That makes sense, but couldn't the botters develop some kind of captcha reading system to work around this?

You think Pokerstars gives a F***?

I stopped playing PLO 2 years ago. I ran 60BI below EV on 100,000 hands. I decided it was because I was up against bots. In reality, I was not running below EV because they knew the card removal. If you have 3 bots on the same table. The bots know 12 cards. It was clear to me they had this info.

For the same reasons I pulled all but the last $1000 of my roll off and stopped playing most cash NLHE. It was impossible to run as bad as I was. I have played a ton of live poker and it just does not happen when it is a level playing field. I was a NL 50, 100 and PLO 25 winning reg. Now I play micro tourneys, (yes they are full of bots too) and micro cash, mostly without a hud. Over the last year and a half Ive been slowly losing it but I don't care, my online roll is like points to me. Once its gone I'll quit.

The same bots have been playing for years on Pokerstars, and they do nothing about it. I recently fired up my HUD for the 1st time in a while (close to a year). I was playing NL10. The were players on there that I thought were bots in my notes from when I was playing NL 50. They continue to be on there almost all day every day. Their stats are the same. My notes are still valid.

A human simply can not grind that much for 4 or 5 years and not improve and move down in stakes and keep doing it. When the games were softer they were NL 50 regs. After millions of hands played they are NL 10 regs and play enough hands to be super nova.

Pokerstars knows they are bot infested and encourage it. The rake back program is designed to benefit bots not recs. The pick our own table and seat is designed to benefit bots not recs.

The saddest thing to me is that Pokerstars is not only killing online Poker. They are also killing live poker. People are sick of loosing to bots and 24 table huds. People think its impossible to win at poker, because they never do. Card rooms and home games are dying because of it.

I guess anything is possible, but most wouldn't be able to do it(as opposed to current state where next to anyone can get a bot running) and for those that could I imagine it would take them a very long time and in that time a poker site could release small changes to their card pixel shuffling that would probably make efforts to crack it a waste of time.

programers would just sit next to the computer and punch in the needed code when necessary. Bots get to keep playing.

People that don't know how to program or don't do it for a living are not posting any solutions to the problem.
If you find the topic interesting, I suggest you go get some books off amazon and learn the basics of programming and you will probably enjoy it.
There are also lots of free material online, like videos, articles and free books too.

powder:

I can't "prove" it is the case, (and Pokerstars will almost certainly deny it), but I suspect you are correct: Pokerstars (and the other online sites) are killing poker by allowing bots and HUDs.

I haven't seen, heard, or read an "official" statement (yet) from Pokerstars concerning this latest [alleged] scandal - or whatever you want to call it. I suspect when they do get around to issuing a statement, they're going to vehemently deny that their games are bot infested and insist that all is well and there's "nothing to worry about" - which is pretty much what they initially said about Nick Grudzien.

It has been proven (it's an actual fact) that some of these sites were being ran by convicted felons. (Remember A.J. Green down in Costa Rica?) I don't think Isai Sheinberg was/is a crook on a par with Mr. Green and Russ Hamilton, but the record clearly shows that none of these operators exercised any real effort to stop cheating and collusion. (They often acted, as with Nick Grudzien, only after overwhelming evidence of cheating and collusion was produced by folks like Noah-SD and other members of the 2+2 community.) It appears that that pattern - of sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring these problems - continues to this day.

I'm not sure if it's technically possible to completely eliminate cheating and collusion from online poker. (If it's not technically possible, that would explain why the sites have never exercised any real effort to crack down.) But it occurs to me that if it is [technically] possible to eliminate 95-99 percent of the bots as well as all (or most) of the human cheaters and colluders, a group of really sharp programmers - backed by a group of astute investors - would create a new poker site and heavily promote all the measures they are taking to create a square game for players. If such a site were to come into existence, (where cheating, collusion and bots are at a minimum), I would think such a site might quickly put Pokerstars (and all the others) out of business.

What I fear is that it is impossible to remove cheating from online poker. Live poker has been around for nearly 200 years and cheating is alive and well in that venue. There are currently 3-4 active threads going here in NVG dealing with [alleged] cheating and angle shooting at the WSOP - which is supposed to be poker's annual showcase event. If it can't be stopped in live poker, internet poker is probably hopeless.

Thank god I just thought I was really bad at plo explains why I lost over 100k at this game

If PS is motivated to catch these guys they wouldn't have very much trouble doing so. They are a number of things that can be done. It is only a question of PS's desire to offer fair games.

Lol @ claiming running 60 bi below ev at nano's over 100k hands is due to bots...

Also lol at thinking that bots have a harder time playing tourneys. They are a really easy form of poker and even if the final part of a tourney does seem hard, they can always just take over manually during the last 2 tables of tourneys.

this is incredibly sad and angering. some people are just pieces of ****.

What do we think about these bots conquering the Zoom tables? I presume as long as their is a HUD involved the bot programmers know what to do to exploit it.

Whenever there's money on the line there will always be people trying to angle or cheat. Poker is full of absolute scum of the earth so the news that bots are crushing midstakes PLO doesn't surprise me.

