I heard that ACR introduced captchas recently so for fully automatic bots it is currently impossible to play. Still humans who read bot decisions and act would still work, but it is only profitable on mid+ stakes as human needs to get profit share for his work. Humans also get irritated by captcha

It is actually the most effective thing vs bots, it forces them to use humans to solve captchas especially if poker room would frequently update new captchas so that bots can't solve it easily.

The biggest issue they are having right now is table mapping. The one flaw with the captchas is that someone watching the bot play can manage it as you stated. The best security they can do is keep changing the table font with every update. Doesn’t have to be drastic. Subtle changes throws off the table mapper.

Captchas are a good option to back that up. It makes it very secure using the two.

Lozgod,

You seem to only be aware of/talking about the crappy commercial bots. The really big problem is the bots that are underground. Ones that have had considerable resources devoted to not only solving the game, but handling the management and bureaucracy of setting up dozens of accounts.

The problem isn't Joe Blow buying some crappy box bot and running it 24/7. Its very smart people with some pretty good AI running medium-large scale operations. Pulling very large amounts of money out of the ecosystem, and getting better at it every day.

Changing fonts would only prevent bad bots to play. Good bots can use OCR like Tesseract to read different kind of fonts. Some bot teams read network traffic, by looking at specific addresses and concluding what is bet size, cards etc. IT is a lot of work but it works, then it doesn't depend on fonts, size of table, updates etc.

Captchas could be solved by having 1 human observing all PCs all the time and then closing captchas once it is detected he could be notified.
None of those 2 options are real solution for good bots, but it is a good start to at least kick out bad bots from the micros.

Like Kevin said, the real issue are advanced bots that are able to beat any stake. By the way, bots don't need to solve poker or beat best humans in the world in order to make money on mid stakes. Like you have many human players playing e.g. 1$/2$ stake, they didn't solve poker and also are not the best in the world still make money on that stake.

What happens really is those advanced bots making deals directly with poker sites. You can already see that neopokerlab is doing such deals, also you can see that those commercial bad bots also selling bots to owners various casinos, they state it on their site. I doubt that pokerstars and other big sites would make deal with such companies because it might be too much risk of getting in public, but i think they could make own bots, considering how much budget they have.

+1

sounds like something the owner would say

People buy bitcoin through their bank account. So its the same process its just they are buying bitcoin first and its all tracked on public ledger that shows exactly where your usd went on what exchange and which wallets it was sent to and its end destination. I have friend works for irs they can track it all and they are going to do big audit on a lot of people over next few years for bitcoin/cryptocurrencies and find out exactly where that bitcoin is going and your going to have to provide receipts and transactions for its end destination. GL with the irs trying to say what your doing is legal.

Most of the players I played with I detected were bots were from ukraine, russan and belarus. I would say its probably over 90%. I don't know of one american I played with that was a bot and I played online for like 20 years. Not saying they don't I just never noticed it from american players. The only guys with same almost exact hud stats were from mostly russia.

+1 on that.

Multi-Quote button is the one in the middle.

Are you trying to imply that depositing on or withdrawing from, for example, ACR is illegal? If so, you're wrong.

It's illegal for an unregulated American site to accept deposits from American players. ACR is operating illegally in the US but you're correct that it's not illegal for it to exist.

Not everyone lives in USA. In Germany they would also be able to track it, but it doesn't mean that casino which is located in some small island is legal or having gambling licence, paying taxes etc. Germany can look if players are avoiding paying taxes, but can't check if casino is operating all legal which is located in e.g. Gibraltar. Which big casino is by the way located in some big country and paying taxes? If you think that botting is illegal, tell me please one case where guys who were using bots had some issues other than account being banned?

After looking at neopokerlab.com, I found three interesting people: Rob Gallo, David Fairlamb and George Zaloom.
I think they are American citizens. The first two are co-founders of neopokerlab, as neopokerlab.com says. This is also confirmed on the website https://angel.co/company/neo-poker-lab
The third one is listed as an adviser on neopokerlab.com, but he writes that he is also a co-founder. And he writes what he was doing in neopokerlab. "Part of the founding team developing an artificial intelligence-based Texas Hold'em poker playing and learning platform. Worked with development team to ideate how to create massive liquidity by deploying bots into the player pool. (Winner of the 2014 GiGse Start-up Launchpad competition.)"
Here is the link:
https://angel.co/george-zaloom

Here are their profiles on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peakmarketing/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fairlamb/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgezaloom/

Rob Gallo hides his connection with neo (his profile does not mention neopokerlab), which suggests that the person is light-fingered, and is afraid of publicity.
David Fairlamb is more public, there is even a chance that one of you is personally acquainted with him. He worked in a casino in Sochi, and big poker tournaments are held there, and players come there from all over the world. Recently, he has been working in a casino in Cyprus, and I have information that one of the BotFarm offices is located in Cyprus - my acquaintance BotFarm's partner repeatedly flew there to BotFarm meetings.
George Zaloom wrote again about himself as a co-founder of neopokerlab, but on linkedin did not describe what he was doing there.

