Please, take your time.

Suspecting a user may be a bot is easy yes. Detecting and confirming said user is a bot is not. I was recently accused of being a bot by other players because I have been winning a lot lately and don't chat. Should I be banned now too?

If sites can't prevent the underlying tech allowing bots to play undetected, banning entire regions will only put a band aid on. It's like taking some ibuprofen for your headache when the real cause of your pain is a tumor.

So...if it is so easy to detect bots like you say, doesn't logic lead to those accused winning players currently playing actually passing the bot tests and they are real players? just something to consider.

My friend, "being a winning player" or "winning a lot" is not at all a factor for "being a bot"

"Not chatting" is not in the top 3 symptoms of being a bot. It's a factor obviously, but not a leading factor.

So "winning a lot" and "not chatting" should be of no concern to a security team.

Banning entire regions is like putting a lock on a door. It doesn't prevent the lock from being picked, or the window from being opened, or santa coming down the chimney, or tunneling underground directly into your living room.

But banning an entire region if and only if that region is only connected to bot accounts makes perfect sense. I'm not talking about 50/50 I'm talking about 80/20 or 90/10 bot to legit account.

I really just don't see why anyone from Russia or other such countries would ever "choose" Chico over the 40 other options they have.

This is why houses have locks, doors, windows, brick walls, loud barking dogs, safes with guns, security systems, 911 emergency calls, etc

No one trick will ensure your safety, but putting them all together will help.

I played about 1000 hands. After looking through the hand history it was very obvious that if I was not in a pot. The players rarely bet or did anything but check down even big hands (in one case AQ vs KJ was checked down with a 1bb bet on the river.) But when I played in a pot the players were more than happy to go all in or call large bets with sometimes very dubious holdings.

I have screenshotted and sent the most condemning hands to Betonline but their customer service has said nothing except that it has been forwarded to the right people and will be taken care of thank you. And did you know the benefits of depositing using bitcoin?

I'd like to know because in the rules if you are caught colluding Betonline says your money is confiscated and your account canceled. But my question is if I'm about to prove that the players were colluding against me what are they going to do on my part to compensate me? So far they have been non
responsive since I've sent the screenshots. I will update this post with the screenshots of the softplay. It went on for 1000 hands.


Here are three of the most telling ones. They are not betting against each other but when he has JJ on an A high board he calls an all in that is very obviously an Ace.

Screenshots here

https://imgur.com/a/P0vdYpN

Now this is only three hands but if I were to go through all 1000 and screenshot and show them to you out of the 300 or 4000 hands I went through very rarely did a pot that I didn't play in go over .50 cents and bets were never over .10 .15 and most hands they played against together went limp call check check 1bb call

So they're specifically only playing against me and out of the 30 players playing I wouldnt be surprised if damn near all of them weren't in on it. Is there anyone from Betonline who reads these forums I could speak to in private?

So another measure you could take is to have every new sign up submit a picture of themselves holding their documents like pokerstars does

Pokerstars even does geo location calling to verify the person's identity and location

I mean, if you wanted to fix the problem, it's really kind of easy...

Not sure if voice recognition software is available but that would be super nice to have as well, if the software recognizes the same voice it flags them because obviously they are cheating the system. (But only if the software has like 98% success rate.)

Hi river Phoenix,

Please send me a private message with, your account number and email address.
I will look into this for you and try and get a response asap.

Kind Regards

Mike

Your assertion that 30 players are colluding or soft-playing in the 10NL fast fold pool is ridiculous.

The JJ hand that you refer to was an all-in preflop. They hadn't even seen the flop yet so the board wasn't a consideration when the decision was made to go all-in.

You provided no proof of collusion or soft play in any of the screenshots. If you have some stronger evidence then post it. If all you can provide is what you provided above then I don't expect anything to come of this.

I think it's more likely that you don't understand what you're looking at than anything nefarious actually taking place.

first hand as MCAChiTown stated allin preflop but the second example is very typical. Open with KJo than cbet flop. hit top pair on the turn but that also brings one card straight on the board so you check. than check the river for safe showdown. Caller calls with AQo in the SB. Calls a cbet with two overcards and checks down rest. also, its a little harder to collude playing fast fold I would think since so many table changes. harder but wouldn't say impossible. anyway, more examples would be nice to let us help you out too with our thoughts.

