Listen here, I do not have answers to those questions and one may suggest you might not either.


anyways here is my reaction when i hear about 2018 online poker bots gone wild:

I work in tech and the recurring theme in this industry is that tech solutions are easy and quick. In reality, tech solutions are hard, expensive, and take a lot of time. And that's the best case scenario where you actually have a development team that has a skill set required to make requested changes. It's not as easy as throwing random ideas at the wall to see what sticks. This stuff takes a lot of developer money to test and develop. And in worst cases, it may introduce other problems. (software crashes or vulnerabilities.)

This is a cat and mouse game that sites can't win. When they plug one hole, bots will exploit another shortcoming. At the end of the day, scammers can put an OCR reader in front of a screen to tell a trained developing world laborer what to do and there is no way to detect this. It's a futile pursuit.

The sites have the ultimate solution: the balance sheet of each player and hand histories. Sites can just go down the list of top winners and manually review and investigate possible bot accounts. A lot of people worry about bots but my guess is that these bots are only very marginal winners. They help sites with liquidity and they don't take much money off the tables. That's why they don't get banned. If they were taking too much money of a site's poker economy they would be banned in an instant.

The government can't, won't and shouldn't step in on its own to "protect the players" (everytime the gov choses to protect its citizens it ends up in a mess and worse for everyone, like the US gov "protecting" its citizens from online gambling.)
What should and could happen is that sites USE the power of the gov to sue the botters. If the sites would just set a few or even one example of this, botters would quickly realize that the risk is not worth the potential gain and stop. This is a possible solution almost nobody is talking about.
The biggest problem though is that botters operate from countries where illegal activities on the internet are usually tolerated. So it would only work properly if they exclude those countries, until the situation is different.




@publius on many stakes on many sites it was revieled that bots are/were the biggest winners by a huge margin.

I think the sites needs to take a Punkbuster-esqe approach to this. I assume Stars does something like this now.

Punkbuster is basically a piece of software that scans the local PC's memory for PC game cheating software.

Actually, I bet Punkbuster would be pretty easily adapted for this specific use.

Yes, let's create another SEC, they do a great job making sure people aren't cheated out of their money

Obviously there is going to be some issues with government oversight just like there is in any other regulated industry. At least there's potential for improvement. The thing is that when there's no oversight it becomes the wild west and you may have little to no recourse with issues like we have with our current online options. Pick your poison.

IIRC it's a crime punishable by jail time for some forms of cheating, bots etc in the states NJ/NV on the regulated sites no? I was under the impression that is what keeps the games clean, an actual penalty for stealing from sites and/or customers. Idk the exact laws but im fairly certain they're in place and came with the regulations, similar to live casino laws where they don't take kindly to shenanigans.

There was also some guy in England who got a cpl yrs in jail over there for some kind of affil scam where he scammed a cpl milly, I learned of it here in nvg there was a thread about it. Thats probably why you don't see many reports of brits cheating ps or americans cheating regulated sites, because there more of a reason not to.

>potential for improvement
It doesn't matter where government steps in, in 99% of cases it will make the situation worse, especially as a poker player you should know.
Using bots is fraud, laws against already exist, sites just don't use them, since almost all of them don't care and even if they would all botters are in countries that don't care.
I know I'm repeating myself, but getting rid of those countries wouldn't only temporary solve/fastly improve the issue like many people claim, it's a longterm solution.

At the very least I think all sites should have to provide downloadable hand histories of the games you've played in with opponents' nicknames identified.

I think an independent 3rd party doing the investigation would be best. I believe a company called Safe Poker advertised this service in these forums.


Your first point here is good. I think statistical analysis, review of hand histories and comparing accounts is the best way to identify cheaters/bots from the players' side. Sites could always use that if their other detection methods fail.

Your guess about bots being marginal winners is unfortunately wrong. Bots come in all skill levels. You can make them play as you would with no potential for tilt. It all depends on the bot users knowledge and effort put into maintenance. Most bots I've found between micro-mid stakes are solid winners. They are more balanced and less exploitative than the absolute best regs so their bb/100 is not as high, but their volume and lack of tilt allows them to consistently take some of the most money out of the games.


I haven't read up on Punkbuster, but I would assume those trying to cheat are currently developing methods to evade its detection. I know bot forums suggest several methods to best avoid detection from poker sites. As others have mentioned it's a game of cat and mouse.



I hear what you're saying. I'm not sure if there is a perfect solution. I'm just looking for the best solution and for that I am open to suggestions.

I don't think it's right to disqualify all people from a country just because there are some scumbags who come from there. I do agree that banning those countries would get rid of a good amount of cheaters, but certainly not every cheater.

Poker-sites do read out your task-manager. Stars does so (100% sure about that) and looking into some threads where people get warned for using software xy indicates other sites do so as well. Obv - as you stated - not really a wall of defence against bots.

I know it is not a perfect solution, but together with legally charging botusers within western countries (it really only has to be one that gets public, to set an example it is by far the most efficient solution.) And real human players from those countries can always relocate.
(As a side effect it would solve the issue that it's almost impossible to go pro ina western country nowadays, since the you have to beat at least NL100, but NL25 & 50 are already filled with a lot of fulltime pros from low income countries)

Yes they have done this forever but it's easy for programmers to disguise the bot apps. If the sites were really diligent they would detect the bot executable signatures like antivirus software does. But that becomes a constant arms race and takes a lot of resources devoted to keeping up.

And of course botters can run two computers with the bot on one just sending mouse and keystrokes to the other. Then you have to detect all manner of remote control software too. So its very hard to fully prevent it.