Quote:
Originally Posted by GlobalPoker_Joey
Hey guys,
Thank you for all your comments in this thread. We appreciate your concern and your commitment to ensuring that Global Poker remains the fastest growing site for US players well into the future.
I can confirm that the sequence of events as posted by Warder and others above is broadly correct. A group of players has been working with our Game Integrity team to ensure that accounts in breach of our Terms of Service were identified, monitored and removed from our site.
We understand that the issues stated in this thread are very important to the poker community and that many of you are passionate about ensuring the games on Global Poker remain on the level and free from collusion, HUDs and AI.
One thing has been made very clear and that is that players will not stand for a site that sits idly by and lets players breach Terms of Service with impunity. We have heard your message and are committed to delivering an online poker experience in line with your expectations.
Global Poker takes Game Integrity very seriously. We are working very hard to ensure that we have security measures in place that are the envy of the industry. We have come along way in our sites short existence, our number of players have grown exponentially and we have worked hard on ensuring we have security tools to match. Are we there yet? Absolutely not, but this is a key priority for us as a business and something we will continue to work on and build.
The first part of this process for us has been to bring in significant expertise in this space. We are proud to have recently brought on both a Senior Security Manager and one of the world's leading designers of Bot Detection Tools, both from one of the world's largest poker sites, to our team. They have been instructed to build the team that they need to ensure we are proactively monitoring our games. This will take a little bit of time but it is a process that is well and truly underway.
Now that we have the knowledge in-house we are working on the implementation. We have allocated significant funding to our Game Integrity team for the next quarter to ensure that we have a significant arsenal in place to proactive track players who breach our Terms of Service.
Regardless of what poker site you play on there will always be people who try to cheat. Furthermore, they will always develop new ways to do it. Our job is to build the best defense mechanism possible to ensure that we are catching these players proactively and removing them as quickly as possible. Global Poker is committed to doing just that.
We are excited about what we can achieve and are thankful that we have you, the players, to help us.
As I have said in the past, the best way for you to assist in this fight is to contact support@globalpoker.com with anything you see that is suspicious. Coming into forums and posting accusations or claims is not helpful and we would respectfully ask you not to do so.
Firstly - it is not helpful as many times individuals get it wrong. An overwhelming number of players who are reported to us as bots are indeed not bots, but actually humans. We don't support players names being dragged through the mud without concrete proof. How would you like it if you screen name was plastered all over poker forums incorrectly labeling you a bot?
Secondly - even if you are correct that a player is a bot. All highlighting the name in the forums (before the player has been banned) does is notify them that we are on to them which will cause them to disappear, cease operating under that name and bring the investigation back to square one.
This is why we were thankful the players who assisted in this case kept quiet until after the investigation was complete. This is why we were able to get the result that we did by removing those players from Global Poker.
I hope that this post helps you to understand our position and how seriously we take this matter.
We thank you again for the passion you have shown on this topic and ask you to contact us via support@globalpoker.com if there is anything you need to report.
Joey
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.