While breaking Pokerstars TOS (like every other player) and looking on PTR, I came across three players that have all followed the same pattern.

All of them starting playing at 200nl, played similar numbers of hands at similar winrates (if breakeven is a winrate). They all moved DOWN to 100nl within a 3 day window and repeated the pattern. They then moved DOWN again to 50nl and continue.



I don't know if there is a way to determine if they ever play on the same tables or not (like the great researchers did on SS for the Chinese DON debacle) but this might be useful as well if anyone knows how to go about it.

fwd tosupport@pokerstars.com

and admit directly to pokerstars that I'm breaking their TOS knowingly?

bit of catch-22 I think

No bots, ask the guys at this forum and they will tell you it is impossible to design bots that beat the NL game at these levels.

Don't bother, they won't take action vs these rake machines

They're shortstackers playing under 10vpip. I think that can be botted for the breakeven winrates these accounts have.

You'll get a beating like you have had never before for this statement!

Oh look, bigfish2010. I'm ****ing surprised.

extremely suspicious how they all moved down at pretty much the exact same time also with extremely similar volume.

Doesn't prove they are bots though. They might just be live players who are colluding. Or a single player who is playing on 3 different accounts at the same time (on the same tables with himself perhaps).

I understand your concern for reporting something that you saw on PTR. I really doubt they would do anything to you for pointing it out but I can't tell you that it's a 100% guarantee.

Perhaps you can PM the names to PSMichael here on 2+2 (assuming Stars doesn't know your 2+2 handle). I really don't think it's completely inappropriate to just post the names of the players in this thread and then assume Stars will see it. But there are some reasons why you probably wouldn't want to do that also I guess.

Those figures are crazy but they don't really indicate bots.

The second two players were doing much better at the highest stakes and would, if their results had continued, made far more by staying there.

The first player seems to have played for 5 months at the lowest stakes without realising that he was doing much better mid-stakes.

Certainly very odd behaviour but I can't see why you assume bots. If they were all running the same bot I'd have expected a little more consistency over their results.

Yeah MB, you see my point. This isn't enough evidence to prove they're bots, but it's suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. I don't want to out the accounts if by some miracle they're innocent of everything, but I don't want to put myself in harm's way either. My SN is known by anyone that wants to do the research.

I think for a shortstacker, those winrate variations are small enough that variance could easily be the only difference between them. If the accounts play on the same tables (I don't know one way or the other) then I would suspect colluding bots or humans. If they don't play together, that would tend to argue for a multiaccounting botter instead.

Go to an internet café or similar and use a hotmail account to email 'stars.

I just looked in my HEM db and the accounts definitely DO play on the same tables.

If you are afraid to report them, PM the nicks to someone on this forum you trust and they could report them to stars...

What is your hypothesis for two players who are winning at a certain rate moving down, winning at a much reduced rate and staying put rather than returning to where they were more profitable.

Neither robots nor collusion explain that behaviour.

Had the last player stayed put at $1/2 he'd have made just over $43k rather than just under $10k between January and today.

Yeah it doesn't make sense to me either, but the coincidence is beyond strange.

Might be nothing to it as I do have 2k to 3k hands on each of the 3 accounts and there are 3 hands they had against each other (all QQ v AK type hands) but they all play 8/8 styles so they're only hitting each other with big hands.

It's simple, they want to avoid detection. When running a scam you don't want any attention. By moving down and terminating the accounts in a few months they can start over (if they already have not). If they repeat this process runing a year they should be able to have ten or so full accounts running at the same time. PS "security" will have a hard time tracking these guys down if they only play for short periods of time on each account. There is a reason why a grifter never settle down in a town.

Trust me when I say that they have at least triple the accounts that you know of, I'd say it could be as much as 15 accounts involved in a scheme like this.

Right.

So they decide to avoid detection by moving down within a couple of days of each other and making a pittance for some weeks when they could have stayed where they were for a few more weeks and then just taken a holiday. Then they all move down again within a couple of days. Way to avoid being noticed!

This behaviour is seemingly inexplicable but involving robots does nothing to clarify things. Your weird take on robots is very similar to the way certain other people have weird views on rigging.

Hi,

If you'd like to send us an anonymous tip, there a few different ways:

a) Create a new anonymous email account at hotmail or gmail or some similar services.

b) There are various anonymous email services you can use.

c) Someone could create a new accout on 2p2 and send me a PM.

Each have their weakness, but PokerStars is not interested in pursuing the end users of services like PTR and similar: instead, our focus is on cutting off their collection of data in the first place. The integrity of the games is better protected by players feeling secure enough to report such issues to PokerStars, rather than pedantically hunting down users who visit a particular website.

To use an analogy, if you happen to be spying on a next door neighbour, witness a crime, and report it in good faith, the police aren't going to arrest you on stalking charges. The same principle applies here.

Sincerely,

Michael J
PokerStars Game Security Team

How do you know they don't have other accounts running? The DoN ring had close to 30 accounts as I can remember and it was only their inherent stupidity that got them caught, If they would have had any brains they would have run an account for a few months and then closed it. This would have enabled them to continue for a long time. They would perhaps still be running today if some peanut brain didn't understand that they would get unwanted attention if they made it to the leader board or just showed good winnings over a years time.

The scammers, colluders, grifters will get better at what they do. When running a scam the last thing they want is attention, as long as people just view someone as a lose or un-orthodox player they will be able to keep it up for a few months more. We are talking about thousands of dollars per month when doing something like this and there are always problems when getting caught running a ring. Scams on poker sites follow the same MO as in real life, there is no difference!

Thanks for the official input. I'll send in the report through the normal channels.

Standard 'investigation started' email received, waiting begins.

Regarding the winrates:

Last played at 1/2 in January could go way back way before that for all we know (it's on the PTR of course...but we can't look them up without the names).

Perhaps they started pretty hot and then suffered losses. They run hot at first, cashout some, then hit downswing and 2 or 3 of the players drop about $3k each or something and they decide to move down.

Assuming that each one's win-rate is consistent each day is incorrect. As the games have been getting tougher and/or players failing to adapt you can find examples of players with +0.4BB/100 winrates who have been losing big-time and more steadily recently. They were something like +1.5BB/100 for a little while and then ran at -0.2BB/100 for a much longer while. Even though their long term winrate is still in the positive it would be incorrect to still refer to them as "winning" players.

So it's possible something like that happened with these guys.

Or maybe they thought that winning "only" 0.7BB/100 at a certain level wasn't good enough for them. Meh, whatever. Really doesn't matter what the incentive/motivation was. The whole thing is really suspicious and weird.

Definitely not. Variance is a much bigger deal than a lot of people think.

There was some graph that I remember seeing that showed a bunch of computer simulations for some typical player with the exact same long-term winrate. Something like 1BB/100 and SD of 18. Anyway, they did a bunch of different shorter term samples for this player. But by "shorter term" samples" I mean it was a bunch of 100k hand samples or something like that (a relatively short term as far as this stuff is concerned). And the graphs and win-rates were all over the place. +2BB/100 for one stretch, then -0.6BB/100 for the next stretch, etc. For the exact same computer simulation with the exact same SD.

I don't know if anyone knows the graph I'm talking about but if you know the thread I would be interested in seeing it again (PSMichael might remember this one)

Anyway the point is that trying to determine that the players are different people based on slight differences in their winrates just isn't going to work.