Wow, this is ridiculous. Not only did PokerStars not catch these bots during the last 1+ year and 8+ million hands they've been running, but even after being tipped in this thread of the possibility of them being bots, they still failed to figure it out before an independent hand database website did.

Anybody who has called for PTR to be shut down in the past might want to rethink that stance. We apparently can't rely on PokerStars to catch bots like these, so we should be thankful there is another group which has the ability to do so.

I've played tens of thousands of hands with these accounts at the old 20-100bb 100NL and 200NL tables.

I have asked a question to PS support the 25.08.08 :

Their answer :

I have to say I made a sad (but loud) LOL at these statements about leaving PokerStars for the "better" sites on bot collusion (and whatever other cheating is going on).

PokerStars has proven to be the Absolute BEST in action taken to prevent online improprieties in all areas. I say this based on my own experience of outing MA, cheaters, etc. I think if you ask others on 2+2 and other sites who work on site security issues you will find the same opinion. In my experience, I get so little satisfaction from sites other than PokerStars, I do not even bother sending them information I discover. That being said, PokerStars is far from 100% on the money with these things. They also tend to let obvious MA accounts that are easily shown to have cheated people online by trading, getting staking, etc and running with money stay and cheat more and more and more.

After doing a lot of work in the Trading Section of 2+2, and seeing Multi-Year 100% absolute scammers flourish on PS and other sites, it has gotten quite despressing. (yes they do shut down many bad accounts and seem to be doing so more lately, BUT)

But if your answer is moving to another site to play free from these problems, your mind may feel better, but in reality you are probably being cheated on a grander scale, it will just be hidden from you better on other sites.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My own Rankings for Best Security

Far Best and Away #1
PokerStars

Sad and Distant #2
Full Tilt

Odd #3
Microgaming (they really get after people trying to cheat their sites) Yeah, I know, dont bring up obvious contridictions to this statement based on sad skin situation

Rest of Online World
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interesting thing is I would assume many of these Bot type things would move to sites that allow frequent name changing, and do not support PTR, HEM, etc so as to more easily avoid detection

100% signed

LOL @ pokerstars and their "poweful servers to detect bots" what an absolute epic fail those are.

Those players could've been detected by some basic comparison algorithm.

Please, why are you all so up tight about it? Bots are not even that good (yet). They play the same super tight game the whole time... they don't take anything from you, if you play good enough you can easily win from them...

They just win from fish, and lose it to you

At the same time the fish learn to play against some really tight players that don't get upset about the bad play... otherwise it would be flooded with only beginners playing weird hands with weird bets from weird positions!

They even help to develop the game, like the New School, the exact opposite play from how the bots play, just to win from them generally...

Until the bots can play New School too, looking forward to how we're going to play then!

And by the way, if you start making a fuzz about it there's probably a whole lot more going on at the site that needs to be exposed... (like washing clothes...), and that might be the end of online gambling... so... what's it gonna be, all in and go for broke, or just call and see the flop?

So how many bots do have you running 'Pro Evolutionist'

No, they don't. Stars uses a contribution rakeback system. The rake generated at the table gets distributed to all present players. Shorstack bots don't generate **** for rake because they never see flops, so they make their money off the rake we pay.

Most of pokerstars reputation is built from the past. They're letting everyone else catch them in terms of security because they're just not getting the job done.

they can grind out sne with ease this way and with enough of them take millions out of stars poker economy.... wtf stfu already, this is a big issue on a number of fronts, not least that stars could't detect them (let alone that there is likely far many more out there farming away).

Wow. Didn't notice the thread explosion as I was on the tables playing against these accounts. Thanks PTR!

These bots are taking away $ from me as I sleep. The fact that they can play nonstop without someone without getting tired takes more money away from the poker economy and gives it to Pokerstars. Bots like this will drain the poker economy quickly.

This is insane. Thanks alot OP for bringing this to everyone's attention.

Any confirmation from Stars that these accounts will be frozen?

Depends if they're from wenzhou or not.

