Real time assistance has been a thing for quite some time now. Correct me if I am wrong as maybe it is true of other games but isn't the difference that the luck in poker obfuscates this to the player base? So even if playing in games riddled with RTA it is very hard for players to tell if they are getting cheated. We already have a massive scandal with Fedor Kruse which seemed to do very little to change the perception even though he showed how ridiculously easy it is to get away with and only was caught cause his roommates ratted him out. You have two of the most high-profile names in Jake and Ali also associated with it recently and again nothing changed.

Now I think that is down to a lack of education on the consumer side for the average recreational. They still think these are special cases who are doing some next-level **** that is beyond most cheaters. I am more aware of what I could make myself very quickly as a developer which means I am very cognizant of what even the average Joe could be using. That barrier has lowered much further with the likes of ChatGPT and people using it to code. The sites and the winning players have no incentives to make the player base at large aware of this problem and luck means it stays hidden for much longer than in games like Chess where if someone is using an engine you lose every time.

Yes but the difficulty of catching cheaters also means it's harder to cheat. Anybody can cheat in chess and play insanely well. It's much harder to do that in poker just like that. And even if you manage to cheat it won't be at the level that you can in chess. People are lazy. Cheaters are even lazier. As long as there's not a cheap and easy to use method, poker will be fine. All the gto websites right now are expensive and too slow to be used in real play.

50 quid a week for PLO trainer and Visions which are both being used while playing and that's been known for a while now.
Cheating is easy and cheap if you do it on the right sites
2 PCs, 1 mobile hotspot and a subscription to these programs and you are well ahead already

To attempt to use Vision while playing would be unprofitable. The pre flop/flop/turn inputs would be wildly incorrect therefore its solutions would not reflect equilibrium. Not to mention horribly clunky. Is there any actual evidence of it being used or is this just speculation?

Wildly incorrect?
I'd love to know how you came up with that one
Yes there is enough evidence and ppl telling both Nandez and Galfond that ppl are using it
I've seen ppl using Nandez PLO trainer since it was on Discord and even more ppl now it's desktop available.

Might want to look at the thread on here about the using Visions to do exactly that
It was posted on Twitter by Dominic in response to Galfond saying it was near impossible.
Ppl need to wake up and realize cheating is rampant

Chess requires the person to have a high level of understanding to be able to play with an engine and not get caught. The recommended best move by the top engines is often outside of the scope of human understanding. That means they would never play that move. Accounts get closed very quickly on chess.com that are trying to cheat. The issue is always going to be a person with an already high level of understanding of the game be that poker or chess who is also using assistance.

I am not going to name them but cheap and easy solutions do already exist. There are also sites that provide private databases/ RTA software for models such as license fees.

Just because the majority of players are losing and not cheating which means the ecosystem is still healthy does not mean poker is fine.

There’s actually a significant population of players that not only think studying GTO won’t help them improve, but think it will make them worse. Some of these players have been losing for nearly 20 years without even realizing it. RTA is an issue but I don’t think it’s going to kill online poker any time soon.

I think some of you underestimate the levels of mental gymnastics that people will perform to convince themselves it’s fine to put in 0 effort. There’s literally one of these posts 4 posts above.

People have been saying this for 17 years.

Yes but in those 17 years poker has basically been solved or pretty close to it and the solutions are available to anyone willing to pay for them along with the technology to have it at your fingers in seconds .
money makes ppl do weird things and let's face it poker is full of these ppl and the nonstop scams/not paying/cheating etc prove that.

I could literally set up a stable with everyone using one of these relatively cheap programs pretty quickly if I was a shady player with the cash to do it.

Ppl are either very naive or wilfully ignorant
Probably even just not caring aslong as it doesn't affect their winrate

How do you know a significant portion don't?
That's just a wild guess and the popularity of solvers, charts, courses, play and explains etc would say otherwise.
You really think the small portion of the community is buying all these courses from atleast 6 different companies.
Nandez, Polk, BenCB, Jordan,Galfond, Johnathan little ,Berkey and so on are all making good money from ppl learning and it's definitely not a tiny portion buying it all.
It will kill poker because ppl like you just want to ignore it and pretend it's a non issue when its a huge issue

This is massively correct. I actually know of certain rta companies that will tell you outright , PURE GTO does not win. It only wins if you combine card removal. so bot rings sharing cards.

