@Meroving1an
Well so you are saying people who make living from selling affiliate deals, softwares (~ poker forums) should unite and bring attention to bots and rampant cheating? It would just drive fish more far away from the tables. (or making them go to another affiliate where they not just withold information about cheating but telling them false infos about beatability of games). Checkmate. And we dont even talk about the fact sometimes these affils/forums are actively participate in cheating or giving best deals to cheaters. So you go figure.

"What if we build a committee from reputable 2+2 users/admins that will agree to put their time and be dedicated to the cause."

You are pretty naive young man...

I dont think we can save this sinking ship.

All the pokerrooms / biggest forums should lobby for true legislation, to make poker cheating a criminal offense etc. While for sure they could at least test it on smaller markets ( .es, .it, .fr etc) I never heard any reps talk about making poker fraud into criminal offense in 13 years being in poker (11 year as a pro). NEVER. This should raise some questions: why they dont even TALK about it? Or at least trying out some sort of player identification that every player should do. "ohhh no it will drive fish away". It was might be true 10 years ago but now lots of 'normal 9-5' people got used to identification processes. So yeah if you play poker on our site more than 30 hours a month you have to send a hour playing footage where you comment your play along and your face showed in web camera. NOT IF YOURE SUSPICIOUS, but always. A system records mouse patterns also so next time a new player registrate but ask a bum friend to play until acc is verified will get caught having totally different mouse patterns. This way once a player gets banned he will not being able to participate in the games- or at least it would be 1000x harder. This things are not that hard with advanced AI, but I see no intention and not even talk about stuff as this.

While I doo agree on most of what you said, I also doubt that EVERY affilaite/reputable user/coach/stacking team is by default a cheater. I do think that there are some people at least that aren't involved in it and ofcourse we can try to create together a team.
And yes, the chances may not be high (even though I think with discipline and hard work we can go far) but still it's better than just stay and watch. Pokergrant was one of the room that was proven to have their local bots playing on their site. In consequence, after a long investigation, the site suffered a big strike on their reputation and the online now on the site isn't going higher than 30 people. If we can regroup and find a way to apply pressure, I think we can make bots a taboo in the industry. There are PLANTY of honest players using the help of affilates. Imagine what will happend when they will hear that their affilate is allowing bots. Who if not those players suffered the most from bots? I think they will turn to other affilates with a clean reputation.
It may be naive, but I honestly believe that we can still make a change. But we MUST ORGANIZE. Only posting suspicion and smalll investigation won't make much of a difference!

Then why are you even posting here?

I mean, I'm not saying you're not allowed to have a dissenting point of view, but if you're just here to tell people that nothing they do will make a difference, I'm not sure what the point is.

Cheating scandals have been uncovered on this forum, and others, many times before.

Sure.

1. to vent out some frustration in a civilized way about what I was going thru battling cartels and what I see online.
2. there must be similar people to me who tried doing same but faced reality: pokerrooms/ forums / affils / commissions wont do anything to solve problems even tho they should at least try things. I also see people who havent tried yet so they think could change anything. For sure they should try but they may wont feel as bad as I felt initally, knowing some others experienced same.

@Meroving1an

Fair points. Wish you success

Virtually all of the affiliates I know are very anti-botting, anti-cheating, etc. The health of the game is worth much more to a successful affiliate than having a couple clients who run bots and produce rake for you.

--
Kahn

This is a pretty serious allegation. Has Filatov responded to any of the gossip on the Russian forums, or perhaps dismissed it as hearsay?

Could you tell me examples when affiliates ACTIVELY battled against cheating?

Almost all the bots or superusers I know were caught by players or the scandal was just so big the poker room couldnt keep it together in the bottle. Never that they started investigating something. (let me know if there were cases)

Its not that I say they should care, but come on... saying that is just so demagogue. Some may care but they dont do **** about it, so the end of the day its nothing. Others getting paid for giving cheaters deals.

Well, the most famous, and only actual superuser case was assisted by affiliates, including myself who provided tens of thousands of hands for analysis.

I can not post links to affiliate websites as 2+2 frowns upon that from guys like me. However, it isn't difficult to go to an affiliate website and search it for "bots" and note that some of them actually do give a damn!

--
Kahn

I can't imagine someone on TRT being such a ***** so...are you even on TRT?

Are you guys sure that BotFarm also offers omaha bots? I saw on the first page it was mentioned that they offer holdem and omaha for ring games and tournaments. I was researching about them, watched video abou neo poker bot and it seems that they offer only holdem HU, 3max and 6 max fixed limit and no limit AI to play against.

