Or maybe Stars read this thread and does not want people to check whether they are frozen/banned atm or not and allows incoming transfers^^

I have not seen Fedor, Susaanin, Samanta or 4somn playing last days. I have almost never played/seen mox anyways (probably different limit). One of them is still active at Ipoker.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=1185

This great post by Chuck highlights Pokerstar's incompetence.

he just wrote another, both are viewable below:

get your **** together, stars!

I followed the thread so far, didn't post because so far I had nothing of interest to bring to the table.

Can provide a little food for thought at this point.
When Chuck Bass talks about the complete denial in stars' security team, that can be explained with "illusory certainty" as described in the best-selling book 'Thinking, fast and slow' by Daniel Kahneman.
He explains that the illusion of competence is so strong that, even after being presented with data showing the uselessness of expert predictions in one particular field (like f.e. the stock market) and proving the overwhelming effects of randomness on the outcomes, those experts will continue to believe in their abilities no matter what (in truth many "failed" experts are just as capable/incapable as them). The gained knowledge about their incompetence gets buried immediately in the backyard of their brain as if it didn't exist. Trying to convince them of their inabilities results in nothing, at most it angers them, just like Chuck described.
Denial is such a fundamental function of the brain and we can't blame these people. Their whole existence is at stake, so their brain protects them from losing their jobs, or falling into depression, etc.

Everyone is biased all the time, some are just informed about it and can work against it.

I doubt it's denial. I just think there's a lot more for the security department to consider than catch and ban every other cheater out there.
There certainly is enough evidence out there for them to just close all those cheating accounts for good. They just don't want to at this point.

It destroys my soul slowly seeing some of the accounts still able to transfer money

Disgraceful

If they let a competent poker player view the hands when these players are at the same tables I bet you could see they know each other hole cards

The "experienced poker players" that work in stars security department haven't got a clue.

This is unacceptable. I think now it's time that we decide on a deadline for Stars. If they can't get their **** together until x:y:z we bring the collection of all facts to news papers/sites.
I propose this Saturday.

just no.

can u elaborate on this no?! i also think going public as possible is the only right choice now! What u wanna do? Just suck it down and let Stars keep ****** us in the ass while making millions on our backs? sure it will be bad for poker - but this news will not keep the addicts away from playing! but it puts stars the gun on the breast to do something! seems like they don't understand it otherwize.

So basically, large bot ring found, millions taken from poker economy.

Bots identified.

People running bots allowed to take their $ and in some cases keep playing?

What an advertisement for botting....

some attention seeking moron who loves drama has probably already contacted lots of people. I'm sure that some people that could report on this actually know about it. Nobody cares though. Somebody outlined why earlier but I don't care to go back and find it but needless to say I 100% agreed. Pretty ironic that you're giving them the "deadline", yet they're the ones that have everybody by the balls.

My advice: Go for it.

They probably said sorry. From Hasting's NVG thread i gather that whatever you do, a sorry will fix it.

Is someone able to check with stars if the investigation is still ongoing?

After all the fees that I have paid for PokerStars, you have to love their automated responses...

Thank you for contacting us. Your email was escalated to me as a member of the PokerStars Game Integrity Team.

We are indeed aware of the online discussions alleging a group of accounts to be operating poker bots. Please rest assured that we do not tolerate such activity on PokerStars. We have an extensive arsenal of detection tools in order to ensure that each player is a human being and playing without the use of prohibited programs.

Firstly, we note that the discussions include a list of accounts that are assumed to have been closed due to lack of recent activity. We can confirm that a number of these accounts have indeed been closed for violations of our Terms of Service, but this does not hold true for every account mentioned. Due to our strict privacy policy, we are unable to disclose User IDs in the context of fraud, nor offer comment as to why accounts we might have previously investigated may not have any recent activity.

As for the numerous active accounts mentioned, we do understand the concerns surrounding their playing statistics. Our access to all hand histories on PokerStars allows us to analyse any similarities in playing statistics between these accounts, as well as every other account. However, similar playing statistics alone is not sufficient proof wrongdoing, and we must do our due diligence to ensure that the correct resolution is reached. Our investigation includes, but is not limited to, reviewing their software and playing environments, how they interact with the PokerStars client, as well as analysing their activity in real-time and conducting Turing tests.

We understand your eagerness to have this situation resolved as quickly as possible. We kindly ask for your patience while we thoroughly investigate this matter. The integrity of our games is of paramount importance. There are large amounts of money being moved around our tables, and to ensure that nothing inappropriate is taking place, we must conduct complete reviews. These are serious matters, which must be reviewed carefully. Such investigations do not take minutes or hours, they can take days or weeks. Allegations of cheating in poker are very serious. As such, we cannot do this lightly. Due process must be followed.

