I'm guessing here but, Wouldn't they use similar realtime ability to read what is going on in the game?

Meh. I think it's done by screen scraping and unrelated to actual hand histories from the client.

One day I will make a thread in NVG about Doug lee or something and I bet it will turn into a "let's ban HUDs" argument by the third page.

My main question is, and im not sure if this has been brought up yet, but why isnt Pokerstars able to track these things?

They litterally have every hand someone plays, shouldnt they have software which would notice these patterns which we can do ourself on an illigal tracking site?

Is it extremely difficult to prosecute people like this? At the moment there seems little incentive for people not to cheat like this.

just LOL at stars asking for a guys help in the investigation when all hes using is rPTR and hem2. loool useless


Also if starshelper uses "everything" chat to get the information needed to change the $ to bb's..i dont see why bots wouldnt use something similar to just read plain txt instead of crazy OTT OCR screen scraping stuff to get all the current state of the hand...



Shouldn't the title also say many nlhe players are suspected too? Not just plo

how are you going to prosecute when there is no regulation?

Soon it will be bots on bots. Online poker is dying because of the lack of repercussions of actions like cheating and bots. Bots are the future of online poker. Can you develop a better bot. What a joke that nothing happens to these people.

does it even have to be written in their software? a requirement for any winning grinder is that they must have full access to their computer given to stars somehow. may be some type of third-party software hooked up to a server. idk but I really can't believe that there isn't a way to have everything that is running on a computer monitored.

Bots/collusion rings have been around online poker and specifically pokerstars for a long time. PStars are supposed to have a "team" to investigate it but still they persist time and time again with threads like this popping up on 2+2/other forums. The fact is game integrity is not a priority. The sites only care about rake and bots help them so there's no incentive for them to change.

It doesn't matter what the botter uses screen scraper/HH - whatever. The key to getting rid of botters is to make botting unprofitable. How to make it unprofitable?
- Segregated player pools (let the old bloc eat itself alive)
- Max 1-2 tables per person
- Anonymous screen names
- 100 NL max limit

But you will never see these things passed on any online poker in unison because getting rid of botters means the sites lose money! Sites want bots making games run, they want RAKE and they don't care where it comes from.

If you need any more evidence of what they want done look at the sites themselves! The promotion of software, increased poker knowledge all in the effort to keep games running. Everytime you use software you're just a little bot or bot-lite (often poorly coded) and Pokerstars and every other site wants an army of bot-lites/bots/fish populating their tables and they don't give a toss who wins besides them.

If you cant understand its the same issue you're doomed.

yep. but to be fair these fancy database queries are a beast. i always get confused SELECT FROM JOIN ON WHERE ..aaaaaaarg screw it!

I could imagine there being a bit of a problem if 'Stars began investigating just with a database. Obviously a lot of people here have first hand experience playing these players, and have seen some funky stuff. But I imagine if 'Stars began compiling all the hand histories into a database they'd find a LOT of players with similar stats that weren't using bots, just by chance.

I would have thought their security system would be up to par in stamping out the bots, but I guess not. I know there's been a captcha I've had to fill in before while at the tables that appeared in chat, but it's been a while since I've seen that (despite playing more hands these days than I did then).

No, it's a related issue but an issue that doesn't really affect a lot of the posters in this thread. An issue that indeed will be pressing but is in no way (seemingly) near the scale of what is happening to online poker at the moment. Like I said, you are welcome to make a thread about it. I'm not demeaning your point, it is a developing issue but you are indeed distracting from the purpose of this thread, which is to talk about the current issues of online botting (particularly on stars)... not people using technology in live games at the horseshoe or wherever.

your poker news comment is absolutely ridiculous (please delete it). Bots have been beating NL1K with very good win rates for over four years now. What the hell are you possibly going on about that you think the reason why they are playing plo is because they have to share hold cards in order to get a good edge.


well your kind of right about that for me i feel bad looking back on this. I had a post deleted because I thought it would be terrible if the recreational players ever found out how rampant the bots were back in 2012 and the facts that stars had no chance at stopping them then, their denial of their incompetence, and refusal to adjust what they were doing.


Limon,

what type of punishment would somebody get if they were to cheat in your poker game that you host and there is 100% proof of it?

If they were to face jail time, do you think that jail time would be a big enough deterrent to stop people from botting on legalized California iPoker(if it happens)?

No, they would not. The bot stat correlations are far beyond the realm of coincidence.

http://youtu.be/d5upxYyeoQ8
Question: how big a problem is cheating at Pokerstars.

Answer: steven winter, director of gaming integrity, pokerstars

"Well, it's not a big a problem as you'd imagine"

This is not a thread for you to whine about HUDs being bad, this thread is about a much more important topic which is actual cheating. I dont care if u wanna cry about HUDs find a thread among the hundreds of threads that were created to discuss that subject where people (myself include) gave extensive lists of arguments as for why HUDs should remain. This is an important thread and it's already full of post that r irrelevant to the discussion at hand, let's try no to deviate from the goal here.

Yeah, and after we play about 10hrs/day we are gonna dedicate 5 hours more to replay every single game to find bots. Because we are just that kind of degenerate people who dont need to eat, sleep or bathe. Players detect bots because they analyse stats as they play.

no no no no no

1) Stars might have found this independently, although given what a joke they've been post-amaya that'd be a risky assumption

2) It's DATABASES that found them. You would be able to find them without having realtime information giving you 592 stats in each of 206 different game states making your table look like an Excel sheet on acid, with the only thing it's not doing is having ****ing Clippy telling you on hovering over the call button "it looks like you're going to call, have you not looked at stats x, y and z and considered 3-betting?"

although given the automated decision software thread, it seems like stars wouldn't care if it did that anyway

but hey, as long as we can identify either of the two fish that are left that stops us all passing money between each other and losing to rake, it doesn't matter, right?

As it has been said a few times already here, even if they had a fully trusted platform, there is no way to detect screen scraping.
And this is what bot networks will ultimately do if other means of getting game data is becoming too difficult.

A PC costs not much these days, maybe 250-300€. This bot-network supposedly made millions...

Just imagine 200 PC's sitting in a room, connected to a digital KVM matrix.
Video output is being scraped, game state reported to a controller. As soon as any anomalies are detected on screen - e.g. a captcha is popping up, some one writes in chat ... the operator is alerted by controller and he takes over the client on one of his 9 screens...and of course conveniently gets displayed bot profile data on one of his screens to mimic correct behavior.

Human behavior will be simulated undetectable with the help of the KVM matrix, have different profiles - some browse on their Facebook, some play slots here and then...

You will never detect this.

Bots only tables. heads up zoom. play vs bots rake free, rake returned. 2 table max tables. mixed games. better collusion and bot protection programs. segregation, regulation, laws. random screen factors, no hand histories.

Yeah, it wasnt HUDs it was databases, because it's that simple right? All u have to do is run a simple miracle program that collects all the info from database from all the players u have there, and export it quickly to an excel spreadsheet. And then have another one to run checks to all the patterns. Does this really sound realistic to u? How many pros could actually programme something like that? What u propose could only be carried out by a bunch of people in the whole poker community. So for most the only way is to do it mostly player by player analysis and I say again:

i don't know, maybe if you weren't such a slave to fpp's you'd be able to cut your play by 5% and spend half an hour googling how database queries work. never mind, carry on, don't come crying in 12 months when it's just regs and bots left

what are the bots on 888? feel like iv been cheated

I have sent an email to pokerstars about the issue and told them that I'm considering playing on a different site if nothing is done. Everyone should do the same.