lol.. looks like you volume sucks and you have no reg friends at all

Plenty of posts on this forum of players being refunded over the years.

We might need to come up with a question or two in order to be able to post to this forum. Something like "Do you think Stars RNG favors certain players/groups over others?" If you answer yes you probably shouldn't be allowed to comment.

I'm not trying to be mean, but the rigtard crap is clouding up what otherwise could be a very important discussion about investigations, cheating and transparency (both for players and pokerstars).

I knew you would finally come up with something to stop me from posting.

I think that its very good that stars be aware of bots, its very good for the regs, but the investigations shouldnt cost more than 2 or 3 weeks to a player, its very unfair have your account blocked if you dont do anything wrong.

About favours to some people/groups , i think that if you think a site its rigged, better dont play there.

I think that's a great point, totally on topic.

Watergun perhaps can answer, but I'm curious why it would take even 1 month after a player has turned over all info (answered all questions) to either ban or unlock that player's account.

Even in a situation where say 50 players are being investigated, you give each player a deadline in order to turn over information.

A question for the thread, are players regularly being locked for several months before hearing back?

Think how long it takes for the actual judicial system to fully investigate a case. Sometimes (thankfully not often!) an innocent person will be incarcerated for quite some time, by mistake. Things take time.

Also remember - no matter how much you may have come to depend on having access to PokerStars player pool for your income, however much you consider it "your job" or the like - you have absolutely no right to play there. They may refuse access to anyone at their whim, as can most any business - excepting matters of race and the like. If you're a reg at $30 spins, they aren't your employer. They don't owe you anything, no matter how much you think the rake you paid entitles you to. They could just insta-nuke any account they feel "might be a bot", and they'd prob do just fine. Them taking time to actually investigate and let you back if they decide you are innocent, is them doing you a good service. Yeah it won't feel like that when you're banned for a month with little communication. But it's true, and I'm sure you realize it if you're able to detach yourself from the situation. Of course their hopefully thorough investigation lets them be confident in an appeal if they decide to redistribute your funds, too.

I think that I totally agree with a guy that posted before and said that Pokerstars does a good job of battling bot users and cheaters in general!This should be one of the top priority pursuits of any poker site that claims to be the best!
But the waiting time is unbearable!I think that going through an investigation shouldn't take more than two weeks tops I'd say!
Also I have another question watergun.I don't know if you are allowed to answer that but can you recall any cases that the investigation led to someone's innocence and you eventually unlocked and gave his account back to him?
Cause it seems that these freezes and these templated messages the vast majority of the times lead to a permanent ban,after the long haul of waiting!

He answers that in the very post you quoted!

Yes. At least once, an account was exonerated (they let him play again) and the player was locked/investigated again later and it turned out he had been cheating all along - so yes, people do get their accounts back obviously.

Quite often there are accounts that we monitor closely- and decide to exon internally.

If you think about how many cases we end up pursuing+freezing- there are many more cases where we investigate but feel that there is no need to freeze. In fact I personally reviewed some hhs of a 100s reg yesterday and this will go to his likely exon on Monday (and this guy doesn't even know that he was investigated). So a lot is going on under the surface, and we are trying to make everything more automated and faster. I'm actually not in the bot department dealing with individual cases, but more of an analyst/consultant doing an allrounder type job.

And obviously I can never name any screen names for anything due to privacy- even accounts we have barred- as privacy laws cover everyone including those who break TOS and cheat us and other players.

Also we are aware of self-interest reports (either malicious or just as a freeroll). The more someone reports with substandard stuff (e.g. no evidence etc), the less we will listen to that guy in future. We don't take all player-reports seriously, and in general do not auto-investigate when someone just says "player XYZ is cheating, pls investigate".

So don't worry if you offended anyone or have no friends in the poker world.

are you allowed to still play on stars watergun even tho you work for them ?

There is one thing that I do not understand, according to what you mention, there are many cases in which you do not consider it necessary to freeze the account (it seems perfect), so I do not understand why in my case it was considered appropriate to freeze the account, when:

1. - I've been playing Pokerstars for 6 - 8 years, never having given any problems.
2.-I have been climbing levels little by little from below, in the case of spins I started playing 20s and 50s at Pokerstars.es and later 100s at Pokerstars.com (and you can compare stats and see that my game is the same) .
3.-I have no idea how to program a bot, but I would say that my game is impossible to program xd, basically because I play very very exploitative, and any of the support that knows a bit of GTO, just to see my HUD or see any hand of mine is going to realize that I'm not a Bot.


With all this I do not understand why I have been frozen and my profile is of a totally clean and legal player, that is, it does not enter my head because in 2 MONTHS I CARRY ALREADY with the blocked account nobody has realized that I am a normal player.

PS: How can I program a bot, if I do not even speak English?

I’m not 100% sure either, but freezing of accounts also has to do with potential risk to customers.

