In an fairness, you won't gain much from cheating at video games while there's a lot of money to pick up in online poker so I'm guess the best programmers simply just aren't so interested in creating cheats for Valorant or whatever else games.

Is this actually the case, or is there more to it?

The majority of credible accusations about players using AI or botting are centred around these countries.

Are the Olympics xenophobic for banning Russia from competing because doping is so widespread there?

Are some major western financial institutions xenophobic for refusing to employ people from these countries in high end jobs? Maybe, but perhaps they have data to show that they are higher risk in terms of data breaches etc.

There is so much emphasis on political correctness that people are burying their heads in the sand in order to be 'woke'. Yes, there are cheaters from all countries, but its becoming more and more obvious that this problem in poker is mostly coming from certain areas of the world. No one is saying that everybody from eastern Europe and Russia is unethical, but to deny that there is a culture of pushing the boundaries of ethics in these places is delusional. There are plenty of articles on that subject if you wish to google them.

I could be wrong here, but I heard that a long time ago stars stopped players from China registering the same sit and gos together as collusion was so rampant. If this was the case, were they being xenophobic or were they acting on the data and risk that it presented?

That said, the vast majority of players from all of these countries are honest, decent people. Russia in particular has a lot of recreational players who are very valuable to the ecosystem.

It's a complex problem but don't let political correctness get in the way of some questions that need to be asked.

If the vast majority of the players are honest and are valuable to the ecosystem then what on earth are you talking about?

every time I see a post saying just ban the Russian players and everything would be fine I ignored it, until now, I've heard it too much and I wanted to say my view on the subject.

Guess what, I'm not being woke, that you gathered that from my post says more about you than about me. I get it, you hate wokeness. Well that is your problem and you can leave me out of it.

You said exactly what I said, almost all the players are honest and valuable. Saying differently is a bad idea, conceptually. Learning that there are bot rings of hundreds of players in one single persons group then guess what's going to happen? One guy, let's say from Russia, controls hundreds of accounts. Let's say all Russian. If we ban the one guy and all his accounts then you end up thinking that 100 russians were cheating when only 1 was, it's a mirage.

It's a stupid thing to say, ban all guys from x or y country because it could just be one single person causing most of the problems, not hundreds of guys. Get it?

Specific countries don't matter too much, botters/colluders/etc will just target the next-easiest countries and the global player pool will suffer greatly if things progress in that direction. Blocking off entire countries is short-sighted, especially as there are better solutions on the table.

"By burning the haystack you don`t rid of the needle" So let`s say you ban Russia, then fraudster will start using Asian accounts, so let`s ban Asia, will start popping from South America and so on.

Every live event I ever attended is packed with many players from all these countries: Russian, Ukrainians, Israel etc... and it`s funny because the paranoia still at the table as soon as they say something in "Russian" the rest of the players quickly remind them that it`s an "English speaking" table.

There are so many Russian players that even Russian dealers are packing the international staff in some of these events.

I think that`s what I miss the most of live events, when you actually put a face behind those avatars.

100% agree but the reputation is there for a reason

I've had a great experience playing with Ukrainians, but a lot of Russians I've played with would not be very friendly at the table, even to the point of pretending they didn't understand English in hopes of grinding out a minor advantage that someone would talk more openly about their hands to get more information (ie telling your friend you just folded queens etc whereas you'd normally wait until a break to say it to him privately)

Sadly the data only goes back to 2014 (but IMO the damage to online poker from these countries was already looong done by then anyway):

https://web.archive.org/web/20141008.../top-countries



(I removed all countries with less than 2000 players; some of the countries like Malta are deceiving as they are mostly just Russian pros who relocated).

(If you are interested then in the past people here have plotted graphs of this data vs average/median wage, GDP, etc).

This only shows the direct effect on the online poker "ecosystem". Sadly, the indirect effect of making online poker boring as **** to all those -$5+/hand players from Western countries is likely to be orders of magnitude more damaging to the "ecosystem" than this shows...

Juk

I play daily for around 120k hands/month with many many of the bots in the files.

I play nl25-nl50 on Peoples .it.

Me and most regs know they are bots and we play hu vs them and exploit, you guys should understand that these bots make more than 50% of the player pool on People`s.

Every single week there are like 2-5 new come up but i know all of the bots in the files by heart.

I used to b/e on Peoples until 1 year ago when i realised they are all bots. Since then i am winning pretty big.

Many times they play 4 of them at the table (tables on Peoples are 5max)

This is amazing.

so how can we know someone is a bot not just a good human player? i thought of starting a thread myself but think its best i post in this one instead. I have seen some weird things online and sometimes get suspicious that who i play may be a bot.