Hi Mike. 4 bots or 3 bots at all the 25NL 6 max today. I open a new table to try to find refuge from the bot infestation and BOOM. Hit with another table of 4 bots.

Teotecan
SpiritLancer
Bushlat
HandTiger

How do you think that 5th player is going to hold up vs 4 bots? That's why the bots are bad for your ecosystem. They collectively rape and pillage any new player that sits down for 2 or 3 or 4 way poker and they can do this across multiple tables because 2 or 3 or 4 handed poker is not a problem for them.

These 4 bots shown have been confirmed for years.

Why are they not banned?

Your bot to reg ratio today has been worse than 1:1
It's closer to 2:1 maybe 2.5:1
Bot to rec is closer to 3:1

Here is another opened table with 4 bots (including balabas this time, confirmed bot) jerking each other off waiting for an unsuspecting rec player to sit down and donate their money.

Here they are playing 3 way. Something regs never do in a million years.

I said before if you see this, it's a 90% chance they are a bot.

Why are they not banned?

Here they are playing HU with me sitting out. Why are they not banned?

Here is the first time in 3 or 4 years I have seen a table with 5 bots.

You say you are doing a lot to fix the problem but this picture and the above 4 prove it isn't enough.

I mean I understand your bosses get lot of rake back from these bots.

I guarantee the Chico bot situation is worse than 95% of other sites on the planet. And there are probably 100 of total poker sites around the globe. So congratulations, you are in the bottom 5%, maybe lower.

Certainly you are the worst when you factor in total player volume.

Yes those accounts have been there forever. Shades of the ACR situation where a site rep comes on and perpetually 'sends stuff to security' and talks about working on it but even the most obvious accounts aren't banned. I think all the empty talk does not do good. It seems like our feedback has been heard in other areas, why not with bots??? The thing that makes it different is that there have been times where it seems like BOL/Chico cleans it up and makes and effort to police the games. I have noticed a few 'waves' of improvement and also regression to the normal bot army.

It seems like a mix of apathy and inability to maintain control of the ecosystem. Also a likely agreement either on paper or via a wink and a handshake with the botters. Really discouraging when you think about how great this site could be and the opportunity they have right now because of their competitors' recent blunders.

Same thing at PLO. Saw the first ever 5 bot 6-max table at PLO 50 about a month ago and have since seen it repeated a couple times. Then this last week I saw a 5 bot PLO 100 table. Those limits are infested with bots and during the day it's rare to see a full 6-max table that doesn't have 3 or 4 bots.

If there are so many bots, betonline needs to come up with a different reward system than a rake race. So much of the rake race prize goes to these bots. This leaves many of the real customers with no rewards.

Giving a flat rakeback percentage, or a decent points-to-cash system for the real players on the site is much more fair.

Since it seems hard for them to police the bots effectively, they really need to do away with the rake race.

Conspiracy theory: It makes me wonder if some of them are actually house bots, making it look like there is a nice rake race, but a huge chunk of it goes back to the house.

They also give under the table rake back from 3rd party affiliaties. So literally they can still make huge profit just from rake back and never even have to cash out from Chico network.

A flat rake back is the best thing they could do because it forces them to have to cash out their money at some point through official Chico channels.

A rake race would be no problem if they didn't have upper management that loves the rake that bots produce or having a "security team" with the combined intellectual capacity of a microwaved potato.

And I would NOT be surprised if they had dozens of house bots. It would perfectly explain why some bots are banned and others are not.

The bots actually don't do well in the rake races. It's the one thing management does right (well, fast cashouts too).

The bots usually only play 1 limit and 2-4 table. The people finishing in the top 10 of the rake race are often 6-8 tabling across several limits. Occasionally you'll see a bot creep into the top 10, but out of the last dozen races, the bots almost never finish top 5.

Also, the bots are cashing out, all the time. They do not tend to carry big balances unfortunately. So even if they were caught and banned (we can dream), there wouldn't be much money to confiscate. I know this b/c occasionally, if the bots are having a rough session and lose 10-15 buy-ins, then they'll be unable to buy back in b/c available balance is $0, even though their illegal software will keep attempting to buy them in.

Note: all my info is based on the PLO bots. The NLHE bots might do things differently.

