I went through the first couple of pages only and not sure if already discussed but the reason why some good regs are having same stats as the alleged bots might be because the bot makers set their bots up considering the frequencies of the most winning regs at the games. Just something to think about.

Also this is getting some serious attention now http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/0...tion-21860.htm

I'm a semi reg on these games and once got my account locked for making a joke at a bad reg about Russian ptr (obv know what it is, but have never been there, I have more than enough data on my own HEM).

Good to know bots can run for months after being reported but an obvious sarcastic joke gets your account locked instantly, although it was only for a few hours.

The story has made it to pokernews http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/0...tion-21860.htm thats enough for me.

I will refrain from posting any new suspect names as advised by the PokerStars Game Integrity. I have edited my last post and deleted the 27th screen name. I was sending part of my research to the PokerStars bot team instead of making it public for the last 2 days. I have only more thing to post regarding the accounts mentioned in OP, it will help to improve the case against them even further but will not help to avoid detection in the future.

Looking forward to playing in safer games on PokerStars.

PLO bots has long been a standing problem in the online culture of poker. As one that has handled cases and seized tens of millions of dollars from online accounts for collusion, bots, et al, I can say with absolute certainty that this will continue.

Bot rings have evolved in complexity and ingenuity over the last 10 years. They are highly profitable businesses for those with appropriate technical acumen.

In the past, and still present today, they are easily recognizable through their playing fingerprint; the statistical similarity between the accounts on how they play give them away.

But things have evolved since then, and the better bot rings understand this and I would say they number in the tens of thousands.

New bot rings are a mixture of human + bot. Past security tricks like CAPTCHA pop ups are no longer useful, nor mouse movement monitoring.

Thousands of bots are still running today where trusted people are paid to watch over the rings to type in CAPTCHA pop ups as they arrive and monitor their playing fingerprint. If a bot becomes too close to another, they simply adjust relevant playing parameters making them nearly unidentifiable.

In the past, bot rings did not need to be profitable to make money; they simply needed to play thousands of hands and enjoy the benefits or rakeback and rewards. Nowadays, the software and real-time analyses are so complex they destroy the mid limit games.

My fear is that the bot rings pointed out in this thread are the less sophisticated types. There are bigger ones out there. Beware.

Exactly , you see so many pros still trying to encourage people to not go public with this. Its because even with the bots running they can churn out decent enough profits. So for them even this situation is ok . But wht I am trying to say is thats its high time someone took us seriously. *** if this ws a competetive market rake would be much lower . There would be no bots , ps could have a counter strike type programme where you need to allow a ps app to access all the softwares you are running. Thats how simple it is !!!!


Does ps want that ? NO. So the only way to invigorate online poker again is by reconstructing from the basics in term of rake , bots and everythin else.

N the only way that will happen is if stars gets a big shock and decline in player traffic after this situation.

Imagine being a strars manager. If you could get away with one bot ring after 2 + years by just refunding the amount lost and rake you would take this chance again and again ,

Dont stay quite people its high time we raised our voices !!!1
Shout it out to all the media outlets and contacts you have at your disposale.
Stars needs to get really affected by this situation for any long term resolution.
A few million dollars is ntn for them !!!1

Stars should probably get you and Willy on a plane to the IoM to help with the investigation. I have a feeling that you have better methods of finding cheaters than the Game Integrity dept does, and they might need to be brought up to speed. :/

i remember a buddy from a skype study group who had run up 100k losing it all over the course of last year in these games ... he described ridonkulous hands where he would 4bet AAxx and villains would call and snap off flop and river some bull**** with 6442s ....

bet he's kicking himself now ! dwight, if you're out there - i hope you're alive

Hi Guys,

I figured the following is worth mentioning as this has really blown up and I feel an obligation to share. I'm going to try to leave my opinions out of it until the end and try to just state the facts. I'm pretty biased, as I haven't been doing very well in these games during the last year and am pretty emotionally invested in the 'investigation'.

Almost a year ago now, I noticed FedorZayzev and Samantha81 (sp?) were playing at all of the same tables and never played heads up together or even tried to start tables. I also noticed all of their statistics were exactly the same. I had about 25-30 statistics on my HUD including preflop and postflop numbers. I had about 20k hands on each of them so it was pretty shocking to see that every stat was exactly the same. (There was only one or two stats that were off by only 1%). I also noticed their 'bet vs missed CB' numbers were extremely high outliers (I believe it was 73%, which was at least 20% higher than very aggressive regulars). Additionally their preflop statistics were much more flatlined positionally compared to nearly all the regulars at this time. It was an extreme rarity to have two players with a unique style who shared exactly the same statistics. I've never seen this in 8 years+ of playing poker online.

