A group of husng regulars approached me to help raise awareness for a serious issue which is happening on WPN for quite long time. After they sent me the evidences I belive this problem belongs to this forum, so I am going to publish their standpont without any changes.
TL;DR We have strong evidence that a botring has hijacked HUSNGs on Winning Poker Network. WPN refuses to take action despite repeated complaints.
In July and August, a group of Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian low stakes players (playing 24-36 hyper husngs) mounted a coordinated attack on the WPN HUSNG games at all stakes from $24 to $500. This botring generally controls the lobbies most of the hours but now they decided to take full control of the day. Here are some red flags which got me and a group of fellow regulars immediately suspicious of them:
- they were immediately ready to play deep, regular blind, husng-s at 200$ stake (before they only sat maxium 50$ stakes for months)
- they were ready to play 8-9 different regulars on 6 tables for 5 hours without a single break.
- They played up to 12-14 hours in total without any break (the war happened after they were already sitting there for 6-8 hours)
- They kept this pace for 1,5 months.
- some crucial statistics are the same for all of them (completely differ from on avg regular tendencies and extremely close to GTO play)
- Players get disconnected only on one of the several tables they are playing simultaneously
- entire matches on sit-out
- (the last 2 points could be explained only by bugs in the bot, which sometime „dropped” one but not other tables)
In 10 years of professional poker career I have never met players with such superhuman endurance (well I did but those were bots too). Accordingly, I made my first report to WPN security after a few days of playing these nicknames, but they replied with a formulaic letter stating they are investigating this issue. I know that other regulars have notified WPN of this unusual activity around the same time, yet they did not do anything although the situation was more than suspicious.
Unlike in cash games, live and let live is not an option in husng-s when a network is infested by bots. One cannot continue playing as normal and still earning some money from recreational players. To quote a classic from xrab who ran the biggest botring in husngs until last year: “The way hu sngs work is that whoever holds the lobby, gets to play vs the recreational players and thus makes money.” Therefore, I had to play exclusively against bots for the past two months along with other human regulars on WPN. This is also the only way to collect data / hand history from these players. Obviously, warring with a botring is expensive so a few of us human regulars joined hands to reduce the cost, while gaining enough evidence.
As the members of the botring divided the timezones we only have hard evidence on 4 players which played the same hours as us: AutisticRaven, QuitSilence, Westchester, whoopensocker. The statistics below are based on roughly 5000 games, or close to 200K hands. During the war, the two parties together paid more than $70.000 in rake (which may explain why WPN is not quick to act).
What kind of evidence could prove that bots are making the decisions for these players? In a word, consistency. Whereas humans’ decisions are necessarily variable and error prone, computers are eerily consistent. Specifically, we will look at consistency across the four (supposedly independent, supposedly human players) mentioned above. If we can show that they play extraordinary volumes at extraordinary consistency, we can safely assume they are linked by a common real-time helper tool. Of course, the designers of the botring know that this is a weakness in their system, therefore probably design tactics to make their strategies more variable and thus more human-like by using different strategies in simple MR/limp situations pre-flop or c-betting/barrelling decision post-flop. However, they
did not vary their strategy in more complex situations, (e.g. fold vs bet-check-bet, fold vs c-bet in 3bet pot, raise vs c-bet in 3bet pot, ISO non all-in, fold vs 3bet preflop, fold vs probe, donking flop) presumably because these are
too complex for the low stakes horses executing the bots decisions and in
situations involving folds, presumably because these are too expensive to neglect.
Note that because these are specific and relatively rare situations our sample size is smaller (and as we all know too well, in small samples variance is larger). So it is all the
more remarkable that the consistencies below still emerge. Some additional noise in preflop statistics is due to entire sit-outs (affecting whoopensocker the most).
Here is their preflop stats in HUD
For highlight these are their crucial stats which happens to be the same:
Their postflop stats:
So who are these players? Here is an incomplete roster:
- AutisticRaven (Ukraine)
- QuitSilence (Russia)
- Westchester (Russia)
- whoopensocker (Belarus)
- G20LLD (Russia)
- exJordan (Russia)
- gerda_kitty (Belarus)
- PAULITROVICH (Belarus)
- psychodel1c (Latvia)
- prizrakOperbI (Russia)
It is an open secret among the husng community that these players are members of the Saauron1 botring banned in 2017 from PokerStars and in 2018 from Party Poker. If you want to read more on their rich history of cheating, here are a few useful links:
Saauron1 (most likely AutisticRaven on WPN) incredible sharkscope graph on Stars (got banned in 2017):
https://gyazo.com/900ed50acec47310b11bf6a6eec8f783
Partypoker banned an entire botring in the end of November, 2018. These names mentioned in this forum several times also
https://gyazo.com/945026328d5b21f6cd4423b568d39222
Saauron’s bots were partially blocked from sharkscope but if we check one of the opposite team member most frequent opponents we can see saauron’s partypoker team:
https://gyazo.com/5fa71e259f911bef2d3f7bdb32de2370
In pokerprolabs we can see that Saayron1, G20LLD, XAPPUGA were banned the same time as the rest of the botring from partypoker
https://gyazo.com/112bfec5cae6f18ffb30bf4a249cf859
https://gyazo.com/f6add66331e2eb09e73d81cb858da1e0
https://gyazo.com/c7567a6ea5ce94fd4ef8c469bb8498f8
Mention on 2p2 about these bots on WPN earlier:
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...ostcount=15977
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...&postcount=142
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1.../#post55272099
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...40&postcount=6
What is WPN doing?
WPN champions itself publicly for being an industry leader on integrity (
https://www.poker.org/forum/viewtopi...2f38271d3e3059), yet they failed to act in 2 months. We sent them multiple emails, including the statistics from above and more. If we could produce strong evidence of cheating with our humble means, they have no excuse for not detecting this weeks ago. Honestly, it raises uncomfortable questions whether it is stupidity or malice explaining their inaction.
If you have a WPN account, please consider sending an email to
gameintegrity@winningpokernetwork.com to protest against bots.
P.s: husng botring on chico/ipoker/888 will be revealed soon.