Even with all the issues with Stars detection stuff lately I suspect this is still correct. It's incredibly frustrating. I think they are missing a lot that they should be able to catch...yet it's probably worse on other sites.

I'm not sure if FT is quite as distant a second as they used to be though. It's almost certainly closer than I thought it was 12 months ago or so.

I've gone from having a relative feeling of security that Stars is probably doing a pretty good job of watching this stuff...to now thinking, "thank god for PTR to catch a couple of the more obvious things that Stars is missing."

As mentioned in a previous post, I've reconsidered by thoughts on PTR. Going from "really against it" to "sort of against it" to mostly welcoming them and being fine with them. Never thought I would be saying that honestly.

But I wasn't buying the logic before that PTR helps to be a watchdog for the games when I used to think, "PTR doesn't even have access to as much stuff as Stars. I think Stars can watch their own games just fine."

They're playing still as of now.

This really is a pretty impressive find for an outside site that doesn't even have access to all the hole-card info, etc. I tip my cap to them.

Note that I think PTR found out about this thread ONE DAY AGO. And it was that quickly that they came up with their article on it with all that data and uncovered the 10 different players and the very high likelihood that they are related. Just one day. That's it.

It's also the type of data I would have assumed was routine stuff at Stars but now I'm obviously not so sure. They even were shown who some of the players were and explained it away in this thread as perhaps being just a coincidence.

So this information has been sent to Stars and they're fine with it?

I might as well just use a bot myself if nobody minds.

OK, we should ask for a change to % then, like the other sites. Then it's their own loss...

Now they make them self suspicious

(Wouldn't be surprised if it's gonna come out they have bots installed themselves. Mind you, the business they're in has always been shady... and we're ALL part of it when we play!)

Didnt it took stars a year of recieving concerns before that whole stox thing really came to light?

And that was harder to detect. They've know about this for 3 months, according to that PTR article the intellipoker guys ''identified a large portion of this group in April''. And even after OP sends them those same names, no suspicion... but they DO reply within 24 hours saying that there are no signs of collusion, LOL. ****ing bad..

While stars was bragging in this thread about the supercomputer they use, PTR used simple statistics that one could have calculated on a commodore 64 and they came up with hard evidence. That is based on the names they got from the forums.

PTR wont have that hyper intelligent cheat detecting server, so they dont know who else is involved and Stars obviously wont find them either because their computer is so intelligent they havent figured out how it works yet.....

Cool story stars!

stars had a good run
/company

this happens all the time but given all the problems since Lee left just as soon as the pokerstars.us is created with taxes passed onto the players as rake their business model is dead

and a lot of it is self inflicted, allowing too many tables to be played right after UGIEA as a premptive move to protect revenue streams, failing to deal with the shortstaking problem correctly, failing to come up with a trustworthy face to replace Lee, and stumbling over repeated issues concerning cheating and reimbursements....

its a list growing into a rope, and I haven't mentioned the rumored member profiling

stop posting

Same stats doesnt prove anything, could be a group of people playing of the same chart and folowing it strictly. You dont need a bot to do that you just need a piece of paper with 3 simple rules and a list of hands one should open from each position.

Same chart + good execution = same stats



Btw poker is hard this days if you can beat it for 6 figures using such simple system.

Yeah, the whole 'supercomputer' thing is a joke.

Furbean and another player played hundreds of thousands of hands together without ever going to showdown. Supercomputer missed that one somehow.

Supercomputer showed no signs of collusion/softplay from the Stox accounts. Extensive PTR analysis proved otherwise and supercomputer changed its' mind later (I think).

Supercomputer couldn't detect a collusion ring of players all from the same country that were siphoning almost a million dollars from honest double-or-nothing regulars.

Spare us the whole supercomputer thing. All of the cheating on PokerStars has been caught by the players. Maybe the computer is broken?

Stars downhill FAST since the start of 2010. Took them years to build up their once almost elite image. Nice giving it away Stars. I bet those supercomputers and supermanagers helped alot.