What irritates me is that those guys have a public website and offer their services. They are not the only one here are some commercial sites that seem to sell a lot of weak and cheap bots

*Links removed for what should be obvious reasons*

I think that those commercial bots are very weak even on micros, because licence is so cheap still they make the tables look fake and make micro limits hard to beat for human regulars who started learning poker.

*Link removed for what should be obvious reasons* Here is the forum for bot developers, there are so many active users and topics. Off course not all of them have strong bots, but it is enough to have 1 solid bot software and then you can use it on all poker site on any stakes as long as you have accounts. By reading through the forum you can conclude that bots play undetected even on pokerstars. They use 2 PCs, casino software runs on PC1 and bot runs on PC2 so it is undetectable and use special mouse hardware so that poker site can't see that mouse commands come from software. This way bot is completely undetectable, the only thing left is to have human-like strategy and not too long session which is not a big issue. Those bot teams that have very profitable bot (playing mid stakes on stars) even do profit share with humans, so humans are clicking with mouse according to what bot suggests. Live GTO advisors are very popular in last 1 year, several teams provide it for cheap price, and claim that it makes very good winrate on mid stakes (on pokerstars).

Some of you asked for proof, well simply read the forum maxinmontreal and see it yourself. off course you can believe they are all lying that they have profitable bot rings on pokerstars, it is all up to you. Pokerstars is in fact doing the most to ban bots, but they can only detect bad bots which have weak stealth. E.g. if bot would teleport mouse or always click on the same point on the button it would be very quickly detected and banned. Or if bots belonging to the same ring would all have same strategy, same bet sizes producing identical statistics they would also be banned as soon as they would play descent sample size of hands. So pokerstars is really fighting against weak bots, but they seem not to have technology and expertise to detect solid bot rings. Other poker sites do much less than stars, if you look at the poker sites that are supported by those commercial poker bots, most of them have very low security for bots. Party poker, 888, Betonline recently switched security of bots from very weak to medium or strong according to those commercial poker sites meaning that they started detecting weak bots, but i am wondering if they started doing it because they have own house bots (considering that games are still very tough and traffic hasn't decreased after bots got banned).
The good question is how much % of bots are on the tables on different poker sites. I think it is quite high, as tables are very tough on all stakes. None of my poker friends is able to beat mid stakes anymore, few years ago they were able.

Regarding the discussion how umoral is botting and if it should be against the law. Sure it should be against the law but currently it is a gray zone so it is legal, it just breaks terms and conditions of the sites, so bot users get banned and nothing happens, then they find new account and continue extracting the money. Why it is that way, well because poker and other gambling games are all about getting the money from recreational players and providing illusion that it is a fair game. Human poker winning players started getting too high egde in recent years so poker sites don't need them as they take a big piece of the cake from poker site and ruin the ecology. Poker sites need to offer to human winning players all site promotions as recreational do get (except pokerstars which gives more to recreational), sites play big part of rake to affiliates that bring human winning players so it is all too expensive. On the other side, having own house bots creates better ecology on the site, no need to pay rake to affiliates, no need to pay for customer support, no need for promotions etc.
Those are the reasons why guys like neopokerlab are able to sell their product to poker sites, they also mention those things on their site.

Oh lol one of admins asked for proof in one of the posts, and i gave here some links which shows proofs about bot rings on pokerstars and admin removes links "due to obvious reasons"

I'm not sure what your complaint is. You provided links to bot sites that most people who have looked into botting in-depth are aware of, and those who aren't can easily Google. Neither 2+2 management, nor many of our members, like direct links being posted to those sites - doesn't this make sense? I even left the name of the forum; I just removed the URL.

This makes a lot sense IMO. I would bet that this is Bovada's model. Makes perfect sense in a challenging market like US.

Ok sorry i didn't know that you don't like direct links will in future only write name of the site. Thank you for editing my post

At the GT forum, there was a discussion of this problem before.
https://forum.gipsyteam.ru/index.php?viewtopic=140190
Anatoly Filatov was accused of using hint soft. He was asked questions. Players wanted to clarify the situation, but he did not find the time or desire to answer them. He did not confirm, but did not dispute this information. Famous personalities, most likely also working on the BotFarm, tried to defend him, but he himself did not say a word.

In my topic
https://forum.gipsyteam.ru/index.php?viewtopic=146792
where it was said that he is very likely to also work in a corporation or cooperating with it, Mr. Filatov did not appear in the same way.
Purity, Egorov, Filatov, Shaposhnikov, Mercator and others are silent. Doesn’t that prove that they are all involved in this situation?
Simple logic suggests that in such a situation, many would decide to write a refutation. Others would be silent.
But when everyone is silent, it can only be a command from above or a silence at any cost policy adopted by the corporation (BotFarm).

