Pretty obviously the sites, with 100% of aggregate player data, have multiple avenues of detecting cheaters.

If there's one defense of sites v cheaters its that they're always behind in the cat/mouse game of cheating. Cheaters find a way to cheat, sites react. This is obvious.

This doesn't absolve the sites from catching cheaters!

With 100% player data sites should easily be able to detect multiple avenues of convergence with behavior of cheaters. If there are 5 ways for players to cheat, sites should, at a minimum, detect 4.

Webcam detection of manual operation is currently way underutilized and paramount. Of course this isn't necessary for everyone, but, if you're playing stakes above (reasonably subjective buyin) I feel you're likely to be cheating if your numbers converge and you cannot provide that as a minimum benchmark.

If you play (blank)nl+ for a living (30+ hr wk), there is zero reason you cannot reasonably provide video footage of yourself when requested within a reasonable window.

Everything more generic than this is sites buying names to sell a face.

The reality is poker doesn't bring in a lot of revenue compared to other casino games/sports betting, therefore sites don't have the resources to allocate to deterring cheaters unless it's painfully obvious, and even then you don't give them business if you're banned, so banning people basically never happens unless it's stupidly obvious or a high profile case.
One reg playing everyday for a month generates the same amount of money as a rich guy donking off 5-10k in a couple hours at blackjack.

^^ nah... I already generated $5k rake a month grinding four tables of 25$ 6+ holdem on PS...

How much revenue do you think poker sites would lose if all cheaters and bots were magically banned?

I magine at least 10-20% for some of the bigger sites with known problems

It sounds like on Ignition the percentage is probably correct only in favour of the bots.

We need a new poker site where we can watch the bots battle it out.

BotStars!

Probably more as many of the bots/cheaters are likely run by the site or the site owners/employees with enough removes to make it impossible to prove. Who do you think has the best knowledge of a sites vulnerabilities? If the users are pointing out the bots and cheaters you know the site is deliberately turning a blind eye.

I heard this was done already by a site in Asia and people were manually turning their cameras so that they couldn't be seen. Probably would be fair to assume that all websites are aware of cheating but it doesn't really mean anything until they acknowledge it. It costs 0 dollars and 0 cents to express genuine concern for the bot issue. Maybe they'll change their ways once they finally realize people aren't going to stop talking about this.

But then again, they won't do anything because they know people will continue to play regardless of whatever bot problems are occurring. It's disgusting.

The camera idea increases operator expenses significantly unless it's just a periodic review ... if you always record and store the video in case it needs to be reviewed later, you need a lot of storage to keep that data. If you try to monitor the video constantly, and store less of it, that requires staff and/or an AI solution to monitor the video & maybe alert the security team if the AI detects suspicious activity (there would almost certainly be false positives). The lowest cost would probably be the strategy ACR is taking (requesting players to record themselves if they think something is suspicious).

The AI solution probably would be the best but the question is how cheaply can it be done & would it be effective?

To be honest even if sites did care it seems like we are losing the battle vs the exponentially growing pace of technology development. I hate to be a doomer and all; I started playing online for years before I played a single hand of live poker and I feel like online is the purest format (live poker has a lot of intangibles)

Idk. What can be done?

Deffo, sites have fish bots at the micros whose sole purpose is to generate as much rake in the games as possible

Think about what you're asking for: You want a gambling business to invest resources that will negatively impact their bottom line? What type of business do you think this is. Much easier to put on "The Fedor Holtz dog and pony show" and act like they're trying. RTA cheats will just run from Odin. I'm sure they appreciate the heads up.

I was excited about the build a bot challenge from ACR. When I heard about it, I thought...

"There will never be another way to make $100,000 this easily in my life."


In true ACR fashion, they backed down from the challenge.

Foolish me, for thinking ACR has any integrity whatsoever to stand behind anything they say.

The only way you can get these sites to take this seriously, is to unironically continue with their bot challenge without their blessing.

I do not follow all of the poker socials. Has anyone went forward with the challenge and come out publicly? ACR's original criteria seemed pretty easy to be quite honest. I already started war gaming and mapping this out, and then the challenge was cancelled like the next day?

Berkey seems to think a poker bot/farm would make 10-100x the $100,000 prize. What Berkey is describing is completely different from the criteria that ACR originally layed out.

To get the $100,000. It said a person had to create a bot to play 5,000 tracked hands without their security.

Their criteria was:

1) Create a bot that could pull money out of our player economy;
2) Complete at least 5,000 hands without being detected by our security protocols;
3) Be prepared to provide information to our team to improve protocols in future;
4) Publicly identify yourself in order to provide transparency and credibility in the community.

The gotcha here is #3 IMO. Point #3 comes full circle with everything that has been discussed so far. For them to fix their security issues, means they probably wouldn't be able to profitably spread online poker, or it would be such a miserable experience people would just quit playing, and/or their playing volume would drop significantly.

So yes, coming full circle to OP's title, OP is probably right.

They just don't care because why should they? People keep playing on the site.

Not only do they not care sites like GG are going out of their way to make it more difficult to detect bots and calling it protecting the recs

I have played on Chico network (BetOnline, Sportsbetting.ag and Tiger Gaming) for about 6 years now and have not once been concerned about cheating. The rake is high but the games are fair and security is top notch. They're not perfect but they're doing a better job than almost anyone IMO.

You can find good, healthy & fair games. GG is a blight on the entire industry.

There were a ton of bots on BetOnline sub 6 years ago? Maybe it's fine now, but there was a time period within the last 6 years it was not.

Yes they cleaned up everything and I haven't even suspected a player was a bot in years. I only play the PLO variants though.