i think its too early to state "there are no bots at stars". only thing i can tell is that the bots we are talking about in these threads are not playing on stars.
not sure about the situation in stars' cap games, mtts and sngs

ya def way too early to say that stars has no bots. in fact the smart money would bet that there are plenty of winning bots on stars (just like every other site)

I think there's a good chance that this is the only botting group that is a real threat correct? I have no idea what goes into programming a bot, but I'm guessing it took this group a substantial amount of time to get to this point.

If the sites put a high priority on stopping this and if there are strict penalties through possible future regulation, the risk reward probably won't be as enticing for other people to start developing their own bots. Worse case scenario is this group decides to release their software publicly. Agree?

well, i sent the mail. Although i didn't really notice 70 bots on PP, i play NL400-1k on a daily basis on party and when the bot scandal on ongame became public i started to pay more attention at the tables to see if i could find someone that could be a bot. I tought on 2, 3 max, didn't think it could be so much. Thanks a lot for all work u put into this research.

Regs can change their screename periodically on PP, so it will be far less than 70 different ID's.

Most of the accounts have been active for many months.

haha, as was pointed out - your grammar is awful.

i admire botters the same way i admire bank robbers. the sheer difficulty of even doing a good table map let alone setting up multitabling, hoppers, interacting with a pt3/hem db, good stealth and collusion (i assume if they raked in $3 mil they had some collusion going too) is the reason why every website isn't populated mostly by bots.

personally i play hu sngs and i'd relish the chance to get in serious volume vs a bot. i pray bots sit me.

yeah your really an idiot

ah.. now i see this as a huge problem.

Interesting, thanks for the info. The botters missed a trick there then....

These bots would crush you.

sounds reasonable

I have spoken with Horse over the past few weeks and e-mailed party in regards to this matter. Party has been pretty slow to react and this type of pressure can't hurt to motivate Party to do something.

Thanks to Horse for taking the lead and compiling information on this. I have played with these bots at 2/4 - 5/10 for hundreds of hours and now believe that these players are cheating in some fashion, whether they are 100% computer controlled or are using humans to enter moves from a computer program.

Email sent. Partybots are effectively the same as ongamebots. Stats etc. Small variations but nothing which would have any major impact to overall strategies.

Just want to say thx horse for taking the time as well as other ppl who have worked on this. It is very an extremely important issue. Also, I really feel these threads should be more aggressively modded as a lot of people w/ no idea about the situation clutter them up w/ the stupidest posts.

email sent. thanks horse and anyone that helped him for all of your hardwork. hoping with some pressure we can get them to take steps to stop these bots and provide safeguards from bots in the future.

Good job Horse. Wouldnt it be a good idea if you out all these nick names now when party already are investigating them?

The above statement is 100% INCORRECT. if we all think its $3m then it is at least $10m if not more... As Jude stated online poker cash is dead/will die very very quickly without IMMEDIATE action...

so so sad this...

i have played this bot a lot, it is really good and hard to play against. often you get outplayed by it. i am up at the tables when playing with the bots but the bots are up against me. a lot is variance, but some of the hands has been the bots taking me to valuetown.

the number of unknown bots are likely much higher than the number of known bots.

it's scary seeing how much the volume on the sites drops when sites takes action or when they update their client. avg players to flop at lowstakes skyrockets after client changes.


just imagine how many hands played bots there are which are not that easy to detect.

if the bots won $10m, they also won $1m, and they also won $3.50

I can "prove" $2m winnings, so Id estimate $3m is a fair lower bound.

I looked into them on party, ongame and merge. Over the past 4 months I found 1.04mil hands played by them, and they won 400K pre rakeback. Counting other Euro sites it's possible that their are more then 200 accounts, playing 500Kish hands a month, and these bots were first reported almost 2 years ago. I'm not sure if anyone has looked into them and found the date that the first of these accounts appeared, it might be interesting. When did PTR start tracking Ipoker?

Haven't been around in 2+2 for a while. Didn't realize it was getting this bad.

I'm not well-versed in programming techniques, but has anyone got an idea how current bots gather information from poker clients? Read an article a year or two ago written by someone who had developed FL bot. AFAIK primitive methods were reading information from screen and smarter ones involved injecting a DLL to gather data straight from poker client. Does anyone know if there's a way to prevent this? If screen scraping is still used, then maybe changing outlook of poker client every two weeks would help. Although this is a huge hassle for the sites. And I figure sites don't even care who are playing - as long as the games run.

Browsed pokerai.org for a bit and it seems like there are people developing algorithms for detecting patterns in timing for different WTSD/W$SD values. HEM2 and its support for timing tells isn't really helping. I mean, who has the time to look all that data in a fuss while multitabling when a bot is capable of crunching that information in nanoseconds.

I'm all for the dumping hand histories in it's current form. Let sites provide session won/lost data for personal tracking purposes, but other HH data - fk dat. We'd get rid of PokerTableRatings aswell which would be good.

Yep, I can't think of any other solutions.

+1 even tho I´m a HEM nerd

If you dump the HH data/HEM then the bots become virtually undetectable. And whoever's programming them will hack together hand histories and create them themselves in some form so they'll be even more ahead of the curve.