Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaKing
When the accounts eventually get found out by PS and the money confiscated it is always fractions of pennies on the dollar that they took out of the games so there is little risk in having the people who control the accounts find out that people are on to them. If anything the heat on certain accounts will get to be too much and they will likely stop using those accounts. If the people behind the bots/colluders want to keep their thievery up at the same pace that it was, they will have to start using accounts that have no history of winning at 6max PLO before. It is presumably much easier to spot new accounts that start winning at 6max PLO and get them banned more quickly than if the accounts had been playing for at least a few years. What made it difficult to get the first group of bots banned is that at least some of the accounts had a history of winning via (likely) legitimate play, the seregaxx account had been playing and winning since at least late 2003 which you can find out by checking sharkscope.
It is absolutely no problem to get a legitimate account with some MTT playing history. This is hardly an obstacle for any botring operator.
Stars is probably turning a blind eye to this, because they know what PLO rake numbers would look like without all these bot accounts. The midstakes would be even more of a ghosttown.
Let´s face it, they have no real reason to shut down any of these rake generators unless the pressure from the community gets too much.
Additionally, there are rumours about the sale of the Stars brand again, which makes it even more important to produce good quarterly numbers.
This is basically shown by some recent promotions for dormant accounts, where they offer +EV sportsbetting promos, heavy reload bonuses (the current MEGA20 or MEGA30 promotion for accounts inactive in the last month) in order to increase QAUs.
I would probably bet my life on it that the QAUs shown in the last quarterly report from Amaya are basically fraudulent due to the heavy reactivation of dormant accounts because of some losing promotions.
The number of QAUs for the Betstars brand is e.g. heavily manipulated because they offered thousands of customers a 5 $ freebet. Of course everyone takes this opportunity (who doesn´t like to wager free money?) and gets included as a QAU in the quarterly report in spite of having absolutely no interest in using their inferior sportsbetting product.
The main reason for this promotion was simply to prevent showing shareholders what an utter failure their sportsbetting brand is so far.
Let´s face it, if you were about to sell a billion dollar business you would do everything in order to produce good numbers for the relevant quarterly results.
To state it once more:
-lose some money on promotions in order to increase QAUs
-don´t shut down botting accounts, which generate a ton of rake, don´t use customer service and are fine with playing long hours for a small bb/100
...
I´m pretty sure they were aware that FedorZayse*, seregax* and so on were not average regs, but rather bots or maybe humans with heavy in-game assistance, but decided to don´t do anything about because of the rake they generated.
If I remember correctly some of these accounts were basically SNE or close to it.
My outlook on poker is very grim these days after witnessing certain sites behavior in terms of botting prevention. Stars is not the only one turning a blind eye to this due to short-term greed, iPoker is obviously much much worse and Microgaming is becoming worse by the day.
The only sites that probably are somewhat unharmed by bots are the heavily restricted sites like SvenskaSpel (hard to get accounts for bot operators and small playerpool), the NJ and Nevada sites.
And this is only the botting problem, we all know that a lot of in-game assistance and pseudo-GTO software is being used as well.
(not only since the latest Ben86 revelations).
Finally, I admit that Pastafiore´s posts are hard to read sometimes due to his poor af English skills (mine are probably not much better
), but at least he is working towards cleaner games at Pokerstars. Of course his detection methods are not state-of-the-art and produce a lot of false positives, but the general intention is good.
The behavior of some thread regs like AlexKP is simply disgusting and they should rather support Pastafiore in his efforts.
I´m also 99% sure that botting (and maybe collusion) is still going on at the Stars midstakes and instead of ridiculing him for his efforts everyone interested in playing PLO in the future should support him.
Either by investigating own databases or by at least not ridiculing his efforts.
In my opinion Pastafiore should investigate the accounts who fold 80 % of their Big Blinds and open too much from EP, because we all know that it is basically impossible to win with a playing style like this in Zoom200/500 these days unless you really are informed about the holecards of the other players.
Finally, Chicongo Joey & Codecci are obviously right, the owners of the previously discovered accounts were printing money.
Of course they are continuing their business and are probably also going about it in a smarter way this time (different stats between bot accounts, maybe not as excessive playing hours, some random chat ...).