I mostly agree with this. While captchas will help stop the most rudimentary bots, any player assisted bots(which are likely the strongest bots) will continue to go unaffected.

I also don't think players, and especially not observers, should be the ones who can trigger the captcha on another player, mostly because they won't be really effective.

- Allowing players to issue captcha challenges is better than not allowing players to issue captcha challenges

- For everyone saying there is no point in trying to combat cheating:
There will always be fraud in the world. But no reasonable person thinks that therefore all efforts to prevent and punish fraud should cease.
There will always be collusion, and there will probably always be bots (or, more generally, players using AI in prohibited ways). But no reasonable person thinks that therefore all efforts to maintain game integrity are useless.

- It's troubling that this is the main concrete step that ACR has announced to prevent cheating.
WPN is in a much better position than players to detect cheaters.
It has, or should have, a database of player actions.
It can see hole cards, it can find players with unreasonable win rates, it can find players playing unreasonable amounts of hours, it can tell when two players are playing together an unusual amount, it can find timing tells, etc.
Allowing players to issue captcha challenges is fine, but WPN, not players, needs to take the lead in identifying cheaters.

Definitely echoing the sentiment of players needing to be able to see mucked cards.

+1. Best and easiest first step to stopping collusion.

This ^^^

What % of the beast leaderboard is recs every week? I’d bet it’s close to 0.

I never play cash on ACR just because of these promotions, they demotivate me. They’ll motivate a rec for a week or two but once the recs realize how much volume is needed to qualify and how the same players are always at the top of the leaderboard (while bots take a lot of $ out as well) it feels like a scam masked as a promotion because of all the extra rake paid without getting any return. When I did try cash on ACR I just paid other players for playing a lot of poker. They didn’t necessarily beat me directly and win my money on the tables but I still end up paying them.

I’d rather play cash on a site where I can track my opponents and use a hud than play anonymously but because of the Beast I play cash on ignition. Without the beast the player pool in those games would be more diverse

Long term they motivate mass multitabling regs, shortstacking & bots who don’t get tired or have other responsibilities. Mass multitabling rakeback pros don’t make the games uber appealing either with all the timing down. Status quo ACR doesn’t work for a lot of people

The elephant in the room no one seems to be talking about is the fact that acr is admitting botting and cheating taking place and putting onus on players to help catch cheaters but not a single dollar has been paid out to players who have been cheated and most likely not a single dollar will be paid out.

To me catching a couple bots is better than nothing but still meaningless if past transgressions aren’t compensated.

So either wpn is inept or complicit I don’t see how anyone could even consider playing here... unless you’re winning

That’s another thing that bothers me in this whole witch hunt... so few number of apoligists and “winners” coming forward to defend wpn.

If I was a huge winner on wpn I would be posting graphs and be doing damage control to save my ecosystem. But honestly I haven’t seen it.

Unfortunately catching bots are extremely hard. You think a webcam will solve it? I'm sure a lot of bots have a human sitting in front of the screen observing, so scratch that idea. And a captcha? Get real. Once again, there are humans sitting there to respond to the captchas. Hell, the good programmers will even make their bot solve the captcha.

The captcha and webcam ideas are stupid honestly and won't solve a damn thing. I really don't know what the answer is besides learn to beat the damn bots.

The title of this thread pisses me off

You haven’t empowered players wpn!

If anything you’ve stunted players like myself who 2-5 years ago were busting live cash rolls on this fixed site...

Rolls that could have stayed in the poker ecosystem, rolls that could have flourished and kept people from busting.

Instead wpn took the short sided greedy cash grab approach ensuring “players funds safety” while having little to no integrity in the games.

WPn is years overdue for this and the way Phil Nagy talks is how Russian bots talk they think of Americans as sheep who have no other options and deserve to be cheated.

Wpn has always been a cash grab

Is anyone dumb enough to think these inept sites would just give away $150,000 in overlay for one tournament???

I agree. They are complicit. Don’t actively monitor games & first time offenders get a WARNING

As far as the overlays, it’s concerning when you hear that the WPN CEO stakes players himself given his loose relationship with game integrity

I bet WPN_REP was so excited when he came up with thread title but it just alienated everyone he was trying to manipulate. Exhibit A of ACRs marketing skills/strat

What would really empower people is not mucking hands at showdown but somehow that's more complicated than spin n gos, a sit out time bank, or some insane "feature" to force other players to enter captchas.

Hello, I will address it. Thank you for the comment.

