Hitman, you got refunded the money you lost on the tables?
Can you give some info on the players you were playing against, when did this happen etc if it's poasible.
It's a good sign that at least someone saw or heard of some sort of action being taken towards bots!

i had a quick look at fishtankz' report and clearly everything points to these accounts beeing bots.


its the same over and over again. players find bots, pokersites dont.

We need our handhistorys. we need (public) handhistory databases. and we need transparency.


all of which pokersites are decreasing.

Cheers man. This guy studied OnGame bots back in the days and had skype group related to it with Internet.

Here's one PM that I got.

I haven't heard anything new from iPoker support.

I do use tracker so unless i go through all account play details this would take a long time and be like a needle in a haystack apx 2 weeks ago this happpened.

midstakes reg on Ipoker here, wil be following for updates.

The two freerolls for bet365 players (10k and 20k) were tonight and 90% of regs were registered as the value was actually good. Its ****ing insane that 0 out of 12 players from bet365 bot list regged to play as these are regular players just like us. Fishtankz might actually be right after all...dunno if this information can be used as some kind of evidence, but its statistically ridiculous for this to happen if something fishy is not going on...

Cashgame bot not registered for a donkament? Film at 11

Agreed
Seen almost all the regs I play with everyday at the players list of the tournament BUT the ones I suspected to be bots...
It's pretty normal if 1 or 2 didn't show up, but all at the same time.... That is not normal
Why would you pass on a 100% free tourney with 10K and 20K guarantee? ?

Last year around October I decided to start playing on iPoker because of the horrible Rakeback situation in Pokerstars. I got to play 100k+ hands at EU 20nl. I have also played a fair amount of hands at Pokerstars and I can tell you by experience that a lot of things seemed very suspicious to me while I was playing at iPoker. For example: the tables were very reg heavy imo, lots of regs after the Rakeback? probably. That wasn't a big problem for me cause I've never been so much of a bumhunter (dumb). What seemed very alarming was the metagame/player tendencies/styles.

I know very well the playerpool tendencies at low stakes. Your typical low stakes regular at 25nl has a lot of leaks and similar tendencies (including myself). I'll mention some of the things I saw at iPoker that you very rarely see at 25nl in Pokerstars.

Statistics: Because I was studying I have a decent grasp on preflop GTO numbers by position, raise first. 3bet, 4bet, etc. What I have noticed that is very typical in Pokerstars 25nl playerpool is the regulars usually have very low numbers because they tend to call a lot preflop. Some regulars have pretty high and unbalanced numbers too. I can tell you that I saw several accounts at iPoker with numbers very close to GTO and so much better than most of the regs at Pokerstars.

Aggression: at 25nl it's very common that the typical regs tend to give up a lot on the river. The amount of triple barreling I saw at iPoker was kind of insane to me, especially in 3bet pots. Seriously, the games seemed way too aggressive compared to how 25nl regs play at other sites.

Tilt: another very common leak among players at low stakes is handling tilt. You win some hands against certain regs and you can quickly feel how they drastically change, they even get personal and you can feel how there is a human playing. I saw some of it at iPoker of course, but very little regs tilting.

Adapting: typically regs are not very good at adapting in low stakes. They have a style and thats how they play most of the time. I started doing very well at the beginning at iPoker but I noticed how some regs were adapting very well and playing so much better against me as we got more hands in.

Now, maybe there was a lot more to notice that I didn't because of my limited knowledge since I'm still learning.

I broke even at exactly BB/100: -0.01 in 100k+ hands. I started playing again at Pokerstars and already have 100k+ hands BB/100: 8.23. The difference is kind of shocking. It feels very soft.

Could it be just a coincidence, variance? Maybe. But I can tell you that the difference between both sites in how the playerpool is seemed highly suspicious to me. So everyone playing at iPoker is just so much smarter? I don't think so.

And nothing suspicious about the fact it turned out there was an iPoker employee anonymously trying to quash this story here on 2p2.

I got the impression he was quashing the story of ipoker running their own bots, not that bots were rampant on the site, which he never got around to addressing afaik?
I think the employee stressing that the site doesn't run their own bots, while being silent on the issue of bots run by other accounts is mildly interesting, but I think most people know that bots are rampant anyway.

While I am 99% sure there are no house bots at the stakes I play 400-1k I am very certain that some of the players in my games are not human, a lot more at 400 than 600 & 1k.
Although players like fr00zenflame play up to 1k.