In conclusion, just about the use of money received from conducting fraudulent activities. The head of BotFarm, Svyatoslav Kapustin is a person known in certain circles as fraudster or Omsk Raider. It is more important for us that in 2013-2015 he invested 500 million rubles (about 10 million $), received from the creation of botnets, in a SPA-resort «Kremnievy termy» in the Krasnodar region (Russia).
https://kremterm.com/en/

Along the way, he stole half from his local partner. And he continues to successfully invest his profits. Mr. Kapustin this year in July once again invested your poker money! He acquired cheaply another gold mining company, the second in a row. He bought the first one in November 2018. SPA in Krasnodar, two gold mining companies in Krasnoyarsk - poker bots bring amazing profits, and its our task is to stop their activities.

The grey area is that it's not illegal for us to deposit and play on it AFAIK.

The IRS doesn't care if what you are doing is illegal or legal, they only care that you pay your taxes. You can be a drug dealer and the IRS is only concerned with you paying your taxes.

18K views so far for this thread, i am wondering how many poker site owners will read this thread and contact neopokerlab to get their bots. This thread is nothing more than a great commercial.

don't let the topic die, big thanks to the topic starter, hope he continues with it, at least some people aren't lazy and fight to clean this game

I'd heard about Filatov being banned on Stars, not sure if true. These threads are huge though. Any serious evidence of him botting? Is he banned on stars?

He apparently doesn't play much on Stars any more, presumably because Party runs enough events to satisfy him, but according to P5s, he's had two cashes this month on Stars (as nl_profit): https://www.pocketfives.com/profiles...etfives_cashes

I'm fairly sure he was temporarily banned along with a long list of regs, some of whom escaped the permanent ban. His stars history correlates with the timeline of bans in the thread that I'll link below.

I'd say that the fact that there have been many accusations against him (I'm not making any myself, but looking at what others have posted plus his history) make it very possible that he is in fact involved in this whole thing. Stars do not suspend peoples accounts for no reason (although they do require irrefutable evidence to apply the perma ban, even if its a near certainty), and people who are accused of wrong doing tend to defend themselves in public if they have any line of defence.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...02/index3.html

To the posters in the know, is this thread related to the botfarm?

In that thread they are suspecting that some stables are using smart sheet, those are actually humans who play with aid of restricted software. Not only bots are cheating in online poker, humans cheating as well.
I don't see why does it matter if Russian pro poker player got banned on stars or not, seems unrelated topic to me. Even if he would be helping in developing bots in "botfarm", still it is not a reason to ban his pokerstars account if he plays fair there.

LOL.

Of course it is. Stars can choose who they want to do business with, and if they believed that someone who plays on their site was involved in developing poker bots that are being used to cheat on poker sites, it would be a smart move to ban him.

Even if stars would ban his account because they don't like that he helps the company which develops bots, i don't see the point of discussing about it, how it is relevant at all for this thread. If he would be using bot on pokerstars and gets banned, that would be relevant as in that case pokerstars would be doing something against advanced bots on their site.

The whole point of this thread was to make people more aware of how good are bots nowadays and how many bots are actually playing in online poker (many more than most of people expected). As usual, some people write in bot topic, lets do something against those guys, lets ban all east Europeans etc, but eventually nothing changes, there are more and more bots in online poker that get better and better, and there are less regulars that can make money in online poker. All poker players that i know quit playing poker as hourly is not good anymore for the amount of stress and work. The most money of poker addicts (fish) goes in the pockets of poker sites and to bot owners

Our only chance of a legit site is giving the GOV/Gaming Commission control of the Poker sites. Anyone that violates the rules will be dealt with in court, like BTCBlade. Nobody would ever think of this type of stuff happening on a site like PokerStars.

Lol this guy is so blatantly involved in some way, shape or form. I can smell the disingenuity of his posts. ALL of which have come in this thread and one where he conveniently (5 days earlier) posts about bots on Party.

so why not to form a team of those who are ready to invest their time and effor to fight the bots? If such team would form I am ready even to donate. But we need people with reputation for this job. I am sure we can make a plan and take action while it's not too late.

well considering we had this company try to do the very thing you're talking about and it seemed like pretty much nobody cared, can't say there much of a market there...

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...?highlight=bot

considering the actual situation, I think people might reconsider it, would be nice if they would create let's say a telegram channel. There I, myself, could invite at least a couple of reputable members of poker community to join the channel, And from there on, we can try and build something bigger. I think right now, with the evidence that we have and the amplitude of the situation, many players may react to it