Maybe you guys could stop playing online and giving those sites your money?

Just a thought.

that wouldn't help at all

What if the poker client can follow your mouse movements and generate a movement diagram from that? Obviously the mouse movement diagram of bot would set off alarm bells when compared to a real player's.

Or alternatively, they could implement a little usb adapter that connects to your mouse's adapter in order to ensure that your mouse is actually moving and relaying the signals being received by the client.

Otherwise, a lockdown solution as proposed by Krazwell might eventually be necessary.

The UK is not a regulator of online gambling.

We merely have legislation covering all forms of gambling probably like the US does if you try to cheat in a casino.

I agree that no US regulation will be able to enforce or prosecute online cheating - that's just a rouse that suits pro-gaming

This.

Well I for one find it extremely annoying to type in captcha's while I'm 18 tabling or any other kind of obstacles and when a site starts to harrass me with that kind of **** I immidiatly leave the site to a more bot/human friendly site. All other methods that sites introduce are pretty easy to avoid when you use a bot (like human breaks and such)

Sure you do.

Boom, first post.
The easiest solution I can see is all of the poker sites working together. We already can tell that Stars seems to be the most effective at combating bots, hence why there arent many complaints about them in the thread.

Have the sites compile a large shared database with every detail of every banned bot, wouldnt be too pricey and wouldnt annoy genuine players. Then its easymode, if a site finds one bot it is banned from all. Im not just talking about details like name and address, which can be changed, more things like ip addresses, stats of players etc etc.

Aswell as that, sites could (and I think some do?) scan your computer for any programs they ban. Id say (thats a guess) quite a few of the bots are using the same program to play, once one is identified its a simple matter to see which users are using it, and ban them all. Again, this shouldnt be a pain for valid players, but could damage the botting industry substantially.

Bots play large numbers of hands. Sites don't need to share information to have enough evidence to identify bots. The point of OP is to convince those sites who are not making much of an effort to do more.

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ACTION PROPOSAL:

Hey guys,

I have posted in the Pokercast forum referencing this thread, and MJ said he would be very interested to see how many people agree with the statement that the advanced poker bots are becoming neally unbeatable: link. Please post in that thread voicing your opinion. It would be good to raise awareness of the issue through the poker media. This may be even more effective than emailing the sites. I think one of the current problems with bots is that they are considered a "mild" form of cheating by many in the poker community. As evidenced by some posts in this thread, some players don't even think that it is ethically wrong to use a poker bot. In reality using an advanced poker AI is not that far off from super-using IMO, especially if you haven't designed the AI yourself - if you play unexploitably, never tilt, and never get tired, the other players simply don't have a chance. If we can start to turn the public opinion around, I think we'll be on to something.

The point of the entire sharing information thing is that the sites will have less work and cost involved if they can immediately identify a brand new bot to the site. Since this is cutting both financial cost and work hours it is an important suggestion that may convince the more "lazy" poker sites to take the small effort that will make a big difference. Aswell as that, how many hands must a bot play before it is identified? 500k? 1mirrion? A midstakes bot will already have taken quite a bit of money by the time the site can conclusively say it is a bot, then the owner will simply switch to another site and repeat the process. With information sharing, they will get removed right after the first site clearly identifies them, cutting income by a large %, and ideally forcing the bots onto the smaller and less reputable sites.

wut

Im just shocked they can get a bot running at the same time as HEM and the ongame software without their computer exploding.

In the bricks n' mortar world, I think it's common practice for (rival) casinos to share information about card-counting Blackjack players. Get banned by one Vegas casino, and the next one on the strip will ask you to leave the moment you step foot in the building, because they've seen the CCTV footage and don't want you taking their money. You'd think that rival online sites would similarly work together to ban real cheats at online poker, but I guess the analogy breaks down because we don't play poker against the house. As long as rake exists (forever, basically), there will never be a short term financial incentive for poker sites to ban cheaters.
Somehow we've got to get the message across that cheating must be stopped, in order that the integrity of the game is maintained. Or I should say regained? Various scandals have not painted online poker in a good light and it's gonna take some dedication (and regulation!) to drag it out of the muck.