It begs the question what you define as having house bots. When the network willingly support bot creators and let them play and also don't ban them despite very strong evidence did they already crossed the line or not yet?
Because for me they already did. There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance and the case here where it seems more and more likely they are fully aware they support bot operations .

Why do you still play there if you know there are bots playing?

I'm a noob (I mean zero experience) battling bots online so excuse the possible stupid question.

But. playing live if I knew exactly or near exactly how a player was playing they would by definition be pretty easy to beat.

After a sample, dont online wizards know exactly how any given bot plays. Thus wouldn't they be pretty easy to exploit for fun and profit.

No because

a) bot owners monitor the play after every session, so any leaks the bot has are programmed out

b) AI has come on leaps and bounds, so it is possible for a bot to "learn" from its mistakes and build strategies of its own as it plays, rather than a human having to program every exact detail. This is called machine learning.

I'm sure you've heard the term GTO thrown around here before. The best bots are programmed based on GTO strategies that are very hard to exploit. As humans it's hard to do something x amount of the time and be random. Bots can be programmed to do this. They can also then be adjusted to exploit specific population tendencies or specific opponents. They also don't tilt and can put in massive volume. While individual players may have better bb/100 because they exploit players better, these bots can carve out consistent winrates by being hard to exploit.

Also...

Every site has bots. Some have less and some have better security. If you were to never play on a site with bots then you'd have no options. I do believe it is an important though to steer people towards the sites that are the best at stopping and preventing bots.

Yes there are bots everywhere, but once you're reasonably sure you're actually playing against one, it's pretty stupid to keep playing in that particular game, don't you think?

Once you can identify a player is a bot with a reasonable degree of certainty, you immediately leave that game and find another table. Report the bot to the site and let them take care of it (or not take care of it, as the case may be).

If you're finding one particular site or network's games is riddled with bots, you immediately leave and play on a different site.

The absolute worst thing you can do is keep playing in a game you are sure has a bot. This guy, to quote him, says he is "very certain that some of the players in my games are not human".

^^

got it, thanks.

Given above, dont know if you all realize this but bots are pretty bad for the game

Someone should do something.

Not really an option for us in the unregulated states of the USA, but ideally you should.

I wish someone would Lou. I really do. Unfortunately a lot of these sites give bot makers the wink-wink that as long as they don't get lots of complaints about the account then we'll leave you be because of the amount of rake these accounts generate for the sites.

This is the exact reason why I stopped playing there. Bad client and connection doesn't help at all.

I never responded to the Mole's post because I didn't have any evidence. I still don't have substantial evidence but I thought I'd reply now that the Mole has been outed as an I-Poker rep.

I do distinctly remember William Hill running bots and they weren't secretive. As our good friend the Mole said, for a site to run a bot they have to be transparent about it and WH did label their bots as "Botxxxxxx" (6 numbers). They were used to get tables going and I don't think they were meant as any serious competition.

I came across several of these in my days which sent me Googling at the time. After a Google I discovered this thread from 2P2 which confirms this (assuming the information is correct.)

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...-bots-1108249/

I'm not sure how this relates to the O/P's claim because these bots are not labeled as such but they definitely did exist. Whether these current bots are run by the site is debatable but knowing things I-Poker have done in the past it wouldn't surprise me.

There are a few solutions. If you play professionally, you could re-locate. If you play as a serious hobby, play live or play a format which is likely to have less bots (MTTs or omaha cash probably the least likely to have bots playing them). If you play for fun, play a lower limit where you will lose less against bots or play play-money.

No, it's not the same, nor is it really all that close.

If a bot is winning, and presumably any that continue playing are, it's a pretty huge difference whether those winnings are going to some cheater running bots, or the site itself.

If a site is putting absolutely no effort into catching bots, or a woefully inadequate one, then I can see how that crosses a line for many people. But it's not the same line as running the bots themselves. Not even close.

No, not always. If you're profiting from the game, that actually seems pretty foolish. And of course I mean profiting in the sense that you feel you're +EV at the game, not just that you're on a heater.

And please don't get me wrong - this isn't one of those ridiculous "Who cares about the bots as long as you can beat them" posts. I always argue against those assertions. Yes, you should report the bots. And I can absolutely understand people refusing to play on a site they believe is riddled with bots, and letting them know that's why you're doing so. But if you've decided you're OK with playing on a given site, and are at a table that is profitable, are you really going to get up from such a table when you think you're playing against a bot? It's bad enough that the bots exist in the first place, but when you allow them to force you into -EV moves like leaving profitable tables, then the bots have really won.

Very well put Bobo.