Yes I actually do. Your logic here is flawed. When they have a webcam test they won't be able to use their bot program as it will show their setup. Due to that their play will diverge, it might be minor but a specialist and I want to emphasize specialist will be able to determine that.


If that is not enough for you to reconsider your thinking on it all you need to do is look at pokerstars. Webcam tests started quite the ban wave in hu and spin n gos that were infested for a while

Also if sit n crush was eliminated it would destroy liquidity in sngs.

I disagree. There seems to be sufficient liquidity in sngs for other offshore unregulated USA facing sites and they aren't having to deal with the security issues WPN is for whatever reason.

I returned a stake from Global Staking 3yrs ago that I was in profit on because I hated WPN so much for all the reasons that are finally now being discussed. I wonder how many more there were like me that went elsewhere and might come back if WPN seemed at all legit or player friendly. Gert rid of the bots passing $ back and forth and allowing colluders to suck $ out of the room, all of which reduces my roi and forcing me to put in massive volume to get paid by the snc as opposed to payouts.. Then I'l come play again.

edit - I agree that if snc was eliminated it would hurt liquidity in sngs short term. I also feel that WPN's entire business model and what's been going on for the last 2+ yrs has done far more damage to the liquidity of sngs and the entire USA facing poker economy than removal of snc would. Somebody posted somewhere about people busting live rolls 3 years ago, trusting WPN etc. Where's all that $ now, Phil's yacht and the mountains of former russian states along with portugal or..?

I disagree. No game was ravaged more than sngs with the Stars changes to rakeback. Unlike cash sngs run around regs. A $100 9 man can be 3/9 full with recs but just won't run without the reg liquidity.

The people that would come back from those sites would be the semi reg 6 tables they won't fill the gap and it will be a ghost town for anything over $10

If the people you said you think would come back were playing against real people for the most part as opposed to bots and colluders I feel 2 things would happen. 1. people would deposit more and play bigger. 2. people would be able to win/move up levels aka "find the pokerstar in you" those days have been long gone.

If WPN can keep the snc and get rid of bots and collusion or at least try then it might work. Right now it's just an open invitation for bots with the lack of security and awesome rewards program. I wonder if the bot makers are running some kind of bot promo for who can be the 1st bot to achieve 5star general and make 100k from rewards that'd be quite the feat.

I don't want to go in a circle but I was a 4x SnE on stars and they have already provided an example of what happens. Rois are a bit higher but now 30s are high stakes on a site that has a much bigger player pool. There is a reason many rest of world regs are making ACR their home for sngs as I've been overseas myself

Edit:. Also from my limited understanding of current bot technology they can't mass table and currently capped at 6-9. That will surely change in time but no one named in the sng bot thread is a mass tabler. Currently unable to do 5 star

I respect the hell out of you man. I won a free coaching session from you back in the pokerpwnage days I know you're a boss, you probably don't remember me. I agree with the $30+ being HS for the most part for the current USA facing sites other than WPN ive not looked there in a while. GP is growing, they just added $150 hypers and $200 turbs so we will see if they run. We all know the reason the regs went to WPN is because of the SNE rewards program with a diff name slapped on it. I think all the legit real people players want the same thing. I agree with you about the webcam verification for suspicious accounts also. I think it's widely accepted that WPN could be awesome if it were cleaned up hopefully that can and will happen. I thought you were still overseas, welcome back!

This thread is just sickening. It is nothing but damage control after the release of Joey Ingrams YouTube videos and trying to show the players that the network does in fact care about them. Does anyone think for one second these "features" would be brought in without those videos being released? How many times have the reps come on here and claimed people were just crying wolf, they even had me believing everything was under control. The creation of this thread in my opinion is even more insulting than trying to hide the problem in the first place. Congratulations WPN, you have now made into Lock Poker territory for being a dirtbag company.

Could someone in security address this?

https://gyazo.com/e9ec0143c1ea0d1639063f9cda2a9d36

is this acceptable under the T & C?

Agree with others, seeing whole cards will help a lot. Not only help with collusion determination, but just generally put it in line with other card rooms.

zero chance this happens before the games are (if that ever happens) cleaned up. its pretty obvious to me the reason why it hasn't happened yet is because the network was trying to cover up major security issues. Simply sickening.

You should have a limit allowed to give captcha, per account history. If u have a hx of abusing it, take it away, or severely limit it

are bots able to play jackpots and/or sng2.0s?