Why are you responding in those threads so angry and arrogant?

Look at the thread title of this one, who would have thought that using a software that makes you play accordingly will make you the biggest winner of the PLO 500 Zoom pool?

So why are you thinking it is impossible for any other player to actually have a similar program which gives him advice on how to play a certrain hand in real time?

I'm more angry at PA for fueling oil into the fire for no reason.
He is a big name, however one can know you as well, especially if one plays PLO.
PA is acting like online poker is dead like online chess and its so far from it.
He has nothing to back up his claims or showcase why the games are "not fair" besides "meh, lost a mill, games are not fair" while in reality he just can't be bothered studying various tools that actually need a time investment instead of "lol it's telling you what to do" (actual decision making software obv. being excluded).

This thread got created after undeniable evidence in form of statistics were available which are presented here - no panicking for nothing.
It also showed how bad the Game Integrity Team was doing their job once again but this time it's a pretty big deal and I hope Stars will do a serious overhaul in that section so that we actually get something positive out of this all. It would be the best move they could do in a long time. If they don't do it on their own we have to be pushing for it.

I obviously don't deny the decision making software (referred here as bots still), however as I said it has nothing to do with a gto solution for multiple reasons. The idea of it existing, being shared around semi-publicly and "us" knowing about it is too absurd and nothing but it. The software would be worth hundreds of thousands if it existed and keeping it a secret would be THE top priority for whoever owned it...
It would be funny if more people realized it is a joke/myth but if they take it for granted you know how it goes.

What I'm trying to say is that one has to be way more responsible when making such comments especially when you're someone known. Do your research and look for facts, use logic and be as precise as possible in such delicate matters.

Sorry for snapping a bit at you. After reading the PA thread and then seeing you write about a myth all over the place I was a tad annoyed. Hope you can see why now.

Thank you for the constructive post. I will reply in the Stars Reg thread to keep this thread focusing on the Bot Scandal.

I think I've covered this earlier when I said I don't know what is "fair" compensation. The problem is the unintended consequences of any fixed requirement to compensate all net losses.

It's a huge freeroll for players. If we beat the bot we gain, if we lose and they are caught then we get a full refund vs the bot.

If you have essentially a rakeback grinding bot then the compensation bill could easily be in the millions whilst other players have also won millions off them even if the profit to the botter is only a few hundred K.

The potentially huge liability of any mandatory requirement to compensate all net losses would mean that sites had a serious incentive never to accept that cheating/botting is proven and worse they would be incentivised to stop looking for it as if they find it then they get a huge bill, often out of proportion to all the rake on those crooked games. Even if they caught them early and recovered every cent the botter made to go to the compensation they would still have a huge liability - for doing a good job.

Now this is relevant because I do want the regulator to review and have oversight on compensation and the game integrity efforts of sites. I want the reporting they can give us - I'd even want them to look at guidance for minimum compensation levels but if you went for the maximalist position of compensate all net losses in affected games then frankly the whole business model for online poker is bust, they could not afford to detect botting or cheating,report it as legally required IF the compensation bill is way above the rake earned on those games and the funds seized.

The sites should never be able to profite from cheaters and therefor be incentived to let them playing/raking.

exactly

It is not a matter of "if"....they didn't. Plain and simple.

They claim "We also monitor all the hands we deal for any unusual statistical results." T

They have definetly dealt millions hands of unusual statistical activities... in different games.

Richards point was, that you can't expect them to pay all of the rake + winnings because their incentive to find out bots or say yes these are bots would be quite low just because it'll cost them a lot of money doing so.

So in a case where the poker site doesn't provide the safe and integer games they a) promote and b) are being paid for by us, we shouldn't ask for the money lost in these unsafe games because it would mean that the provider gets a huge bill? That doesn't make sense. It's their job to not let that happen in the first place.
Paying back the rake is in any case an absolute nobrainer, this is money Stars made without any real cost while they didn't provide a safe playing environment, so there is absolutely no argument to not pay back rake generated in these games.
As for money lost against bots, I see the point of players freerolling, but there is still Stars responsibility of providing fair games and the chance that the bots never get caught. I understand that this is a bitter pill to swallow for Stars, but it's their own fault as they failed to provide what they are being paid for by the players.

In regards to Stars having no incentive to find bots - there should be outside regulators involved in security at Stars, assuring that this situation will not happen.

You can't just say "yeah don't pay back all the losses you are responsible for" because it costs them a lot.

probably10% on stars low stakes are bots

Of course I accept that the sites have a duty to police the games properly and that we should get fair games. I also want the regulators involved but the priority has to be getting cleaner games. This means the regulator pushing sites to do more, monitoring their efforts, the cases investigated, the proportion caught by each site and at each site where the catching is done by the site rather than players.

Sites that don't do enough to catch cheats should be forced to by individual licence conditions added for them (to get to that we first have to get reporting in place BTW). This getting the regulator to demand reporting and proper resource on catching cheats is likely to be a significant additional regulatory cost for sites, even before we get to "fair" compensation. That cost ultimately comes from rake.

Just this week the UKGC have launched another discussion paper come consultation. This time on licence fees and how to charge sites. They go in to a lot of detail about what they spend the money on.

http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk...ting-fees.aspx

Issues like money laundering and match fixing, sporting integrity get multiple mentions. Match fixing stuff a special mention as a fixed cost due to the need to have in house expertise. The idea of the fees structure is that it should reflect the costs of regulating that operator/sector.

Poker gets no mention. Cheating is not mentioned. Prosecution gets one mention as a power, in a paragraph about how their strategy is to avoid the need to prosecute!

