Hi there.
You might or might not know me from other posts at this forum but this will be my final one. It is a guide which I offer to online poker to share my knowledge about how to identify, recognize and take action against pokerbots. Because I am now suffering from a DOS attack, I went thru a lot of trouble posting this with a blackberry.

The idea behind this is very clear. If people from 2+2 would invest a little of their time in searching the way I describe in this post, you will be able to catch a LOT of bots.

Where are currently the most bots?
- Bodog
- Ultimate Bet
- Cake poker ( all skins )
- iPoker

At what stakes can you find the bots?
Anywhere between NL2 and NL25. There might be a few bots at some higher level, so checking that once in a while will bring some of the bigger bots in.

At what games can you find the bots?
Bots are especially to be found on Holdem and Omaha games. Among more experienced botters, playing FL is the way to go. However, botting no limit has made a huge step forward in the last two years

How to recognize a bot?
Bots are meant to look human and bot owners do a lot to make a bot look human. However, botting is a time consuming hobby and in order to play the higher stakes you need to put down some serious cash or develop for more than a year. That is why a lot of the smaller bots can be easily caught. Also greed is an important factor. Last but not least, human sense will do the rest.

Catching the low level bots
There are a lot of bots at the lowest stakes. They are there because they believe that players will not notice playing a bot and believe the sites do not check that stakes. Are very easily caught. How?
- They play (almost) daily and grind the lowest stakes with a winrate of max 4bb/100
- They usually play 8-12h a day ( on bodog even more )
- They are grinding the microstakes for a longer time. Many bots are playing the same winrate for multiple months and because they are bot they gain no experience to go one level up.
- Cheking their sessions, you will see that human sense does not allow somebody to play 8h every day for making a few dollar on average

How to find the bots?

PTR
There is a wonderfull site called pokertableratings.com. The site offers a function called top winners. When you search for the top winners of a specific month at above sites and select the microstakes, you will for sure find a lot of players who have played an enormous amount of hands at a small winrate. Just click on them and check their sessions.
- Do they play daily?
- Do they use the play-break-play technique ( play 5 hours, take two hours rest, play 5 hours again ).
- Do they have fixed schedules? ( play from 4am to 4pm )
- Do they play around the same amount of time a day? (everyday approx 8h)
- Do they have enormous sessions ( play multiple days or three days in row with 2h breaks in between
- Do they grind NL2 for a longer period? ( some grind there for months, every single day )

Your own hand history database
Check your own hand history if you play <= NL25 and check for players which have a huge amount of hands against you. Check their stats and how constant they are. and of course, check them on ptr

A nice example of a bot making multiple of above errors, but playing on NL25 at Bodog is http://www.pokertableratings.com/bod...ns/vikiviki111.
Lets just analyse his stats for a second and see what is going on:
1. Player plays every single day ( which can be normal )
2. Player uses the play-break-play technique to avoid detection by the site. We as human can see that the player had in fact one big session from october 6th 4.30AM till october 7th 8.55PM.
3. We see that he has played 25k hands already this month with a winrate of just 2.09/100.
These things alone doesn't of course mean anything. When putting them all together, you see its clear. BOT

Remember, normally the higher the level, the more cautious these players are. This guy is obviously a dumb guy because he has bot written all over him.

Finding bots by volume
Check for above sites the top winners and choose the lowest stakes. Just see the number of hands these people have played and how much money they made without moving up. Tell me, how likely is it for a player to play over 400k hands this year with a winrate of 2.2bb/100 at the lowest stakes, earning 176$ and never decide to move up in stakes?

Reporting bots

Bodog
Bodog is hard in taking out the bots since more of 95% of the players on that site are using a bot. Basically, the most easy way would be to have all human players leave the place and let the botters have their party against eachother. However, you can use the power of 2+2. Just post the screenshots of the emailconversations here in this thread and notify them that the forum is watching. They will most likely first respond that they will investigate collusion, on which you need to reply that you did not file a complain for collusion but for violation of the prohibited software policy. I can not guarantee succes since Bodog seems to be bot friendly.

Cake poker
Cake poker is a site supported by some bots, but Cake poker itself does not like to be associated with botting. Therefore, the codename among botters for Cake poker is SiteX. Cake poker does not have a lot of security against bots, however, once a bot is reported, they will respond very fast and investigate the player immediately. They want their game to be clean and honest and reporting a possible bot for investigation will lead to a ban if you can back up your story with good data and reasoning. Also make printscreens, post them here and notify the pokersite you did this and give them the url, so they can see that the pokercommunity follows the progress.

iPoker network
This one is kinda tricky. There are bots that have a deal with one of the iPoker skins called Betngo. The best way to report these bots is straight to iPoker or file a complain at Titan poker, which are on the same network. I think iPoker would be the best shot.Also make printscreens, post them here and notify the pokersite you did this and give them the url, so they can see that the pokercommunity follows the progress.

