Any other Nl200+ players get a refund today for collusion? I just got about $700 back

I woke up this morning to an email from Global explaining the situation. It said a player was investigated for violations of the terms of use and that the questionable account had been closed and funds seized. The funds were distributed among the players affected. So yes I got some $ back as well. I'm curious to know who it is.

There’s a lot of bots being busted at these stakes. Hopefully it’s refunds from those. A few 200 that I think ring a bell were KarateMunkey, koolio8, and babalugatz that I can recall off top of my end.

Interesting (and good to hear). If they were indeed bots, how would GP go about detecting them? Is it just from reviewing hands/play, or can they somehow "detect" them through software or something?

There are a variety of ways. Its pretty easy to tell within a few sessions if they’re bots. I typically just send over my research/info to Global and they pass it on to their investigation team. Wish we’d get more follow up details instead of silenced.

I'm very happy to hear GP is on the lookout for collusion and/or bots. I wonder if they were first alerted through their own surveillance, or if players tipped them off, leading to an investigation?

They have access to player stats.

Kidding aside this is a very good thing if they're really not only rooting this out but actively seeking players to refund. Credit where credit is due.

I didn't. Also curious who it was, though I guess it's unlikely I played with them much. Glad to hear this, good on you Global. Good on you as well for doing this. They probably want to keep it as quiet as possible, for both image and security reasons.

Huh! So let me get this straight : Global has been open for lets say 18 months . Chicago Joey outs ACR recently for Bots and Collusion . Two weeks later Global starts refunds because they suddenly found BOTS !

Looks to me as they are trying to get ahead of a very very bad possible scenario

LMAO

Wonder what else is going on there ?

But I'm a crazy Rigtard so what

Bots have been around long before ChicagoJoey out anything. I reported suspicious accounts back in December to Global on a few accounts. If anything, I think it just added extra eyes as people get comfortable and want to assume the best.

With Global particularly, many regs don't want it outted that there are bots as it may "Scare away fish". Reality is users should know and Global should be speaking up and fighting these proudly to show they care.

It is good that they banning them and reimbursing us. I'm not too optimistic that globalpoker will continue to 'catch the bots', though. In this particular case, globalpoker was reliant on players showing a ton of very strong evidence that there was a bot ring before they took any action to take down this bot ring. What actually happened here was the players, such as myself and a few others were the ones that undertook the original bot investigation, and then once we had finished it we gave globalpoker all the evidence and then global did their own investigation and ended up banning the botring.

We were lucky to find strong evidence that they were bots without any statistics, or hand histories. Either global needs to be more active on this or they need to give players better ways to detect bots, or this site will get taken over by bot rings again as it was in a couple months ago

Got it but is this the first refund we are hearing about?

I agree they should be plastering this everywhere we caught the bots . We care about player safety . We refunded funds. We are diligently investigating Bots and Collusion . Yet not a peep

Also I suppose this would look very bad to say Facebook and Pay Pal . Since this is supposed to be a sweepstakes ? Cheating at a sweepstakes game . Although I do think I read an article once about cheating in the Mc Donalds Monopoly Game

Agreed.

The reality is I'd give them a pass in most cases to deal with the bots behind the scenes, etc. However, when the site removes hand histories and does everything imaginable to provide any form of transparency, they deserve to be outted when due.

Curious to know how receptive they where when you first brought this to there attention?

Sounds to me they played it off until you presented undeniable proof?

I got ~2k back. When I saw my balance this morning I thought it was more lag from GP. Thank you Stroggos

Somewhat receptive at first, then as more evidence rolled into their email inbox they replied telling us they will take some weeks to investigate, which they did.

Honestly though their emails are the most ambiguous messages you can get a lot of the time.

Thanks to you and others for doing this Stroggos

Couldn't agree more.

I posted on the Global Poker HUD thread, as a tech professional, it's really easy to grab hand histories. So all they've done is raised the bar, making sure players following the rules are HUDless/dataless, when all the hackers, bot makers and solvers will have no issue doing this.

Keep that in mind, the underpinnings of a bot is built on hand histories and data. So while it's good to see bots being outed, and Global Poker taking steps to refund players, this does nothing to solve the issue of people using Data or solvers during play.

The community has historically been extremely good at bot detection, but you need to give us access to the data.

Global is never going to be able to escape this issue. Everything always cycles back to this.

Getting refunds today has been the resolution of about a month wait as Global processed evidence I sent in along with Stroggoz when this was brought to our attention late january. We gathered and sent in evidence that I believe confirmed the existence of nonhuman players on the network. It was a shock to me how sophisticated the computer accounts were. I believe Global poker did the best they possibly could given the fact their website is relatively new, and the threat of computerized players is relatively new as well. To my knowledge, all offending accounts that we identified were banned and to the best of my knowledge no bots exist on global poker at this time. Getting refunds shows to me great respect from Global since they listened to us, and were committed to make things right.
I am grateful this issue has reached best possible conclusion I could have envisioned, thanks to the global staff, whom I genuinely believe did they best they could under the unfortunate circumstance.

Thanks for your work, I am grateful, but I completely disagree with your conclusion of the site being bot free.

I used to be a programmer for free to play games, and even in those there were extremely complicated bot networks (7+ years ago) just to play a stupid game and compete with the players who spent money. With poker there's a profit motive. I've been gone from 2+2 for a very long time, not sure if it's common knowledge, but people have been using heavily assisted play for well over a decade now.

But in all cases, if you have bots on your site then you, with 100% certainty, have assisted play and people regularly analyzing hand histories. If they were smart you would use solvers and play manually at reasonably high stakes. Obviously, it doesn't scale, but you could also probably teach an army of monkeys to play doing this and scale that way.

The issue we will always have is that we only catch the dumbest bots or assisted players... those who get greedy or make mistakes, like the ancient UB scandal. I promise you there are people who fly below the radar, and Global poker has hamstrung us in community policing efforts by not providing hand histories. Other people have suggested a 24 hour hold before download, that seems reasonable.

I am fairly certain that there are more. There are a few newer accounts that all popped up at same time and I've sent evidence in. One thing I've noticed is that the accounts I suspect all tend to sit HU to start tables, which many of the older ones did as well. I can PM you some suspected names.