For anybody currently playing on 888poker or considering playing on it I would suggest reading this post.
Timeline
On December 27 I tried to login in 888poker client and received a message that my account
"has been temporarily disabled". I had not received any notifications about this, so I emailed support and received a generic email that they have disabled my account because of suspicions that
"use of Artificial Intelligence may be involved". I responded that this must be a mistake and I could have been flagged because of some long playing sessions and gave some facts that should indicate that no magic AI was involved.
On January 9 I had not received a response for 11 days, so I sent another email. After 2 more days I finally received an message with the same generic response. Again, I tried to provide more details and 5 days later support asked me to submit notarized documents to confirm my identity. I submitted the documents and assumed that this would move to conclusion, but on January 19 I received an email that investigation has concluded and
"the decision to discontinue your membership has been made" and
"The account will remain blocked and any money in your bank roll will not be refunded and no cashouts will be paid."
Finally I got emailed a link to their user agreement with a quote from it:
"The Company may decide at its sole discretion to terminate a member’s account, and withhold all funds in such account, on the basis that such an investigation provides a negative or uncertain conclusion."
The only communication 888poker provided was through the described emails, that I will attach in full to this post. I have no idea what this investigation included and what was the real reason for seizing thousands of dollars in this manner.
Background
I believe transparency is the best policy, so I will provide some more details about me.
I had played some poker on 888poker around 5 years ago and deposited again in January 2017. Starting with a 50$ deposit this was just a way to blow off some steam in a competitive environment after work. Writing and running AIs for dying industries definitely is not my main job.
For the first 3 months I played quite a few hands of nanostakes. For the rest of the year I played a total of 130k hands, playing few times a month, mostly on weekends.
During these last 9 months I reached a reasonable winrate (almost 10 EV bb/100) playing very loose and exploitative style. I would think that my playing style was the least bot like among regulars, exceeding 30% VPIP and 10% 3bet, building table dynamics and taking crazy lines, playing anybody heads up and short handed, playing extremely deep, slowrolling regulars and communicating in the chat pretty often.
The only thing that could cause some misunderstandings is that I played some very long sessions on a pretty weird schedule. For example in the last 6 months I played only 25 sessions, most of them 7 to 16 hours long. I can only say that I enjoy building huge stacks, creating table dynamics and playing for long stretches of time and I have a poor schedule with no regular working hours. Few players have even mentioned this in game chat and I have always responded to these messages.
During this time I have used only basic software like Holdem Manager and 888caption. I have not even really studied the game theoretically, I might have opened Equilab a couple of times last year and watched a watched a couple of Doug Polk videos (does this qualify as AI?).
During entire last year I withdrew a small amount of money only once while having around 100 buyins for my main stakes. If I was smart enough to run poker AI, wouldn't I be smart enough to keep only bare minimum in my bankroll?
Summary
The result of this investigation seems very odd to me. If I could get banned for using AI, anybody who goes on a heater can get wrongfully banned.
It feels like seizing thousands of dollars from an almost recreational player who has payed thousands of dollars in rake would warrant at least a single phone call or interview. I would be ready to record sessions of me playing, analyze hands played, heck allow remote access to my machine for analysis.
Instead I was banned without an email notification in the beginning and was provided with a link to the user agreement 3 weeks later that apparently permits 888poker to confiscate anybodies funds without presenting any more reasons for it.
List of played sessions during last 6 months:
Result graph:
All communication with 888poker during this time period (emails):