Ultimate Bet
Ultimate bets have a banround twice a year in which they ban a lot of botters. The procedure should be the same as for cake poker. Ultimate bet will take your complain serious. However, to make sure they take action, post screenshot here and send them a link.

Finding bots on FullTilt
Full tilt has banned a lot of bots in a banround last week. However, they used IP addresses from a botforum and therefor people who did not visit that forum are not banned yet. How can you recognize these bots?
- Before they leave the table, they will not just step up and go, but use their time to go to sitout mode and then leave.
- You can use same strategy for catching the low limit bots like above, but watch out! The data is still polluted because it still contains bots that are already banned. Wait for a month to check the monthly top winners list and see what dirt comes up.
- On rush, they often use a midstack strategy which is basically shortstacking with 40BB. So, when you see a player with around 50-90bb going to sitout mode by using their whole time, make a color note on the player. Same goes for the stacksize above 200 of the max buyin. If you use 3 colors for painting them like that, after the third color, it is safe to assume that he is using one of the custom midstack-rushbots that are still out there. Just send the username to FT and explain that going to sitout mode is a thing that is used by many bots.
- Rush offers botters a problem, called quick fold. Many bots cannot read the next table well if quickfold is used. Therefor, when you see a player using a short/midstack strategy waiting for 2 to 3 seconds in the button and then folding, you know he didnt have a hand so he should have pushed quick fold. This one is kinda tricky, so you might want to use a larger samplesize to identify these. use player notes to count them. It is prefered to have this info backed up with some other 'tells' before sending to the pokerroom, since they will only take action if you can arise reasonable suspicion.

How to exploit a bot?
You might want to report a bot. However, a second way to fight bots is by exploiting them. Once you identified a bot, make sure you get in a nice position to have a lot of blind battles with them. Do they have a high stealing % but a low fold to 3bet %? Then it is very nice to take two seats to the left of this bot. Some bots are stealing so much and folding so fast that you can gain 5bb/100 extra just by 3betting every single hand against them. The fun part: when they do push, they have the goodies, when they do call, they have a hand. Passivity will always be followed by agression, so lets say you hold 44 while 3betting him and the flop shows 24A, just check. He will cbet for sure. Since he called your 3bet, he is likely to have the ace. When you check the turn he will likely bet so much that he is potcomitted.
Know that a bot always will show aggression when it has a hand. they have slowplay techniques but only for the ultimate nuts.

Check their betsizes!
Bots have different betsizes for different situations. Pay attention to the bot and write down what hand he had when he made a specific betting ammount. Once you can create a list of the %, you can almost read what he has got and what your odds are for drawing against him. I currently have a few bodog bots on my list which I love exploiting since I can read them very very good.

Tablehoppers
You will notice that at a certain moment, the bot will leave the table when you get on, because they have tablehoppers in which they can state usernames to avoid. Once a botter sees that he is losing huge because of you, he will move on. Once you find out you cannot exploit him because he keeps running for you, make sure you have somebody else playing at the specific site and give him the playing style. This way you will create a ring of bot exploiters, trading information about bots.

Bots do change!
Bots do change. The coders are most likely checking their stats for leaks and trying to improve them. Watch out when u notice a change in play. You will need to spend a little time to figure out what has changed and re-adapt to it.

Bot exploitation creates an additional 5bb/100 on top of normal winnings!


Well, this is it. I will go back to my anonymous life and will be playing at botfree pokerstars, since I still dream of becoming a poker pro which grinds for a living. Perhaps very far in the future I might return to this forum to discuss advanced strategy, but I think you understand that will not be with this account and not with any information on pokerbots.

Since I have seen the hate that you all share for bots and botters I really hope you can get this movement going and start searching for bots. Right now botters have the opinion that they need to avoid being profiled by the pokersites. However, the human eye will always see more than a program. If botting is not stopped it will develop itself to faking being real players so good that they will no longer be caught. Bots with reads, with memory, even with self learning capability. The only way to stop this is catch these guys and make sure you are a huge demotivating factor for botters. Right now botters fear the pokersites for catching them. They should fear you guys for actively hunting them down.
If you can gather 50 people which spent 15 minutes a day doing proper PTR searches, I am confident you can take down at least 1000 bots within the first two weeks. After the FT blow these botters received, they might choose another hobby.