Naturally this seemed extremely suspicious so I asked a couple of friends to check their stats to make sure it wasn't just some crazy statistical coincidence. After my friends had gotten back to me with the same numbers I got pretty suspicious. I decided to warn all the regulars I knew at the current limits and notified them of my findings and suspicions. Additionally, I asked Fedor and Samantha why they had the same stats and Fedor told me they didn't know each other, while Samantha remained silent.

I decided to e-mail pokerstars and attempted to clearly articulate how suspicious/rare/statistically impossible this was and encouraged everyone else with the same findings to do the same. Pokerstars refused to take any immediate action and insisted they would look into it. Three weeks later they got back to me stating the players didn't know each other, were 600km apart, both play high volume, and their statistics were similar but not the same. They said that my reasoning would apply to most regulars. Again, Pokerstars refused to take any action.

I decided to respond repeating that their statistics were NEARLY exactly the same; emphasizing only one or two numbers were not identical and they were only 1% off. I asked if they had a statistician who worked for them to know the likelihood of this happening and they ignored me.

I've played over 5 million hands of poker (I'm in the VIP Club Hall of Fame) and I've never seen two players with such similar statistics, so I decided to e-mail them again. I emphasized that their statistics were a near mathematical impossibility and they should look into it further. I also asked again if they employed any sort of statistician in order to prove to me that this is not a near statistical impossibility. Pokerstars again ignored my question stating that they don't disclose their methods, suggesting it would only help the 'cheaters'. They also threatened to suspend my account for calling Fedor a cheater in chat.

At some point during this I also noticed Fedor and Samantha completely ceased playing with each other. One would play zoom and the other would play full ring. I thought this was pretty suspicious because they had played together nearly everyday at the same tables up until this point. Why would they suddenly change everything?

I'm pretty resentful about how dismissive and unresponsive Poker Stars has been to me throughout their investigation. This may be the only time I've ever e-mailed Poker Stars accusing anyone of cheating, so it's very infuriating. It has also been very obvious that cheating with AI and/or computer assisted software has been on the rise for quite some time now, so it's inexcusable for the 'industry leader' to be so ill-prepared (you know they have billions, right?). Unfortunately, it costs the ethical, loyal, honest customers the most. Pokerstars still gets their rake; we don't get our profits. I'm absolutely disgusted by their lack of foresight and blatant disrespect towards the intelligence of the regulars playing in these games that have brought this to their attention about a year ago.

Joey contacted me that all the botters must have made a major software update at the same time last year. The redline after steadily growing for all of them started to fall for all of them. I am not exactly sure what they changed, the postflop stats remained exactly the same. I have managed to discover that the play from BB was changed for all of them, they started to defend way, way wider. I am attaching screenshots for the alias as well as Fedor and Samanta, cant really tell who provided me those and those arent as good as I would like them to be because of the medium sample size.







There could be something else. Perhaps we could ask Fedor. He was playing a lot of tables on PokerStars today, maybe he could share a few things with us.

EDIT: Thank you for your insight straate, it was very valuable.

I am happy my investigation GTO lead to something as I spent far too many hours looking at every single account on RPTR


You might notice that the the time frame they made this change was the same time as something very relevant was released



Here are graphs for reference


http://gyazo.com/3c6e968bfef3fd6f6ecb71a5dfe0291a
http://gyazo.com/a7d65876dd5fa4acf2f082d55509040f
http://gyazo.com/d6e15699ad141e16dd9c0a71aa68822c
http://gyazo.com/0876e621be96f3653fb0534a71928972
http://gyazo.com/39b396343e9520f86263aacdb92f3f26
http://gyazo.com/6ce9d8b1e6c62fe0bd786fddf0d29e82
http://gyazo.com/50fc2d18fdc0ccc848dea8a523cd0e3a

This is one of the very obvious tendencies I was talking about in my original post about the PLO100 accounts that are now banned. Every single one of them stabs with an extremely high frequency vs missed cbets. In particular in position.

