but I would be setting the line on closure at the 2+ YEARS mark not the two month+.

There is nobody to sue (yet) - you can't demonstrate negligence and failure to compensate when it is still at the investigation stage. You have to get to exhaustion before resorting to trial not I'm a bit upset still, and they have not acted immediately as I want - especially when there has been no complaint that has been through the Stars complaint procedure (that for UK people complicates matters by having their Isle of Man regulator acting as their Alternative Dispute Resolution body).

I'm finding really hard to believe this would be picked by any major news agency, or if it would anybody to really care. "Bots playing obscure poker variant affected at least tens of people."

But huge props to schwein, really nice work.

no you're not
no you won't
no you're not
no you don't
if it walks like a duck..

The depressive thing is that they let those accounts play again, i don't care if it takes 10yrs to pay compensation - since i don't care about the compensation at all! But i want a fair playing environment - thats all we´re are asking for!
In 2/3 yrs online poker is probably close to dead so what do i care if those accounts get banned then, also this is like a green card for botters - "go ahead do it - it will take years til u´ll get banned!"

Lol obv this wouldn't be the headlines. More like "Huge Cheat at the Biggest Online Pokersite - ppl get cheated for millions - while Pokerstars making millions in profit by there self"

Oh the anti Gambling (but pro UK Casino) Mail group might well run a shock horror piece. The Stars suspects alone is $4m player losses, add in the rest and it would not be any real stretch to estimate £1m cheated from UK players.

That's a headline. It is a tarrible, crude, story detrimental to poker, lacking any detail or any solution but hey this is the Mail group we are talking about.

We can put the worst case interpretation if we want or we could just calm down for a while and let them get on with it.

They have to complete the investigation. If they let some suspect accounts run for a while and watch them so what? Hey they might even be innocent. We don't know the current status of Stars investigation, we shouldn't know the current status of their investigation

Let's stop assuming the worst, give them some time. I'm all for accountability and full disclosure but we don't benefit from roasting Stars based on speculation and their inability to respond properly now. We can only hope for a fuller picture once it is all wrapped up and the investigation done.

good post.
i think we have to divide two things people care about.

1) the alleged botters should be banned already. Not only at Pokerstars btw!!! the most depressing fact for most of us is that they are still able to play and it feels like they were detected ages ago (BUT THAT IS NOT TRUE, IT IS JUST A MONTH). it seems like a lot of players think that stars already had enough time to investigate them. i am not sure about what time it requires but i am sure it is not years and i feel it should be within 2-3 months

2) compensations. that is not so important right now as we need those players to be banned first and compensations won´t be paid in a short period of time anyways


@dan plz not only stop posting here but stop sending e-mails to pokerstars security too, please. there is a good chance that responding to e-mails takes their time instead of working with Schwein, investigating aso...

Well, I have no idea about british media so you guys probably know better, but I was just thinking is this really news to general public? General perception of poker players isn't the best one so will anyone care if players cheat each other - it would be totally different story if PS or its employees were somehow involved with this.

Party seems to be bot free at this point?!

The bots were reported to Stars in 2014. So it's not unreasonable to claim they had enough time to resolve this by now.

I'm not sure why the investigation matters now. They are able to play again; ie they have already probably managed to chip dump a lot of the $ out of the accounts.

A+ post.

Hmm, let us assume your speculation is accurate. Now what does that do to the wider investigation?

I don't want to get in to this stuff, indeed I don't think anyone here should. Indeed my advice is STFU for a little while and let the investigators investigate rather than second guessing them. we can hold them to account when they have had a chance to finish the job.

It isn't speculation though. They are actually playing.

Really ? 4Sominaire,Samanta and etc had the same stats and changed their playstyle overnight as some known banned botters. Yet they came back playing a few days ago. Seems like their investigation is completed and looks like stars made the wrong call imo.

I'm quite shocked right now about how this has been managed, for years players are getting the worse of it, every time. Gaming commission has to have greater powers or players have to unite. There is no liability for anyone in online poker which make me sad. People are going to beg for this industry to be heavily regulated as they seem to not be able to do so on their own.

you could be right. the problem is that we do not know how they were reported back then.
if it was something like "i think this guy is a bot, investigate plz" it might get ignored as they probably have a ton of these e-mails day by day and are just able to focus on the ones that are more promising.

and it seems like the guys who reported (straate and pastafiore?) have not been sure aswell. otherwise there would be threads like this one started by them.
and as far as i am aware the screennames that are discussed like seregaxx, fedor, mox, 4som, samanta have not been reported by Grethe, Oink who made the only solid report regarding PLO i know about (before Schwein´s report of course).

so, to me the time elapsed started couple of days after this thread has been started though i agree it sounds incredible that they have not caught them while investigating the reports of Grethe/Oink and Straate/Pastafiore