Why? Because humans underbluff massively. So a pure gto bot calls off too light and overbluffs.

If you showed someone from 17 years ago the current state of online poker, they would feel 100% correct. Lol

If you zoom out, online poker is dead dead. Sure a few savant/autists with 20k+ hours into poker can make nurse or doctor money on a good year. That doesn't mean the game isn't dead.

It's far too easy to cheat, and poker players are generally scum. It's beyond naive to think large-scale cheating isn't happening, at least on RoW and grey market sites.

I disagree that it's that easy to cheat in any efficient way. You have to put some money and effort into it. It has been possible to use bots and collusion for who knows how many years now. 20 years ago it didn't requite too much brain power either but most still didn't do that.

If you have to manually input the cards it's not really impressive. Maybe you can one table if even that.

btw I missed this the first time around when I was reading the thread. I agree with this completely. It seems so silly to be concentrating on what poker will look like in a year's time because what the world will look like in a year's time after AI really takes hold is a really open question at the moment.

hehh that's just not true, they usually overbluff and also overfold

3d cameras for winning regs and random video calls by the site where you have to show around

Rta isnt the only propblem. You have ghosters, colluders, multiaccounters. There are way too many issues with online poker atm

Sorry I’ll rephrase. Vs a solver, players don’t value bet thin enough for a solver to defend vs thin value bets. So what ends up happening is the solver defends too light in many spots.

You’re right in the perspective of humans overbluffing, they overbluff but also don’t valuebet thinly enough.


Example a spot I just went over.

SB vs BB
Hero (oop in the bb 9dTd)

Bb open 3x , Sb 3b 9bb hero call
Flop Ad 6d 8d
sb b30 hero?

Solver suggests call 75% and raise 25%

Almost all humans c/r here like 80% instead of call 75% and then have a 33% donk range on 7x for example.

i like this example

There was a thread a while ago about a player called Zhuang Ruan who had a stable cheating PLO on GG using Vision from what I remember.

Amazingly they would rather make up conspiracies on this site about imaginary cheating on streams,shufflers,frog poison etc than actually try get something done about real cheating that's been proven and it's easily available from multiple sources which are probably better than Visions.

You can be sure until it actually affects HS or pro players nobody will care.

You would think real cheating would get more attention than some supposed cheating that's nobody ever proved (j4)
Just a bunch of drama whores and conspiracy nuts on this site.

Just because it's not true for you doesn't mean it's not true for everyone, or even a majority of recs. It's possible that the amount which anti-cheating measures will scare away fish is exaggerated, but it also shouldn't be ignored when deciding on best measures to use.

Look at the names of the famous cheaters and realize it is effecting the HS and pro players but unfortunately that is because of the number of that type of player that have been caught cheating.

What makes my post bad and misinformed? I’ll have you know I probably know more about this topic as a whole than anyone on this site for multiple reasons.

1. I have paid endless amounts of money in the old days to solve for monk3r ranges for 6 max holdem.
2. Partnered with companies that have solvers to implement the ranges.
3. Reviewed cheaters with multiple other high stakes players.


There was one case as of recent where a player(won’t say who) was a nitfish at 3k and 5knl. I wouldn’t even call him that bad. All of a sudden the player was using gto ranges, became balanced so balanced he started over defending in spots where he wouldn’t even get to the river with any weak parts of his range.

He went from a small loser to an absolute drooler. I would compare him to Ben Affleck playing. We highly suspect this player found an RTA. Instead of reporting him to the site we actually just adjusted and exploited his tendencies to be “balanced” in spots. Hands that the solver wouldn’t triple, we started to triple off, so we massively “overbluffed” with value and the solver fish would defend and get crushed.

One day a new account joined our games, lo and behold it was the nitfish that became a spewtard. His previous account was banned and we got a fresh spewtard to play.

2 weeks later his new account was banned again.

A couple of things I learned from this. Accounts that all of a sudden start playing differently stuck out like a sore thumb.

Using an rta and the opportunity cost of this is severely -ev for a high stakes player.

Depositing 50-100k (10 buyins) to use an rta and then getting your funds confiscated just isn’t worth the 1-3bb/100 that you might think you can achieve.


And in retrospect the poker sites actually wait for players to build up a balance before they ban them. Poker sites are actually super on top of this.

The real problem we have is card sharing and multi accounting.