I think that this is fundamentally wrong, the online poker sites have a huge incentive to stop cheating (and more importantly, it is the morally right thing to do)

If the excuse is that somewhere in the ToS it says that the poker site won't give your info to a 3rd party or whatever, can't the ToS be changed at any time anyway? Just send email to customers and say that it has been changed, if you continue on playing you will agree to it, and 99.999% won't even bother reading it anyway.

I know this is going to sound overly cynical, but I really believe that given the nature of business itself, morally sound business practices are inversely correlated to profit making to a very high degree.

You can choose not to use 6yo Cambodians to make your sneakers but boy are you going to lose to Nike, Adidas, etc...

That's just a fact because morally sound behavior is not something that's imposed, it's a choice that is made by every individual engaged in every business.
Therefore it is a sacrifice, a handicap in the context of a competitive market place in which your competition has the choice whether or not to abide by these rules.

It's as if killing people in the street for no reason were legal. If you decided to impose upon yourself an irreproachable moral behavior, you'd be at a serious disadvantage survival wise.
You'd be a better and happier human being, but that's besides the point for the purpose of this discussion.

In the end you just have to decide how much your conscience is worth to you. In the case of the management at iPoker/Ongame, etc...I believe the answer is close to nothing.

Another technical solution that I'd like to propose is for the client to randomly disguise cards. The player would not get any pop up or have to enter any text, the randomly chosen card would simply be disguised behind squiggly lines for example. So to the mass tabler it might add a few seconds here and there but this could prove to be a very effective tool in deterring bots. This is assuming that the bots use the screen scrape method to read the board but I'm not 100% sure that they do.

This would freak the casual player out, unless the card was easy enough to read, in which case the bot would be able to be programmed to read it, too.

No chance sites are going to scare off their casual players in order to stop botting, which most players aren't even aware goes on.

I am of the opinion like player fund security (or the lack thereof) is a pertinent matter, and in time sites that are commonly accepted to have good bot detection and effective procedures to deal with false positives will gain a competitive advantage and spread the higher staked games.

The UK Act which makes bots and cheating a criminal act is not tied to a regulator it is the criminal law in the UK. If you create, sell, install or use a bot in the UK or against a UK based player you are breaking UK law.

The US/UK extradition law would apply if the maximum penalty were raised to two years and the US had a similar offence. the European Arrest Warrant could be used if the maximum penalty were 12 months or more (1 WEEK MORE).

There have been no UK prosecutions for online cheating or bot operation but the offence is on the statute books so if you want to sell or use bots in the UK or against UK players it is a fact that you are committing a criminal offence and this should be included in any EV calculation made by the cheater or supplier of the software. Time the US and others enacted similar laws IMHO.

In tackling bots as an issue then another avenue is open, players can and should pressurise the UK Gambling Commission to investigate and prosecute bot operators. They should also be pressurised to demand information from the sites re those banned for running bots as these sites have prima facie evidence of a criminal act in the UK, disclosure re crimes is not protected by privacy terms and conditions, the UK prosecutors can apply for and get court orders forcing disclosure even in places like the Isle of man or gibraltar.

Must be nice to have "Bot" in your bot's name and still get away with a 40%+ ROI. And there's NOTHING we can do to stop it except to pull our money out of ipoker (which I did last week).

I think if there's anything to get out of this thread is that regulation and government imposed penalties, like jail, are THE only ways to really stop bots.

It's -EV if someone still playing micro to mid SNG in IPoker. So many guys withdrew, so maybe something like 10-20% are bots ) not sure, just guessing

Maybe IPoker will use their network only for bots, bots wars

If poker sites came together (or the top sites at least, because there is where the big liquidity is being generated) they could create a "POKER CENTRAL IDENTIFCATION CERTIFICATION AND HAND HISTORY DATABASE" (or whatever name they wish to have) and ALL THE PLAYERS would have to register from there on the various poker sites/networks...they would have access to the screen names, the sites they play in and the hands history along with all the the ROI info and stats, the centralization of all the info would make things a lot easier to control and to act upon,this would be the first step

Bots is just another issue that helps to push for the regulation of the poker industry, the unregulated nature of these businesses is what makes all these activities/scams even more juicy and profitable in the first place