The main PLO cash bot profile that I have investigated can be detected with 100% certainty after 3k hands. This is because it plays an outlandish and trivially easy to spot strategy. i can take a peek at the lobby in my underwear and spot a bot using a simple statname player lookup. Why WPN security cannot do the same remains a mystery.

Because I have played over 1 million hands against these bots and done extensive statistical and line analysis vs them. Their frequencies are not even close to how any human winning regular is playing. If you compare 10 postflop stats between a group of regulars, they may have some stats that are similar (eg,flop cbet overall) or identical but not every single stat. Multiway flop cbet being over 70% as well as higher than hu flop cbet is not some magical strategy that only certain people are in on. This tendency as well as many others are only exclusive to this bot.

Please PM me or post.

Thanks!

It's easy to say you can stop all the bots when you don't know if you have spotted all the bots. Obviously all the easy ones should have been stopped, but you don't know how many bots are more difficult to detect. What is so "blatantly false" about likely getting a number of false positives when dealing with bot detection?

I don't think anybody is saying or truly believes you could stop every single bot from ever playing, but you can make it more difficult on the bot users than the methods most sites are currently using. The relatively small amount of profitable bots that are customized enough so that they can't be linked to others bots are not the big issue we are all complaining about.

HandOfGod666 and I are not using methods which result in false positives. We both use hard data. Most sites using any other methods are probably wasting money, time and resources tackling the problem by trying to identify bots from processes found on their computer. That's probably a good idea to do too, especially for a big site like Stars, but it can result in false positives and is less effective than analyzing the data when it comes to mass distributed bot profiles.

Most sites would probably benefit from datamining all of the games on their own site and having somebody who can analyze the data and identify irregularities. Cheaters have been developing methods to hide 3rd party software from the detection of sites for years. Mass distributed bot profiles can't hide their tendencies and hand data.

How good are these bots? Are they exploitable?

Not great, but better than your average player. Those particular ones are exploitable for a good poker player, but not exploitable enough to want to spend too much time playing with them at the micro-mid stakes. They never tilt or lose focus. Even though they are exploitable they can still be hugely profitable due to the amount of volume they can put in which results in tons of money leaving the games via them exploiting weaker players, getting deposit bonuses, getting rakeback, and winning rake races. They are only limited in volume to avoid standing out and for occasional maintenance. The sheer amount of them results in tons of money leaving the ecosystem.

Thanks for the update HandOfGod

I have forwarded this information to Phil in preparation for our podcast on Monday.

Glad to see it isn't 2-4 bots on each table anymore.

Hopefully they can start taking the money out of these bot accounts who are playing 1 table and drive them away from the site for good. This type of thing should also be easier to detect as some bots will start being more active to get money off the site/keep less money on to avoid it being taken.

Great Post

Feel free to give me any questions/topics for the podcast w/ Phil on Monday.

Feels like quite a coincidence that on what amounts to the eve of his interview with you Joey, that all of a sudden bots are disappearing and players are being paid back.

Quite the coincidence.

I feel like HUSNG's are being ignored and that is BS this player base was the first to bring this stuff to light and it seems as if not mention by any reps/phil or any other person at wpn or in recent threads

us regs were hammered for years by these bots and we didn't get race races and leaderboards or beast or anything just long tilting sessions for russian bot rings that drained us and flooded lobbies all while generating that rake for YEARS!

Highly exploitable. They are good enough to beat 95% of players, and even beating a lot of professionals that are not aware that they are facing a bot or equipped to exploit such a bot.

I am only making claims about one particular type of bot that has many accounts on WPN and other US facing sites as well. I think that it is likely that custom bots exist, and methods other than simply checking for matching stats would need to be devised or implemented to deal with such a bot.

Like ChiTown mentioned the impact of any custom bot is miniscule compared with the millions that this particular mass distributed PLO cash bot is draining every year so I don't think that should be the priority right now.

Yeah, just to reiterate, I think a lot of people like Kelvis are under the impression that while there may be bots, there are likely dozens of different operators/programs, and therefore enforcement would be a nightmare. This is not what we're seeing. There is exactly one plo cash bot (perhaps controlled by a single person) that is deployed across every stake up to 2k at almost every site. Recently, the operator seems to be getting more brazen about sitting multiple bots at the same table at higher and higher stakes. They do sometimes play each other HU, and I have not specifically seen evidence of collusion. It is possibly not capable of effective collusion yet due to the sheer number of accounts that are online at any given time, but I'm sure it's being worked on.