I wish you all the best and hope you will make a botfree Cake, iPoker, Ultimate Bet, FullTilt and ( not very likely ) Bodog.

After this post I will log off and not be back on again. Please use this thread what it is made for. I was a botter at bodog in the past and that story has been pretty much covered. Since I will not be back on PTR to anwer any questions, please use this thread wisely, whatever you may think of me.

Best regards,

The_Challenger
Bertusbadeend

Is this your penance? If so, thanks.

You can consider it part of my payback to poker society yes.

why did you not mention botters and sitngos? surely there are far more bots grinding dons than cashgames, specifically Ipoker from what i've read

well, i'll add my first suspect to the list. el1tendo plays 2nl FR at ipoker and has played 4-5 day sessions at a time without a break in the past.

look at his hands played jun18-june21 session 36000 hands in 4 days and he also had a 60k hand session

Make screenshots of his sessions, send it to iPoker!

As I explained to you before, the e-mail response you posted from Bodog was obviously a standard automated response for all reports of cheating. The fact it said "collusive behaviour" doesn't matter, they obviously weren't going to just allow it if they found out it was a bot.

I hope PTR can/will help to out the bots and compile a list with evidence, then send it to the reps of the sites/networks in question and make them public if the sites don't act.

I stopped reading right there, but GL in the great hunt.

Hello.

Well, that's where the most inept ones are to be found.

For the sort of people who are prepared to put in the work to make a decent robot and cloak it properly Pokerstars is the site of choice.

Using the indicators above you will generate a lot of false positives and completely miss the serious robot operators.

i have been practicing 24 tabling at nanomicros lately on stars and pretty much meet all of the things on that checklist. i got comments on my ptr about how i am a confirmed bot, etc. i'm not saying there aren't bots out there, but i am saying that people are ******ed and highly underestimate human bots.

don't turn this into another rigged thread
i stop playing at ipoker because of bot and colluding issue at DON
if a player on his own time can spot this, there is no reason that poker site cannot have software to spot this.
after all, they have all hole card available. it's definely easier for them to detect.

I don't know what you mean by this.

Unlike a rigged deal it is well known that people operate robots on the sites.

Indeed, and some sites are more proactive than others.

However, the set of guidelines given in the OP will tend to produce false positives and will only catch the least able of the casual robot operators.

Yep, if I was a bot programmer and wanted to be very anal about it I would probably check PTR for some human players and make my bots emulate their playing schedules. You could probably also spend some time watching human masstablers so you can get an idea of the distribution of click timings to make that appear human as well. I'll bet there are people doing stuff like this already.

Looking at timing and play schedules will catch a lot of weaker bots, but I am sure it will be useless to catch the more advanced bots. The only way to catch a good bot is to look for patterns in their playing style.

lol, I can just imagine this clown feverishly typing out this magic manifesto on his blackberry, like he alone has the secret to where Atlantis is and its his duty to move humanity forward by getting this knowledge out to the word before hes snuffed out by an evil conglomerate hell bent on keeping mankind in the dark, but really its just the recipe for blueberry pancakes and hes on an old laptop in his parents basement

"It's impossible to create a bot for PokerStars"

This seems to prove the contrary: http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/06/imp...on-techniques/

Why do you have to be such an *******.

Op, I found his thread interesting. Dont mind the haters.

lol, because its nothing nobody doesnt already know, its just common sense **** that a 5 year old could figure out, yet he acts like hes got people trying to kill him for getting this information out to the public. I find that hilarious

lol at all the ppl loving this trashcan for this garbage guide. weve found plenty of bots w/o your help.

There's no new ground breaking news in OP's thread. Searching for the highest win rates each month is stupid it simply means he thinks anyone winning is automatically a bot. In fact the theme of the thread makes me feel like he is a jilted ex botter himself

LOL, actually, I just read it again and it is pretty funny.
Blackberries are hard to type on, poor guy was prob up all night.

I hope the readers this: Bothunting guide is very simply put together by someone who was caught trying to sell other people's orifiles as his own. He is a very low class crook who is not even good at what he does.

Most of the bots are just programmed as to how a person can play, it does not contain a data base like some of the other AI type bots. Just imagine recording your style of play and then just play the same in all your games. IS That cheating???? You be the judge.

Alobars reaction clearly best part of this thread

Yes, it is, you botting buffoon. Why is this so hard to figure out?

The bot, that is. People can play however they like.

If you program the bot to occaisionally tilt off half its roll like a lot of people, then it might be ok