This shouldn't be relegated to just the Ignition/Bovada/Bodog section of the forum. The pool has been overrun by bots especially after the ACR ring got exposed and ACR took some action?

Despite it being anonymous you can still identify bots and see the blatant collusion with the clairvoyant hand histories that are downloadable 24 hours after a session is played. Any and all visibility would be helpful as some states here in the US only have a couple of options to play.

Unless cheaters are prosecuted legally, which will never happen, nothing will change. Regulated sites should provide a safe environment for everyone and they fail miserably. At least they should had the dignity to refund everyone's overall ev in the game and not what they found in their balance, which will never happens because they dont really care about customer service and they dont want to hurt their bottom line

I would prefer if every poker site hacks our internet connection and see what is going on than this joke online has become. We have a cheating scandal every second month. Absolutely disgusting. Pokerstars touting good secutiry but is it good if a cheater is playing 5000 hands having 20k profit and they catch him with 1k in their balance which will be spread among the players affected? People have to accept online lacks security, yet is profitable and we have to grind through it, with the extra variance added and all this crap

What both cheaters and the sites fail to understand is people affected not only lost money, but they lost hours from their life. Pretty sure, the majority of sites dont even care about the cheating going on and those which care dont do a proper job

Of course they understand they are stealing hours as well as money. But they feel if the fools let them why should they care when the fools don't.

The games changed in late Summer. You can look through the thread where we talked about the excessive time banking. A lot of us thought it was just a bad run but it became clear later on we were being colluded against. The refund policy seems to be completely arbitrary. Some got refunds and others, like me, got nothing despite playing over a million hands. I’ll never play another hand at Bovada.

This is not pertinent. Ignition and the other skins of Pai Wang Luo's network are unregulated.

Have heard a lot about ignition bot/collusion problem lately more so than ACR even. Sad state of affairs.

I am listening to the piece around this on the Solve4Why pod today. We have threads with about 10-15 different issues around online poker. Anyone can now cheat in real time, bots are sophisticated enough they are now using GTO solutions with population insights from data collection, cheating rings are massive, and on and on.

Its done, its over, the game online is now this, things are not going to get fixed from this point.

I feel like I live in a alternative universe cause it feels so clear that things are over and if you play online its a case of you get what you deserve at this point.

It’s sad games used to be really good there a few years ago and went to **** so I stopped playing. They always had horrid security i had gotten obviously squeezed and colluded on there many times before bottling was a huge issue.

The software that is seen in berkeys video is called x-poker. It isn’t malfunctioning of any sort. It’s literally doing that until the fish sits, it’s a script. The reason acr banned seeing anyone’s stack at the table before they sit down is literally because of this exact thing. So all the bots can not be seen doing this, one seat be left at each table.

Dude found a bot on auto fold and told the world when he should've sat more tables?

I could see you and some others being negative, but you also have to see the positive side of it. I'm in the discord group mentioned and I would say there is 150 or so give or take of the 150 best players in the world with few exceptions. I would be surprised if anyone in that group have made less than 7 figures from poker and there is multiple people who I'm surprise if they didnt 8. Thats from playing alone excluding coaching, you also have basically evey major coach or cfp owners in there. There is former and current security reps in the group that works with catching bots for a living. The competence and intelligence in that group is outrageous when it comes to poker. I can guarantee you that if the sites take in what people say in there sites and humans will be in front of the cheaters/bots and so on.

I also think it's somehow overlooked that plenty of guys in that group had their best results in their career last year or in the last few years despite the issues. I do genuinely believe that if sites do work with the community the poker dream is more alive than ever. The traffic is extremely high on average in online poker and there are higher stakes running than ever before.

I think the counterargument is that the currently obvious problems are very, well, obvious. If these sites were even halfway competent they would be able to deal with these bots without much problem.

In the long run this should be an arms race between operators and fraudsters--typical of many other industries, actually. I don't think you're wrong to be pessimistic about the current state--most sites appear to be run by chimpanzees--but I think "it's over" is too fatalistic.

The people saying online poker is doomed are missing that the current state is due to ACR and Ignition giving up sometime around 2021. ACR has a site where they publicly posted refunds from banned accounts, you can see down to the month where they stopped taking action. Even in my relatively small network guys were getting low 4 figure refunds from Iggy security. You were almost hoping some of this obvious collusion would happened to you so you could report it and get a refund. I played 200nl to 1K from 2016 to 2022. I’m sure I lost winnrate due to cheating, it’s obviously inevitable and just a cost of business. Historically the risk was worth it because the cheating was at a low enough level to not materially affect winnrate over large samples. These sites always used to police collusion. Stars was running rta checks on players back in 2018. I’m not expecting a perfectly safe game, I’m asking the sites to go back to historical levels of investment in game integrity.

That doesn't make a ton of sense, because:

1. Folding every hand is a massive leak
2. It takes at least a few hands to recognize a fish on Ignition

Tough to disagree, so many ridiculous stories of incompetence.
But tales about "arms race is lost" seems laughable, when you do any sort of in-depth MDA. Making strategy that blends with population or changes styles is very tough, and all those cheating ****s just use solvers as magic oven, to give them all the answers to every spot. Always leave massive amount of indicators, but doesn't matter.
ACR, GG, Ignition too lazy to have someone's nephew check preflop stats once a month.
Stars has scripters that have been reported for years. One of them even exposed himself with screenshots, still doesn't matter to them.
But every single network splashes money on some ambassador/integrity "celebrity" that hasn't seen default positional report from tracker in his life. Ofc it's gonna seem like you are surrounded by cheats with "more rake, less security spending" approach. All these farms wouldn't last a month if they hired anyone competent.

Site DGAF for such a long time that at some point we have to consider they are just house bots. Same like ACRs

^^^

Mods, please move the rigtard posts to the rigtard containment thread.

Man, I noticed this late in tournaments on Pokerbros and I knew after a few times when there would be a couple if not 3 of them doing it they were colluding. I don't know if they are sharing hole card info, I just assumed they are tanking to drive everyone to being short stacked together to increase variance (these dudes have usually been on the shorter side when I've seen it go on). It's always late, and always when everybody still has 15-25bb and they ****ing tank everyone down to 5-10bb for last 2 tables. It's a joke and it pisses me off.

BTW, I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to. I assume you're talking about tanking in like 6 max and taking time to share hole card info with their friend. Which is even worse.