Quote:
Originally Posted by ___1___
Is there any proof that would reasonably convince that the majority of the players on Bodog 10/20 and 30/60 are bots (house bots or otherwise)? Does that proof not exist almost by definition on an anonymous site?
Doug Polk offers four indicators of possible bot play:
1. The player takes about the same amount of time to act every hand.
2. The player doesn’t answer to moderator in the chat or to an alert.
3. The player plays for unreasonable amounts of time.
4. The player plays an unreasonable amount of tables.
Unfortunately, only the first indicator is something that a player on Ignition could be in a position to observe. There is no chat on Ignition (there may well be on Bodog, but I can't observe it from Ignition). There is no way to tell how long a player has been playing, unless you, too, have been playing with them for a long time at the same table. The software limits cash tables to four, so a single account can play in only four cash games at a time -- but I understand that tournament tables are not limited in this way. In any event, players have no way to determine how many tables another player is playing.
Ignition does have the feature that (twenty-four hours after the player leaves the cash game or after a tournament ends) they can download all the hand histories, complete with revealed hole cards of all the players, and examine them for sketchy play.
But the anonymity makes it impossible to identify a player in multiple sessions to see if their play is peculiarly consistent like a bot's would be.
So it will be
extremely difficult to prove if there are bots on Ignition and impossible to prove that there are not.
If the security team gives a ****, maybe they have the knowhow to look out for these things and other telltale signs of bot play. But the word on the street is that most grey market sites are far more concerned about money laundering than they are about botting or other cheating going on.
My own opinion about bots is that they make the games worse in pretty much the same way that multitabling regs with tracking software and HUDs make the game worse, and (except for never tilting) worrying about one and not the other seems a bit off to me. The fun players will lose to both and lose in just about the same degree.
It's collusion cheaters or superusers that pose a greater threat to the underlying integrity of the game. Collusion is as easy as having a phone call going with a buddy while playing.