This may seem a bit rambling but I can see myself submitting to the consultation and saying that they have undercalled the work necessary for poker betting integrity, international liaison on that, reporting of it and yes the need to consider prosecution in multiple cases a year.

Now if you assume this needs full time staff and legal advice the poker cheating cost hit for the global regulator of poker is what? I'm not sure but I can't see it being change from £0.5m - This from a total budget of £13m. Call it 4% of the budget - they currently spend 6% on all "illegal enforcement" but that covers unlicenced gambling primarily. 6% is spent on "betting integrity". So it's pretty clear to me that doing a proper job on poker is a significant new cost they have not allowed for.

If they were to listen to me, then the result would be an increase in the casino licence fee, or worst case a supplementary poker fee, making poker less attractive to operators, adding costs on to players and potentially reducing competition further - it could have unintended consequences.

This is before we get to compensation - if sites that detect cheating have compensation rules enforced on them that guarantee that every time a cheat is caught they get a bill well beyond the rake from those games then the site has three options 1)not catch cheats (maybe even relaxing rules?) 2)stop dealing poker as it would become unprofitable 3) Increase the rake significantly.

Natural justice needs to be tempered with consideration of the impacts of unintended consequences.

outside regulation would be nice. i would furthermore love an independent institution running the rng and all the pokersites take it from there and build their skin.

it would prevent players from being cheated by pokersites and it would stop all the rigged discussions. to be clear: i do not say that the pokersites are cheating but there are cheating possibilities that cannot be ruled out and that are almost impossible to detect. so, it would be a good thing to close the holes.

having just one rng would also allow better botdetection and cheaters would be taken to court more often than nowadays because pokersites tend not to sue people. an independent institution would have no incentive to hesitate. what are the odds that stars/ipoker/party/888 takes at least one of those cheaters mentioned in this thread to a court?

why the heck RNG-testing. contrary to your assumption, that these are "almost impossible to detect", irregularities should be easy to spot. Besides that, some RNGs are getting tested by independent companies (b/c you can test streams of random numbers if they are truly random or just pseudo generated). And no test whatsoever would stop the rigged-tards to feel cheated.

the last paragraph makes zero sense at all ... why would "just one rng" be better, why do cheaters benefit from bad randomness, and why should poker rooms tend to sue ppl. it highly depends on what users have done and from which market the cheater comes from. an operator can't sue, if there's no written law, that would help them to sue. not to mention, that some markets are grey and there's not regulation so far. what you also should think of, if poker rooms would sue every cheat, this would mean higher costs.

the only scenario i could think about, is a dodgy operator using pseudo random numbers and cheaters can predict the card distribution. but if an operator is saving money in such a way, i highly doubt he has the financial power to sue anyone. besides that, these kind of operators tend to operate from a Caribbean island or somewhere else and any lawsuit would be a joke anyway.

The regulators have long been if anything too obsessed with RNGs- all the regulators cover RNGs in detail and requie certification, testing and retesting.

There has never been a case od a faulty RNG cheating players, we have had super users, sites running off with the money, cheats and bots galore and on those issues that really do affect players regulators are (or at least were for years) either silent, completely ineffectual or both.

RNG obsession is part of the problem not part of the solution. It lets regulators tick a box and then pretend RNG verification means it is job done.

i'm not sure about your comment about "never been a case" ... once heard a story about an early site which used pseudo numbers and some players found out and made big money. tbh, not sure if it's true and the guy talking about this (youtube video of persi diaconis talking about randomness) didn't mention the sites name.

anyway ... i replied to the potbet, because he/she assumed rng-testing would be the solution, which i (as you) strongly disagree. good regulation should focus on real threats

at least for 100 and 200 nl i would guess that number significantly lower. There are still suspicious accounts but nowhere near 10%

So this is probably just a post that make no sense at all, but i decided to post it anyway.

Ever since these bots got banned, i noticed some easten european accounts who berate me a lot after i win a pot. Usually it doesnt even really make sense, like they win 4 allins and after i win one they start berating. Probably either just coincedence or a tactic to tilt me... But since it might be a tactic of a botter to create a chatting / human history with some regs; I think i post this observation. People recognise this or is this just random?

I never get it in bad so they cannot really bithc. Havent seen that behaviour at all yet

I think something like this happened to me too month or two ago.. might be random though but it did seem weird.

What happened was that to be super open about the RNG a site published the source code. From that a team were able to reverse engineer it so that from their cards and the flop they could wotk out the rrest of the cards. That "fault" - trying too hard to prove it was random - was never used to cheat a player. Those that reverse engineered it told the site and let them fix it before they published their result/achievement.

In practice it might have been hard to implement a cheat in the time available post flop but the people who were able to do this were honest "white hats" anyway.

There has never been a case of a site having a bad RNG that cheated players or allowed players to be cheated. It s the bit that is most scrutinised and in many ways easiest to check as t is all centrally held and its output avaiable for analysis over huge samples by people with pretty basic tools designed to analyse their poker history.

There's a new russian on PLO100 and his playing style is like some combination of thoughtsaway and totalsuccess. His nickname is simpleme203, he is very aggressive, I've never seen him before and he is very good and has insane winrate. Can you please investigate him? I can provide with HH's. Who would've thought that first timer at plo100 can already be one of the biggest winners at the game? My bet is that he is a first reincarnation of previously banned bots.

^looks very much like a bot! 23/26 stats within 5% interval and most within 2% even though the sample size is not that significant yet.

Please report to Stars asap

fresh blood coming to the system

Watched Jason Carver's stream last night and he said Stars has 2k employees, 800 of which are in security. He made it seem like that was a good thing but in reality this whole thing makes 800 people look incompetent.

probably 798 guys in payment security and 2 guys for game integrity... or did Jason talk about the allocation of the 800 security employees?