I assume you are refering to the fact, that their opening ranges arent very positional aware compared to most regs? Thats another particular stat, the banned account had in common (Something like 22% RFI UTG and 52% RFI OTB)

Sorry, 0ink, I haven't had a chance to read through this stuff. It was just linked to me from a close friend so I chimed in without reading most of it.

The fact that so many people have so easily noticed this a year ago really does show how absolutely incompetent PS 'investigations' are. How long would this be going on if we were to rely on pokerstars?

It seems the players who regularly play in these games do a much better job regulating the games than pokerstars. Historically, it's the players that uncover this type of stuff -which makes it even more infuriating that they didn't listen to the players.

What do you guys expect will happen if stars finds them "guilty"? Like do we get the money refounded we lost vs them? + The rake? Or will we just get like 50$ and it will be explained like last time that they can't give us any info on how the calculations were made?

I know i might be getting ahead of myself here, i'm just wondering if there is any precedent to this (i remember people talking about banned sng cheaters).

Thanks

Why do we pay rake if we dont have fair games ?

@ Straate1

No need for apologizing. I was merely confirming that your observations are in line with the banned accounts.

BTW can someone with Russian PTR access comfirm, that Emper0r92 hasnt played since Tuesday? According to regular PTR he hasnt played since Tuesday the 9th, but they dont track zoom. According to the screendump in OP, Emper0r92 pretty much never misses action on Wednesdays and Thursdays (fingers crossed that stars aint done banning accounts)

I think its worth noting that these bots are VERY sophisticated. Clearly they are playing just as good (or better) than many of the winning midstakes regulars.

With this assumption, it's very reasonable to think they'd be highly sophisticated at colluding, as well. In other words, they wouldn't be so obvious. It's possible to collude without any (or extremely circumstantial) evidence:

ie. If bot #1 folds a crappy hand with Ac, it could communicate to bot #2 on the same table and when a mono club flop hits and bot #2 can make a lot of money bluffing. The same can apply for flush draws, paired flops, etc.

Inherently, all of these lockdown board type collusion spots result in a HUGE advantage, as PLO equities normally run so close, that having a huge edge on these LDB's is a massive benefit.

I'm extremely suspicious that this is the case because Fedor and Samantha stopped playing together as soon as I started questioning them.

I emailed stars about 1 year ago with these suspected accounts in NL (d33xtr, here4busines, iddqd55) and was ignored. Not to sound conspiracy oriented but maybe someone up top knew what was going on and was getting kickbacks? Seems overly incompetent in general.

That seems a) something relatively easy to do and b) something that i suspect myself as well. There's definetly human components involved here. There's definetly a human that knows something about poker imo on each account. But stuff like that can be really huge. And it would be very easy to spot. As Stars have access to that, they should just look for example how often these guys repped a hand another one folded. Easy game.

That may be easy to 'spot' but it's not proof. I'm sure if there is 'soft-colluding' being done it probably isn't provable. Even if you found dozens of these spots it's still circumstantial at best.

I would say it's a bit more than circumstantial. Remember this isn't the court of law. Basically Stars can ban accounts if they have strong suspicions. If there's a pattern here, it imo can be proof enough. Like for example if you see that guy a) never bluffs w/o the A blocker unless guy b) folded the A blocker.

That should be proof enough if there's interest to find that proof.

Like i said it might be circumstantial in the court of law, but i think it would be enough to suppor the idea of fraud.

straate, sorry to hear of your situation. It's terrible. It really shows how absolutely scummy Stars is. They're not in a court of law and this doesn't have to be beyond a reasonable doubt. These guys are cheating and there's not a single doubt about it.







Much like Sam Rothstein says in Casino, "he's (stars) either in on it or he's incompetent. Either way he's (stars people in charge should be) gone."

That's a really good point. It's possible that situation could become obvious colluding if PS actually critically thought about things from a poker strategy perspective instead of just using algorithms, etc.

I don't have that much faith in pokerstars right now. I literally showed them a near statistical impossibility and they couldn't distinguish it from an ordinary occurrence. Maybe they should hire some ex-poker players to help them!

By the way, I just wanted to say thanks for all the work everyone has done with this. It would be great if we could double-check the conclusion of poker stars.

Eperor never played zoom this year at all, i think.

Played 500k hands myself and never seen him there. Sry if my Info is wrong.