I regulary sharkscope my competition to see if when things go bad i am been outplayed or simply getting unlucky. its not a perfect system but generally if villian does something i think is stupid and takes my chips i scope them and see they are a 51 then i conclude they are likely a complete fish.
sometimes though the plays seem a bit out there and i sharkscope and see 70s 80s or even 90s and have to conclude they are playing on another level.

but where i get suspicious is when people do something that looks outright ******ed that i cant fathom a human player doing i scope them and they have mid 70s 80s+ etc and they consistently do these apparent ******ed plays.
clearly they are not bad plays because these are consistent winners but the plays dont look human.

heres an example i watched one guy i had played in heads up hypers a few times thought they were a complete fish beat them 4 times out of six scoped them for a laugh realised danger danger did not rematch sometimes i dont scope if i have a few games going and it appears they a fish this guy definitively was not a fish strong shark. I guess i got lucky in my sample of six.

so i watched them kill another reg, the action was this
blinds 10/20
reg raises to 40
suspected bot re raises to 60
reg reraises to 240
suspected bot calls

flop comes 568
suspected bot checks
reg jams all in
suspected bot calls
shows reg AQ
suspected bot J7

we might say the reg is the fish but i watched this suspected bot play weird and the regs line makes sense if you saw all the weird plays.

the play makes no sense to me the random reraise with j7 min reraise i guess u got to mix it up but calling of nearly half your stack with j7 off suit in the first hand of a heads up hyper seems bad to me.

I guess once the flop comes 865 a jamm makes sense but a check call? the whole thing looks like terrible play to me.

but suspected bot has been a consistent winner over a statistically significant sample size is this looking like a bot it seems weird to me?

What specifically about this makes you think it’s a bot?

they are a strong winner over a statistically significant sample size. i fail to see the logic of the way they played that hand and many others. I think clearly their results kill mine so I cant say they are a bad player.

just the whole way they play seems absurd i get when its raised to 240 your calling 180 chips to win 480 which means you need to win 37.5% of the time. so maybe that is what I am missing, it just seemed very strange.

thinking about it more in short stack poker here the hand plays reasonably easy i guess you get it all in if you hit second pair or better or an up and down straight draw. possibly even third pair you could well be beat but at that stack size you got to go for it on the flop and you only need to win 37.5% of the time.

but you miss the flop most of the time and short of a pair or strong draw calling of the rest of your stack seems a weak play. this hand i confess has caused me a lot of confusion.

it ceratainly is not what i would expect the regs in heads up hypers to be doing maybe the game has passed me on the higher levels. just seemed utterly bizarre to me.

Winni, with the greatest respect, it is very clear that this is just a fish running hot and probably has a winning sample size that is much less significant than you think.

This is a very serious topic and posts like that will dilute the discussion. I realise you have the best of intentions, but its immediately clear that you don't grasp the concept of bots/ai given the example you provided.

All the best.

if you can show receipts then there's definitely some money in it for you in creating a course on beating the bots

I would submit some of the guys he's playing could be house bots.

When house bots are in play there may be an agreement between the poker room and the bot runners that the Bb/100 winrate cannot go above a certain amount.

Hence the reason these bots are still exploitable HU.

The .it sites were always super dodgy for this because they get pretty poor traffic.

I'm a reg Zone player on Bodog and lately, it has been really difficult to beat the game. Could just be variance but seeing this thread has made me really rethink the site.

I notice a couple of screen names on the small sites that aren't included on the ACR list but I have history with. Without hiving checked my database yet, the one that stands out is Iron Maiden...

It seems impossible, with this level of penetration, that sites are not complicit to some, possibly varying, degree.

^ Same for me on my site. One of the names is playing right now.

https://neopokerlab.com/

Crossposting this link from Internet Poker. This site is advertising their bot rings to sites. What really stands out to me is Bovadas model is perfect for this kind of system imo.

You can send your lists to sites but if they are in on it nothing will come of it.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

There are sites that will work with small networks in "helping to create traffic". I do not want to specifically name any, (not looking to get sued or censured), but there is one in the US even.

I do not think any of the major sites do this. I can say that there are several of the better known sites that we have a live and open channel with their security/game integrity team. They are all pro-active.

Yea heard this as well. But some big sites could be involved also - ones that have gained a lot of traffic in last few months.

Also these sites may still ban bots just not the bot ring they have the deal with.

The one small site that I am in direct contact with/have relationship with is Greysnow. They were on it immediately. Someone gave me a couple of email addresses to be of the small sites and asked me to contact them. I did and never heard back. Cannot say that means anything plus or minus re their position on the matter.

Pmarr is both far more qualified than I am to speak in the the realities of large sites working/allowing bot rings. My guess, purely, is that it is more of a boogeyman issue for players than it is a reality that any of the major players engage in that. I say that purely based on the interactions I've had with them. "Them" meaning the security, integrity, or mgmt teams of the sites.

In Athletics no country has more evidence of systematic doping than usa#1, but it's all fussing about Russia and China.

Maybe the ones that get caught just aren't doing it right.

remember in 2017 when a bunch of "regs" from serbia showed up overnight on party?

Who woulda thought "prop player" would be added to the list of jobs taken over by automation.

^ yes, this is at least true from the bot sellers' POV. While no site will ever admit it, it does make logical sense and the commercial bot sites say to contact them if you need help creating traffic. It's a sick world...