Hi, forummembers. As You have already guessed, I'm here to talk about serious problem. We have reasons to be anonymous, but anyone can check our proofs just by using HM2. As You know, there were huge blocks of botnets on Ipoker and Pokerstars (huge winrates up to NL1k) in last few years. Now they appear on 888 (or other skins of pacific network) at lower limits.

Like in previous cases they all are russians, they have very low folds to cbets, high WTSD and WWSF. They play huge amount af hands (comparing to other pacific regs). Most stats are identical, as You will see on screens.

There are few unique stats, very different from field, which we can use to identify bot with probability close to 100%, but we would like to keep it secret (in order to hide it from bot operators for future) and just show coincidence of about 150 other stats.

Also we detect another group of bots, who plays more tightly preflop and might be a slight modification of first group (it would be wery suspicious - 20 superwinning lags from one country in such a small field), or just another botnet from Russia.

We abosulutely realize that public post will
1) scare recreational players
2) give bot operatos an advice what they should change next time
but we have no choise, because support of 888 just say they would investigate. And they investigate. And investigate. And investigate. For a month since their first answer (which take a week also). We have gathered proofs in 3 days and security with all information given to them can't come to conclusion. Bots are still playing. We are afraid that bot operators google themselwes every day and will cashout soon, but responsibility will be on 888 security.

Their nicknames:

botnet 1 (lags):
Trolltracker
Aggrophob
Waitlistreg
Blindviy13

botnet 2 (tags):
urmessioli
6u6lik
Haxpanom
idlike2win
validmad0
tinaterna
xavierhern
f19117
minitrashy
patronpa
Nellyskip
B3tshark
Yonikakan
barglot
qapetskas
qotoclism

Also we have more suspicious players very similar, but not absolutely identical.

And there is a time for some stats:







And funny screen with 4 bots on 1 table (3 tagbots with identical HUD stats).


I'm not sure if pictures are not represented because of new member, so there are links:

http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#YGHCVX6
http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#1vDvYDa
http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#fa24145
http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#AfvZF9t
http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#mC00io5
http://imgur.com/a/4LYtO#xjVElZW

And funny screen with 4 bots on 1 table (3 tagbots with identical HUD stats).
http://imgur.com/EqBMF5l

what games are these guys playing?

NL50, NL100, NL 200, mostly 6max, sometimes FR, don't play SNAP. Also might play other limits, we can't monitore all field.

I have played alot with most of these accounts, B3tshark called my 5b shove with QJs once and if I'm not mistaken he did something redic like 4b shoving ATs vs me 150bb deep, not sure though, and he changed his game alot, so I doubt he is a bot.
Trolltracker does some wierd **** too, can't access my notes atm, but pretty sure he can't be a bot, he takes the wierdest lines all the time. same for aggrophob.
waitlistreg does some wierd stuff too, although slightly different, stuff like calling a 4b oop with 55, A5o etc .. those are the hands I remember, but pretty sure he makes some lolbad plays.
for others I do agree strongly for the most part.

I have highlighted this thread and sent it over and you can be assured that this has been escalated to the proper department and will be investigated thoroughly.

Thanks for your detailed feedback.
888Rep

Gl with this! There is a very similar Russian bot ring on the sngs as well on 888. Unfortunately after I report the usernames, a bunch of new names pop up. After going through that cycle numerous times, I've concluded 888 does not care about this issue and can't stop them for some reason.

booommmaaa, it seems to me that few weird things is much easier to explain than 150 same stats. I mean if I was bot operator I would for sure do some strange things from time to time.
Calling 4bets with small pairs is same for all lagbots, I guess You rarely (if ever) see it from reg.

888Rep, thanks, hope this time it helps.

am_man, with the help of community (and hopefully publicity) You have new chance.

yeah you're probably right, I mean I have no clue about bot's coding/algorithms, but do you think a bot programmer would go as far as to include wierd and mostly spewy lines just to concieve?? it's possible I guess.
anyway I hope you guys can gather enough evidence to ban them and hopefully pressure 888 to police their tables more strictly in the future.

Don't know for sure, but looks like it is the way to improve for them. Older bots were never missclicking and press buttons always in the same place (pixel). That was easy way to find them. As far as war goes both sides try to be one step ahead.
We don't include some moments in this post (and only tell to support) just to not give bot operators information for "next round".

I'm just as worried about bots as anyone else, but I don't see much "proof" of botting in this thread. The stats of the 4 suspected "type 1 bots" don't look all that similar to each other in my opinion, especially considering you have over 50,000 hands on each of them.

e.g. To take some stats where you'd have a "trustworthy" sample size, the RFI for BUTTON varies from 38% to 49%. That's a HUGE difference in ranges.