Unfortunately this means that ppl with higher volume will have a lower threshold for triggering a freeze. This is the logic anyway, and imo it makes sense. We don’t need to freeze someone if they only play 3 games a month. In any case, after a request for a vid, all accounts should be frozen.

Watergun I think you are giving away too much info here on how Stars operate vs cheaters.

^while i agree with the selfishghost i am very much apreciating the information he gave, its interesting. Slight candle of hope.

1) None of the above explains why it would take 1+ months to arrive at a decision. If you give a player (or group of players) 4-7 days to respond, why on earth would you need 3+ weeks to make a decision on a case? Unless you're severely understaffed, in which case you shouldn't be pushing so many resources towards freezes in the first place (most more towards resolving open cases or just hire more staff). Any other ideas? Am I off base?

2) Stars banning most accounts they freeze isn't a bad sign in of itself. The only telling sign would be if most frozen accounts were unbanned, that would clearly mean they are over freezing. But that is not the case.

Most people that follow this stuff know that many cheaters have been banned in the last year, so barring some new evidence, it looks OK to me so far. Keep in mind, most accounts investigated thoroughly by the community in the Internet Poker forum end up leaving key information out of their complaints. Things like "oh yea I dumped my bankroll to my buddy HU, but we were playing real I swear" become commonplace after digging.

I feel like the problem here are stables/schools.
OP stated that he doesn't belong to any of them but used preflop tables from other regulars.
In this particulare case, Stars sees this guy start playing from 50s and then 100s in the span of a few months without prior experience. (red flag here)
What most stables do is gather huge amounts of HHs from their horses (which is even better than the observer bots) and elaborate almost perfect preflop strategy vs population tendecies for their horses to use.
When Stars sees that a group of players all use more or less the same strategy preflop they start investigating but can't actually prove they shared HHs.
So we get to this point where they take all the time in the world to make a final decision probably because they know there's something wrong and the guy is telling half truths.

I imagine some stables do that, but certainly not all. The stable most likely to be accused of doing such a thing, is also accused of being favoured by Stars / untouchable in this thread by riggies lol!

Watergun I think that you know better than most of the people in this post that volume is key to win at spin n gos due to the huge amount of variance involved in this format!Especially players that do not achieve high Evrois should play even more to be able to make enough money for the time that they spend playing to be worthwhile!
So I think it's really unfair to freeze a player or eventually ban him because he puts in big volume every month!With what you say it makes me think that PS is trying to prohibit players from
Playing the amount of games they need to play to achieve their monthly or yearly goals,because they put their accounts in jeopardy.
Volume itself shouldn't be a key kriterianfor a player to be freezed or banned,as long as this volume is between a logical amount and not something overexuberant!

The idea is that a low volume player really doesn't ruin that many games or steal that much equity from the pool even if they are somehow cheating, so it takes more to freeze and investigate from them than from regs playing high vol and in tons of games per month.

Everything itt makes complete sense. You should really stop freaking out, comply with PS, and be happy with the info watergun has shared so far in this thread.

hello i am bstefano88.sorry for my english i dont know so well. today pokerstars froze me.they were waiting to deposit and immediatelly after my deposit they froze me 1 second later. thats how a scam bad site like you work. i see some posts from a guy that work for pokerstars with username watergun. he said that a reg will get freeze on monday and i see that its me. i hope the worst for you and your ****ng company. you destroyed me i would win 150k ev in these 9 days on 500s spins and just you froze me with no reason. i am 100% legal. i am playing different than anyone else and 100% different than gto game.i wanted to play as much i can these 9 days to make a very good profit and with no reason you ****d me. i wont have a chance to make that money again.i wish in near future someone to destroy amaya totally. if you want to investigate me lock my cashouts and let me play 500s. why to not let me play when i am 100% legal. if you want to investigate someone just lock cashouts. this is totally unfair and just you destroyed me. i will support everyone here. lets make a war against this **** amaya. i will be here for more.

i played 550 games yesterday 500s. so you dont let someone to play that games. you can just lock my cashouts and let me play 500s. i am 100% legal and you hurt me a lot from that freeze. i know that i am hungarian and you ban lot of hungarian people but you wont find anything bad to me. i know that some hungarians they are selling bots but i dont have anything. the only that i did is that just i bought some solutions and i tried to put these in my game.some of them i didnt like some of them i liked so its a mix.i will send those to pokerstars. its too unfair that i dont have the chance to fight to make that money. and that money is important for me. i am open to help for the investigation but i cant accept that you dont give me the chance to play 500s... too bad. and also so bad that you immediatilz froze me after deposit.

i think that you freeze people just to protect fish money. lof of people out say how terrible is pokerstars novadays. there is no other reason to freeze someone for 2 or 3 months as i read here. just you are trying to ban the top players. i made a very big effort to increase my ev cause i had ev at last months and all this effort go to the hell.i was playing only 80 games per day trying so hard to play better. and the result is a freeze for me.

Oh please.

Surely the problems with English translate into problems with writing numbers. I don't think 150k is what you think it is.