Great! Although, downloadable Hand Histories are often necessary to watch for all but the most obvious collusion and bots. Cheaters already have the means to run HUDs, so why not give us HHs ?

There are HH's under your profile, no?

Not beyond your first 100k hands.

Nice work. I played with some of the banned players before. I did not get any refund though lol.

Joey, this sort of response is really refreshing to hear. The fact that you're willing to acknowledge the situation publicly and admit that your security team is still a work in progress actually gives me MORE confidence that you'll deliver. The standard response from every other poker site would be to deny that cheating is taking place, assure players that you have the best security team that the world have ever seen so cheating is impossible on your site, then go completely silent when players provide overwhelming amounts data proving the existence of cheating.


I am still in agreement with many here who think that allowing players to help police games, by providing hand histories, is an important security step. Historically, players have been responsible for finding the majority of bot rings and other forms of cheating. Players are generally far more diligent about this sort of thing because we have monetary incentive to do so. Also, there's strength in numbers. While i do not doubt that you will do all that you say, players with data can be your biggest security asset. We can find playing patterns that are abnormal and then report them to you for further analysis.
This could bring up a conflict in your desire to prevent datamining, huds, etc., but there have been a lot of good suggestions on how to mitigate that. We're a creative bunch, so if we pooled out thoughts together i'm sure we could come up with something that was a win win. I hope you'll take this request to heart and understand where we're coming from. We want to prevent datamining and huds as much as you do. But there's been a long and ugly history of cheating of all sorts (collusion, chip dumping, bots, real time ai, super using) that's gone completely undetected by poker sites. Poker players are justified in their belief that a poker site security team alone is going to miss a lot of what players are able to find and that only by working together can we have the best possible outcome.

Once again, thank you for your candor about this entire situation.

i have played heads up against almost every single one of those bots, including yukonsam at 25/50

i sent support an email asking if they were going to issue me a refund. ill edit my post with whatever update i receive.

What site did you play yukonsam 25/50? Did global get rid of that stake?

I'm still curious why they told me they don't give refunds for
Culloding. I mean I had proof and after I reported the accounts they never played again. Guess I'm not important enough for them to give a refund

sorry i meant 10/20, i get it mixed up with 25/50 i think because there are deepstack buyins.

anyway, support told me my account was not eligible and they would not discuss any details any further. kind of ridiculous considering the thousands of hands ive played against those accounts, but i guess ill just congratulate emergerd and the others who spearheaded the move to get their refunds.

im not going to bad mouth support because they do a prerty good job as a whole, just strange to only give refunds to a couple of players.

Also don't forget that just because you played with them doesn't mean you lost vs them. I was up vs them overall so i also didn't get a refund.

can any of you guys provide a timeline of this bot ring?

I've been a 200 reg since January usually playing 8+ tables and I've definitely played with multiple of the accounts listed. I was neither refunded anything nor received an e-mail from global disclosing the situation.

edit: just read the above post, I guess I didn't lose money vs any of them. Makes sense, justjohn ****ing sucked.

did u lose to them?
the accounts could have been drained also
nobody is particularly important to support

Got a small refund. Poker players actually uniting together for once, haven't seen that in years. Shout out to them and Global Poker for actually taking action. There have been bots on BetOnline, ACR, and Bovada for years now and those sites have done very little (if anything) to fix those situations. Given how young of a site Global is this is a great sign.

I can only imagine the damage they are doing at the smaller limits.

The one nice thing about Global is that you can only use paypal. There would seem to be a pretty good paper trail compared to a site that uses crypto methods. Idk if legal action could be taken, but you might be able to find out a real name and address of the account holder.

And don't forget just because you didn't specifically "lose" to the bots, doesn't mean you didn't lose any EV. Bots are a huge problem for the long term ecosystem, hopefully the players and Global can keep working together on this and cut the problem off at its head.

The collusion on global right now is terrible. My advice stay off the cash tables until they can clean it up more. Its pretty bad right now. I couldn't even iso one player tonight not even going all in pre. 6 tables of 6 max could not iso 1 single time. Thats extremely odd. I would have the same 2 guys playing 100% of hands together even call an all in pre. Post flop unless you flop the nuts your gonna get pushed out of the hand on scare cards by the turn or river. I even said in chat you 2 are colluding and they sit out jump off the table. I been reporting these players doing these things leaving tables together and global says their not colluding that they are just aggressive. Ya right...

bad players tho, lucky u didn't have 6 way showdowns everytime. In all seriousness this cant be a legit excuse anymore, we need hh's for so many reasons. Same thing happens in stts with broken fold buttons and what do u think that does to an roi, not to mention with constant sick run outs that cant be tracked for legitimacy..? GP can't expect us to tolerate this for any longer enough is enough.

The way the players play on global is definitely different, so you have to approach it differently than other poker sites. Other poker sites don't have this many fish literally throwing away their money. If you adjust accordingly, it is very profitable.

Any tips on spotting bots?

I feel like there are a bunch in PLO but I'm not sure how to tell between bots and weird players that don't know what they're doing

nope its a secret that those involved in the situation apparently refuse to share. I am considering asking gp's fancy new security dept to do an entire overhaul of my account to look for collusion and also rng stats since they won't allow me to do it myself and I'm far less than pleased with many things at this point. I think the security dept doing this for me on a monthly basis would be acceptable to me how's everyone else feel about this? I know it sounds absurd but what's the other options on while potentially on a downswing not being able to verify anything or work on my own game? It's not very much fun at that point is it?

best i can come up with is that they took screennshots of heaps of the hh reviewer since they play cash games and are able to do so in their preferred game format lucky them, or maybe they took live game vids. Anything more than that would voilate GP's tos and even that is questionable the way they're written hence my question and part of my level of irritation about all this.

The rake to start games heads up is way too high. Both players are taking a huge hit to do a service to Global Poker and start a new game. Paying $3/hand is absurdly high when you win every other hand. It's not sustainable.

This is my only complaint about the site. It cannot be overstated how important of an issue this is for the economy of the games.

I understand them not completely outing everything they know about bot spotting but just a few general things to look out for would be nice or even a PM.

what stakes are you playing?

.1/.2 - 1/2 depending how I'm feeling

this is correct. i regularly quit shortstacked fish hu because the rake makes it a waste of time. pls fix global

Its hard to detect collusion. A good example is in a live game. They fine tune it well. They come off as these bad terrible fish on the tables and even play few hands poorly making think you hit the jackpot. Just cause someone limps in doesn't mean they are this recreational fish. This could be collusion team. then their stacks keep growing. Same bet sizings, same tanking pre and post and playing almost 100% hands together. One will bloat the pots for the other when he has the nuts. And we are sitting aorund saying wow these fish run hot. Then I see the same 2 guys at another casino doing the same thing. And then you know you got cheated.

Online its even harder to detect but I am seeing the same patterns its like they are twins playing 100% of hands together, same bet sizings, same tanking pre and post. These guys know security will check them out so they can fine tune it where its hard to detect. They might even stack each other on the table. You can report stuff but if security says hmm maybe its cheating maybe its not they aren't gonna ban them unless its full blown obvious potripper proof type stuff. And i get it its very tough to spot collusion. I do think they are doing everything they can to keep the site as fair as possible, but honestly only so much they can do. I mark players with their own color as collusion players but when I am seeing them on a lot of the tables I am like meh no more cash for me for awhile. Security not gonna hold your hand you gotta watch your own back.