The flop c-bet stats don't match either. One of the "bots" is c-betting IP 57%, while another has 69% for that stat. OOP, the c-bet frequencies range from 48% to 61%. Again, that is a HUGE difference.

If the suspected bots have very low fold to c-bet numbers, and remarkably high WTSD numbers, it's possibly because they are playing closer to GTO than the rest of the field. In other words, they are simply better players.

It's certainly possible that these players are connected in some way (other than being based in Russia), but I'd expect to see much closer similarities in their stats if they were truly being programmed to follow robotic algorithms.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade - and I certainly hope 888 investigates this matter thoroughly - but just from a quick look at these numbers, I remain unconvinced for now.

EDIT: Just from a very quick look at the stats for "type 2 bots", those guys look a lot more similar. Type 1, not so much.

ArtySmokes, probably some obvious stat differences were made in disguise purposes. There are some unique stat combinations and strategy elements which are same for them and REALLY far away from average. Sorry can't provide more info, it's for the 888 support only.

That still doesn't necessarily indicate bots, although it could. I would imagine that multi accounting and cooperative study probably both produce a higher number of similar players than botting.

Again guys, modern bot should have possibilities to use different strategies and mask themselves. They need to do this for sure, because absolutely identical stats are much easier to find (like on screen with 3 identical group2 bots).
We now how it looks like - post from noname, and not all stats are the same. All important information have been sent to support. They have much more ways to identify bot than we are. If security wants - we can talk on skype and tell them "where to look".

Party /Stars best in catching robots and acting fast. Rest are way behind in race

what are their win rates?

@antibot_coalition
fwiw I have at least 40k hands on all those acounts, maybe more. I could send you the hh if that would help you.

stoopmonkey, tags are playing close to zero, lags - up to 10 bb/100.

booommmaaa, thanks, we have 100-200k hands on each suspicious account.

Isn't it easy to beat the bots? do they adjust?

Even if decent regs are able to beat them they are very bad for poker because they will literally steal money from recreational players who think they are playing real humans and since they can put insane amounts of volume that no human can, they take more recreational players money. Plus there could be a chance that a bot is going to be/is better than the best human reg especially at shallow stack poker

AlmostShark, on pokerstars bots play up to NL1k with huge winrates. Group of top players before reporting wanted to exploit, find some leaks, etc., but they can't. So, there are unbeatable bots. In our case we don't sure it is the same botnet, but we also firstly try to find their leaks. They have some small stat problems, but it might be part of their exploitive strategy. And we guess they adjust ok to betsizing and frequency change.

oigres02, You get it absolutely right. Tagbots are ok for pokerroom I guess, because they are almost ideal for making "recreational player deposits -> rake" path faster and get rewarded small. But in long run it makes the end closer.

What fascinates me is that you can detect robots operating just by watching them play and yet PS, with access to every single detail of how they play every single hand - including things that you have no access to - can't.

It's a little like the people who can tell that on line poker is rigged just by observing how their own hands play out - without using any maths or stats, and yet people who are well qualified in using the statistical tools necessary can't find anything amiss even when looking at tens of millions of hands.

Wiki, we don't know how security works. I guess there are some simple algorithms (like clicking fold button every time in the same pixel, chipdumping, maybe timings, etc), but I doubt they look at hand histories in holdem manager to see identical stats. Also there are more important things to do for them like big tourney wins, cashouts, documents identification, etc. So it might be easier for players.

It seems to me that I would do some things much better both as security and as bot operator, but obviously hard to say without being inside.

http://matt.gipsyteam.ru/blog/3217-d...u-nas-problema - pokerstars bot story (in russian, but you might try the translator), where You can see that players indicate bots much faster, than security. We ask author of that topic for help and he confirmed that most likely it is the same botnet.

I think near identical stats is one area where players may notice something that the sites don't and the more reputable ones will be very happy to hear from you if you can show them evidence that a set of people are playing with infeasibly similar stats. They can then deploy their own more or less sophisticated technology to see if there is anything untoward going on.

A lot of site security is automatic, so it can work in the background while humans deal with other matters. Of course, they do not want to inconvenience legitimate players with such things as frequent captcha checks so a heads up on suspicious activity may be welcome.

However, a lot of the things that people come here saying is indicative of robots is nothing of the kind. Some people just have a very weird style of play (which is why some others can consistently make a profit ). Near identical stats are probably the only reliable way a normal player has of detecting robots (or other multi-accounting).

you copy pasted the wrong URL, right click -> copy image URL to get the correct one

aha, source?