If there's bots playing and winning at PLO there's a decent chance there's plenty of them playing NLHE as well

The manager of publich relations is posting in the riggie thread on the regular. I already pointed out to him the automated software thread and in the software improvement thread to Keith. They just ignore. They cannot be trusted. At all.

I've pointed out software issues a year ago that are ignored by Pokerstars and become a big issue to mass players a year after. I can imagine all the cheating/bot reports that are ignored also. Ive reported suspicious activity recently and its really pointless and its disgraceful whats occuring. Why are players with limited resources finding this? Years after it started? Stars security and player protection is such a propaganda and phony farce and has been for a long time. This is proof. Please pokerstars. Invite Pokerstars steve on the next podcast and let him answer some more pre written questions about how they are on top of this and have been and bla bla bla bla bla. Just quickly blow it off and promote some more laggy tournaments. Huds, automated seating scripts, cartels, bots. You are fkn useless in protecting me as a customer and providing me with a fair game. This not even starting with the RNG

no offense but how could you possibly think this?

after this thread (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...nners-1292802/) and stars stance that they had no ability to ban a program that would auto seat you at a table, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone that stars cannot stop bots.

If stars cannot tell whether or not you're using a program to sit at a table, it cannot tell whether you are using a program to play either.

the bot problem is a lot worse than you can imagine on stars.

two post from one of the Alberta computer science guys.


From this thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...25/index3.html

now those two posts in conjunction with what happened on pokerstars 3 years ago is really bad. the 6m ssnl games + msnl games got crushed by suspected bots starting summer of 2012. in September 7 accounts were reported to stars, 5 of them were banned.

2 of them continue to play we the players were still convinced they were bots. There is one thing that the bot would do that you could never explain if it was a human. If the table was to break down to heads up and there were no other players sitting out at the table the bot would immediately get up and not play. If there was one player sitting out and still being seated at the table being shown as sitting out the bot would play 5-10 hands hu then get up.

This finally happened with one of the two accounts that continued to play against me in December of 2012. I had a lengthy pm exchange with pokerstars steve telling him that you guys are definitely wrong and this is 100% a bot (it did everything else that the other bots were doing too that made it very obvious it was a bot but this was a smoking gun. Absolutely no way you can tell me that human is doing that). the incompetent game integrity guys even sent me an e-mail.

about two weeks later once the script problem came about and it became apparent stars was going to take the stance that they were not going to be able to effectively ban them. I made a post that I had deleted calling out the account in question urging everyone to mass e-mail stars about it. since if they can't stop the scripts they can't stop the bots and then poker is over.

1/10/2013 was the date of the post. the account I'm talking about is 'EatMyStak' anyone who has Russia PTR go tell me the last time he played any hands? I never played with him again after making that post.

the other account that was reported with them went on to crush nl200 zoom playing a style that no human played (obv a bot).

my personal opinion is since some of the accounts were banned and others were not that what Sam is talking about is what went down.

Bots are on stars they have been for years. stars cannot stop them and their game integrity team is beyond incompetent.

this needs to go viral

There is a sports talk show in Toronto, Canada thats the most popular in the country, that Daniel Negreanu has been on numerous times. This thread will be emailed to them. And to it's rival station. Im sick of playing fair for years and not being protected.the host likes to talk poker.

Do you have proof of this?

Pessimistic rant incoming...

To some extent, Stars can't really do anything about the impending 'robot takeover' even if it wanted to. The technology exists; the technology makes money; regulators cannot keep pace with the technology; honest customers get shafted. The Stars PR team might pay lip-service to worried customers, to soothe their fears, but it is - and always has been - in Pokerstars' best interest to encourage high volume play, whether its by legit supernova grinders, or by bots, because liquidity => rake => profit.

For an analogy, look at the way that bots control the financial markets, with around 80% of stock-trading being automated by algorithms. In 2010, a trader operating a botnet from his spare bedroom triggered a 9% flash crash of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, wiping a trillion dollars off the value of US companies in half an hour. It took the regulators five years before they banned "spoofing bots" and brought charges against the botter (as if locking up one little guy solves the entire botting problem!), but other forms of high frequency trading remain perfectly legal. Indeed, for the 2% of HFT companies that account for over 70% of all trading volume, and the stock exchanges that benefit from their action, it's an extremely lucrative business. (One of the biggest legal HFT companies is even called Tradebot ffs). Good luck competing with that if you're trying to make money from stocks and shares in your spare time.
Botting isn't going to go away. It's only going to get more extreme, as it's the fastest way to move money from the plebs to the people at the top of the money pyramid.

To slightly misquote a famous line from Orwell's '1984': If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bot stamping on a human face - forever.

how much rights do players really have. If it's obvious that a site is/has been allowing bots used, can players sue a site because they are knowingly allowing the break of TOS against them by allowing bots and therefor not providing a customer with a fair game which is the expectation he has when he pays a rake, against what he thinks is another human.

oh god this is amazing

"What is dead may never die"

Juk

Any information if those bots are actually very good at PLO or it's the collusion which brings the edge?

Two more posts from him in the rigged thread after this one but no words about the bots. We're getting trolled.

There is no evidence of holecard sharing or collusion yet, it is pure speculation. i am going to check it when i get my hands on a big enough sample.

Sent from my GT-I9195 using 2+2 Forums