Thanks and thank you for doing the podcast Joey!

1. Who is the person in charge of the decision to ban an account for botting? What is their name? What is their experience with poker and poker data?

2. Did the PokerKing owner also create the new software? Who is he and how much control does he have over security decisions? It strikes me as odd that the guy who maintains the software also runs the skin that has the most amount of bots coming from it on the network.

3. Why does he think they've been so ineffective to the point where the games have gotten so bot infested? On a scale of 1-10 how much were they really trying to detect bots in the last few years?

4. What methods are they using to detect bots? I can already see his answer being that if he discussed this then the bot makers would then start developing methods to avoid detection. News Flash: Hundreds of them have been able to avoid detection for years! Maybe if you told us what you are doing then we could tell you why it's not working and offer up some better ideas for solutions.

5. What is being done to prevent people who have been banned from opening another account on the network? Improved KYC procedures? IP bans? VPN restrictions and detection? Better communication across sites on the network?

Joey ask him if he would allow players from 2p2 to audit his company to make sure the bots are not internal..

Either wpn is inept or complicit in my opinion.

Joey for head of audit committee!

A few months ago there was a topic on 2+2 publicly outing a shortstack HU PLO player kidopham who was unanimously considered by the HU community to be using real-time assistance software. He held the entire highstakes HU PLO lobby on ACR for 2 years, little was done about the situation despite numerous e-mails to support about it. A tracking site has him up over 400k and since it does miss quite a lot of hands, his profit is most likely significantly higher. No regular battled for the tables vs him as it was very apparent he was cheating, therefore the times he was online the stakes from 5/10 to 25/50 were basically his to wait for fun/semi-rec players who were unaware they were being cheated.

Shortly after the thread (the day after) was posted the entire heads up lobby was removed with no explanation given by the site. It was shocking and very sad as the heads up ecosystem was hardly predatory compared to other formats, there was a fair bit of battling between regulars on every stake level. This along with the king of the hill system made the site special - one of the few so welcoming to people who enjoy 1on1 poker.

It's hard not to assume that the outing and the decision from the site were related. Removing an entire game format because of a single cheater would not only be incredibly unfair and disrespectful to the rest of the players on the site, but it also disincentivizes people from exposing cheaters in the future (why bother if this the end result). I'm sure many regulars now regret that the subject was made public and that seems to be a very unhealthy situation to be in.

Why was the heads up lobby removed? Was it influenced by the topic?
Does he regret that there was no communication on their part regarding this decision?
What kind of investigative work was done regarding this player?
What are the chances of reimbursements in this particular case?
Would ACR/BCP be willing to reconsider their decision and reinstate heads up tables in some way or the other? There was plenty of action at the tables and the format seemed very healthy (of course discounting the hours kidopham was playing) and plenty of people miss it.

My point is that just because you don't see them or detect them it doesn't mean there aren't tons of additional bots out there. You've spotted the one bot that is easy to detect, but you can't gather data on bots you can't detect.

I would say again it would be awesome if we kept a list active in this thread.

Playing mistakes NL and PLO now on ACR.

I would say for one operator, they probably have at minimum 1 account on every skin, possibly even rotating throughout the day to remain undetected.


Be sure to ask Phil how he plans on dealing with this in the long term, because it's not going to go away that easy.

zzzz

I don't know whether keeping a list is a good or realistic idea, but if such a thing is done, it should happen where most 2+2ers who play there tend to read and post:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...hread-1112097/

Or maybe here:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...e-bot-1727995/

It would make much more sense for this thread to be primarily about ChicagoJoey and WPN, otherwise you get people talking about the same thing in different threads, and people who read one and not the other miss a lot of things.

what about all of their in-house bots

stretchyclaws
i8mykids

among many others

Why do you think stretchyclaws is an in-house boy?

not sure why you keep repeating this. they have explained very clearly what they are doing and why. it is clear they are far more knowledgeable about this issue than you are

Any proof of these allegations?

This is the danger with putting names out there with blind accusations, like when this thread started. I've sat with both for tons of hands over the years and seen spewing, random chat, etc....

This is almost as bad as when two of the regs in our group were 'obvious bots'.

Hi Joey, could you please address the HS HUPLO Kidopham bot in your podcast?