Does anyone know who controls Chico network? Is it Betonline or Tigergaming? Because according to "Mike", Tiger gaming is where most of these bots are playing from and there is not much anyone at Betonline can do about it. If this is the case, and Betonline is the site that is truly in charge then they need to expel Tiger from the network. If its Tiger gaming, and they are literally allowing this **** to go on, then they are either in on it or too dumb to do anything about it...

I remember when Pokerstars cut their Supernova Elite program and one of the reasons was they decided to look at the rake in a different way: They said that players raking money had nothing to do with profitability...For example, a player playing a very high volume and thus paying a lot of money in rake, BUT was a winning player and net withdrawer was not making them money. The profit was coming from players who were net depositors. Therefore, why would a company allow bots to completely destroy their ecosystem by raping net depositors and discouraging future depositors?

I guess I will ask the question again.

Mike, are you able to ban tiger gaming bot accounts or not?

I kept track of all regs and all bots tonight.

Regs that are not bots

Ashley
Godmode
Merovingien
The weekend
T1ny
WLadySlaw
Pretty_Gamer
1{*&}\Kn2 (I totally just made up most of this name, but it's a player that has a weird name like this)

(((KeascoDriver???))) ***Have not confirmed bot or reg yet, not enough sample

Bots (all confirmed)

B****
B******
H**** *****
F**********
F********
B********
B**** ***
T*********
S****** ******
M** *****
D******
R******
1** ********
S*** ******

So excluding myself that is a 2:1 bot vs reg ratio

Also the bots seem to have been putting in more volume than any of the regs. The regs eventually stop playing after the bot infestation maxes out to 4 or 5 bots per table.

Also many of those bots were playing 25NL and 50NL simultaenously.

Ok. Here is 1,000,000,000 % proof bots exist and that certain players like myself and ChiTown have expert knowledge. We know what we are talking about. So Mike, please never again question me when I tell you a specific player is a bot. Certainly you should have your security team double check my work, but if my work is accurate, then I will always be 1,000,000,000% correct in who I label a bot and who I do not.

I used d00ble as a comparison bot to the other 2 bots, Sudden and SpiritLancer. I used stats that, through years of experience researching these effing things have proven show similar data points. The stats I will not mention in thread. I will relay to Mike, personally in private message.

When comparing the bot stats, the divergence is only 109 points and 86 points difference. This is statistically impossible if you want to use the tired and annoying argument that "oh maybe they are just part of the same Stable"...well, please excuse yourself from any further discussion here.

Comparing the d00ble to the first 3 REAL players where I have the most HH, you can see the divergence is 381, 332, and 346 respectively.

When I say divergence I mean I took each and every stat on the grid and added up the difference in numerical values...

I went even further...I compared the regs to each other.

You can see the divergence is 234, 265 and 252...

1.) This proves the bots are programmed so far outside what a normal reg strategy would be that to not know a player is a bot or a reg means that even if your "security team" consists of a 5 year old and a microwaved potato, they should be able to confirm within a few minutes. Certainly if you want to go even further than this, there are other methods/factors involved...that we could discuss in PM...

2.) This also proves that even though regs have wildly different strategies, their divergence is much much smaller from each other than bot to reg divergence.

Furthermore...there are a few stat anomalies that only exist within the bot stat pool that even further prove the statistical relationship with the parent bot, d00ble...

I want to give a shout out to ChiTown for assisting me through all these years...in the beginning I laughed at him and doubted him...then he proved me wrong...

He's a reg. I've chatted with him a few times at 10NL

The bots are literally stealing money from the site if they aren't operated by the site.

So whats more likely, the site is knowingly allowing someone to steal from them? Or the site is the owner of the bots?

None of these unregulated sites should ever get the benefit of the doubt.

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes"

I'm posting this publically to put pressure on Mike to get them banned, and for everyone to see quite clearly that they are all bots from the same programming update. Sometimes the programmer(s) update the bots, giving them slightly different nuanced stats.

All these bots, except d00ble have been very active the last week at 25NL 6 max.

Once I see these bots have been banned, I may or may not provide further assistance. Consider this a trial period to test the good faith of Mike and his management team.

I would also like to make an apology to TeoTecan, it looks as if he/she is not a bot, and just displayed many bot like tendencies. But that's why stat analysis is the most accurate way to prove these things. Upon checking it out, TeoTecan does not hold up to the level of confidence one would need to make the judgement of banning.