Updated links to the negotiations and HH:

Negotiations in English:
https://transfiles.ru/uu998
pass: z2yqr9

All negotiations:
https://transfiles.ru/jelgy
pass: 8whxno

HandHistory:
https://transfiles.ru/azpfb
pass: plk21e

i have read first conversation it is discussion between 1 Danish and 1 Russian guy belonging to different teams discussing about communication between their processes. Interesting part is describing their architecture, having 1 process for OCR or traffic reading and stealth, 1 for decision making and 1 for monitoring bots
The discussion is not revealing anything special except showing that those 2 guys are experts in what they are doing.
They have even solution for Chinese firewall probably having private vpn. Chinese were recently even arresting some guys who were running bots or humans doing collusion because they were not playing from China but from different countries using VPN, but this guys seem to have solution for it.

In HH files you can see that they play on pokermaster and even generate hand histories while playing. They don't have real player names but assign some pid... names meaning that they most likely read network traffic to read player names, bets etc because Chinese letters are too much work for scraping. I am wondering how their bots performed vs human collusion teams on pokermaster. If those bots don't do collusion themself it would be hard to beat collusion of 4-6 accounts in team on the same table

in the 2nd file there are a lot of screenshots of conversations i can't understand it as it is Russian. Maybe bst5219 you could tell something relevant what is there?
All of this is showing that they really have a lot of developers in their team. If they pay taxes in their country for the profit they make i don't think there is anything illegal that they do except that they run bots on Chinese sites from other countries, which Chinese don't allow.

Very interesting read. I have nothing to add but if the allegations in this thread are possibly true then in my view this thread should be in NVG where it will get much more attention. Could be one of the most important online poker threads in the last decade.

Could you upload files in another format/website?
I mean I dont know what file types are in abut I dont feel like opening random russion links. I think probably most people are the same.

You should either upload as images or just typing the content in or other where I could feel safe opening.

It should be in NVG also as said above.
You could get better publicity.

I've dl the files and everything is legit. However, nearly everything is in Russian so i don't think it's going to be too meaningful unless we can get somebody to translate the correspondence here.

I believe this to be real, and I believe it has been going on for a long while now. Back in 2014 a thread was started about the Tartanian7 poker bot being developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University in the Computer Science Department, thread below.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...poker-1477525/

Shortly after the thread was started it was joined by one of the members of the team

After some Q&A he then goes on to say in the thread

Followed by

and when asked further about this he responds

So, with this being the case as far back as 2014 its not at all surprising that these entities are out here and are trying to figure out ways to work with one another to maximize profits before this ship sinks. Just look at the numerous players, all sharing the same style, that hail from the same cities in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then go look at the average cost index of operating out of somewhere in Belarus or somewhere like Novosibirsk, Russia and actually start to pay attention to how many players come from those places. Start to think, are there really 50+ regulars that all play super similar coming from places that have a population of 1.5 million people? Or are these great places because there's an abundance of low skilled, but somewhat tech capable people who would be willing to accept a low hourly salary to sit and click buttons for 8 hours a day?

It is funny how everyone is just blaming Russian guys for botting, like they are the only one who are having bots. Even suggestions like lets ban all people from east that would solve the problem. Russia is a big country so off course they will have more bot teams than other smaller countries. USA is also big but they have less access to online sites, thus less motivation. Yes, you can play on french, spanish, italian sites if you think there are no bots there and that western guys are fair in general, but hey those sites are somehow also full of bots. in every country there are people who try to win money by playing fair, and also people who try to cheat with collusion, and people who try to win with bots.

There are going to be bots from all countries but the botters can't get on ACR right now because the table maps aren't working since the last update. Most of the players that seem to be missing are from Russia and Eastern Europe.

Also I am believing OP's theory less and less because on ACR the bots seem gone at the moment and all the bot forums are saying they can not play on there. I don't think the rabbit hole is deep as OP is suggesting.

Such an interesting and well supported opinion. Very hard to contradict you, you came up with undeniable facts and argued on every point OP described.
Other than being sarcastic, there is another creator of a much smaller bot network who confirmed (on gipsyteam) the existance of BotFarm. Even though he called it otherwise. Him, on the other hand, he's got a lot of credibility since he fought the bots on most of the big poker network in bot wars, so he is well informed about other's bot networks activity.