PokerStars is regulated and subject to the rule of law. We have chosen to be based in a strong regulatory regime because we believe that regulated online poker is in the players' interests, and because it is good for the industry. A natural consequence of this is that accused players must be given a presumption of innocence, and that we must consider their situation fairly and reasonably.

At this time, we are unable to provide further comment on this case as the investigation is still ongoing. We are doing our utmost to investigate this matter thoroughly in order to reach the correct resolution.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter, and for your continued patience. We will contact you with further details as soon as we are able.

Regards,

Ian Y
PokerStars Game Integrity Team

So this is really cliffs? I just got linked to this thread from the NVG thread

No one has received a response from Stars other than a form email, correct?

I'm doing some Turing tests myself, and by analysing their activity in real time, I've established that the Game Integrity team does not possess the ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
Alan Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine that is designed to generate human-like responses.
Pokerstars does not seem capable of human-like responses. Ergo, it is a machine. A money-printing machine.

b/c it will OBVIOUSLY scare the **** out of the fish. Which is NUT LOW FOR POKER EVER. jfc

In light of this I agree that people should be trying to get as much publicity as possible. Bad headlines forcing sites to take this stuff more seriously is preferable to it continuing unpunished, or even half heartedly punished.

Its insane that a company the size of stars has a security department that has been outperformed by one guy with a PTR account and some spare time, and insulting that the profits and rake aren't being paid back to players even when they are caught.

No one has received a clear response other than a for email yes. Because of that we cannot be certain of what is going on and the following is speculation at this point but the fact that they are able to receive money certainly points towards the fact that stars is letting them withdraw their funds. Most likely because they cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt or something. I would be very astonished to see them playing again though. Most of the time stars will deem them "suspect" and as such will bar them from playing on stars any further.

Some people would say that statistics indeed are a sufficient proof. For example, all of us.

I was away for a while. Everyone has bills to pay etc.

I discussed previously how the alleged bot accounts changed their stats, namely BB defend vs BTN, around the same time. I got plenty of archive of HH from HH-dealer for free, for which I am very grateful. It looks like they didnt change roughly same time but simply overnight, same day.



Those are 3 alleged bot accounts compared with banned IPushMyPrius account. Checked the suspects on IPK and they all changed around the same date +-2days. I chose the defend against minraise, because its the most outstanding one, the 3 main suspects have 99%+ in October.

Now I see only two possible explanations for this, they all work closely together or they have the same program that is updated for all of them same time. Samanta and seregaxx were kind enough to chime in and assure us that they dont work with anyone else, so...

If this is not enough for Stars than...

theyve been proven incompetent, uninterested and greedy as ****

I got a non generic reply from PokerStars two days ago. They assured me that they have made big progress with the whole case.
The cliffs can be found here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=1230 and I totally agree with them.

To main difference between my views and the ones shared by PokerStars Integrity Team is that I do think that certain similarities are actually a sufficient proof of botting.

Some similarities can be explained just by coincidence, or having common stats in a large population while others cant be. There is whole science based on it called statistics and terms like statistically significant or 6 sigma events are actually precisely defined. Lets take at a look at my previous post, the one with BB defend vs BTN. Are those numbers alone proving that they are botting? Absolutely not. Could it happen that 4+ unrelated accounts changed their strategy so much and its just coincidence? Well, the chances are slim to none. I think this screenshot alone is solid proof that they are somehow related.


In theory its possible that someone plays blackjack and somehow always makes the correct adjustment for the number of high cards in the deck. In practice though its enough for casinos to ban that guy for using the hi-lo card count.

In theory its possible that someone writes a PHd dissertation that is a copy of another science paper but in practice it will get him expelled for plagiarism. If he decides to take the "You cant really tell how I came up with my dissertation just by looking at the final outcome. You have to also look at how I wrote it page by page to concluded if I copied someone else work or came up with it by myself" line of defence he will additionally become the laughing stock of the community for years to come.

When it comes to poker it can be hard to tell which similarities can be a result of coincidence and which cant, but the sites have to start writing algorithmic systems to do it, otherwise we will see a lot more cases like the one in this thread.

Same preflop stats can actually be explained by having the same chart. In another thread skier explained that he is supplying such charts to his students and since charts arent against the rules everything is fine and clear.
It gets more complicated when it comes to PLO postflop play. Since there are no charts for deep postflop cash games, extremely similar stats have to be either same person on the accounts or same bot. I mean 25bb preflop holdem can be charted on few A4 pages but charts for 100bb postflop omaha would have to be the size of Kazakhstan or Russia.

I wrote a summary of my methods and concluded that everything I did could be done a lot faster with proper software http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=1192
Implementing something like this and then slowly building upon it would be a really good idea.

Cliffs:

I believe that extremely similar stats actually prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is using software to assist his play. The 45+ accounts I found across all major poker sites do have extremely similar stats and I think they are botting.