The issue of bots - automated accounts playing online poker - made headlines again this week, with a Bloomberg article on Friday exploring the operation of a Russian bot farm.
It’s not the first time this year that this issue has been thrust into the spotlight, following the incident of suspected bots running deep in ACR Poker’s $12.5M GTD Venom tournament in April.
Credit for outing those bots went to pro player and coach Vojtech Cervinka, under the X account MTT Database Review. Cervinka’s work as a coach often involves the analysis of large amounts of player data in order to help his clients plug leaks in their game, and it’s this familiarity with using data in this way that has made him so adept at identifying, tracking, and reporting the bots.
MTT Database Review recently posted an update that not only flagged a number of suspected bots still active on ACR Poker but also several potential ‘false positives’ - seemingly legit players banned as alleged bots. In reviewing their hand histories, Cervinka found they played the same style on various different platforms but had not been banned elsewhere.
PokerOrg caught up with Cervinka to explore this development, as well as his ongoing work to expose bots in online poker.
What is your personal theory on why ACR Poker seemingly has a bigger issue with bots than other major sites?
I’d say a combination of how easy it is to make an account, lack of regulations, and bot detection just not being a top priority, but it is tough to know from the outside.
ACR is still a huge company that is, as far as I know, owned by another company. So maybe CEO Phil Nagy really wants to give millions of USD refunds and spend money on game integrity, but he doesn’t have the authority to do so. I don’t know.
But it is not only ACR Poker. There are some MTT bots on GGPoker playing exactly the same style as the ACR bots (although, as far as I know, there are not as many of them on GGPoker).
In your recent post you point out that players are having their accounts closed despite no evidence of bot usage/rule infringement – do you think ACR Poker is banning winning players?
I don’t think so. In my view they are just desperately trying to do something, but due to not having the necessary experience they end up with false positives.
Also, as I mentioned in the post, there is no way for me to know for sure that the players in question didn’t somehow cheat, but it is very suspicious that they play the same style on several sites like PokerStars (which is known to have pretty high security standards) and only get banned on ACR, without any detailed reason for the ban.
In a reply to your recent post, a user claims to have reported the top-earning bot “near instantly,” but it remained in use – do you think that’s a result of ACR Poker being unable to prove malfeasance, or something more sinister/suspicious?
I am pretty confident it is all just incompetence and not anything sinister. I see a lot of people who think this is some inside job, with house bots… I really don’t think so.
Just take the $100k bot challenge: that would make zero sense if they were operating bots or willingly letting them play. The only reason to announce something so incredibly stupid is if you are completely clueless about the situation. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.
After the incident in the Venom earlier this year, does ACR Poker act instantly if you report new bots to them?
For some time it seemed they did, although the last names I reported took them 10 days and me tweeting it again until they banned them from playing. Hopefully they at least locked their cashier sooner than that.
Why do you think they take so long to ban accounts you are certain are bots? They should have a lot of internal data to be able to investigate those reported players.
It’s either a low priority, or they’re just not able to verify it properly. While they obviously have many times more data to work with than I do, they lack the knowledge to work with it effectively.
I’ve done database reviews for hundreds of tournament players, from micro-stakes to high-stakes crushers, stables, different fields… I’ve seen many different styles of play and I have thousands of custom-filtered stats to find all kinds of leaks - which happens to also be the best way to identify bots (at least, relatively simple bots, which I consider these to be).
You can’t just get a bunch of people who have some experience with data or IT, offer them an average-salary office job and expect they will detect bots that are beating online poker to keep your site safe. You need professional poker players/coaches.
Why is it that the bots can seemingly fly under the radar in the $5-$215 buy-in range events?
Those are the stakes they usually play; higher is too tough. Venoms are an exception because of the Beast satellites, where you can get free $95 tickets from Sit & Go (SNG) or cash game leaderboards (there are cash game and Jackpot SNG bots too).
Previous to the $12.5M GTD Venom in April, ACR Poker was very slow with acting, even after obtaining a list of bot names. But having bots in Day 2 of their largest tournament to date was clearly a big deal, so they started banning them instantly, mid-tournament. I think from the bot ring’s perspective it is better to not bother, even if you have a free ticket to a Venom satellite. I didn’t see any bots in the last Venom.
You mentioned cash game and Sit & Go bots on ACR too. How bad is it?
Yes, there have been many reported cash game bots on ACR; I don’t play or coach cash games myself, and only did limited research to confirm findings of other guys like TyleRM who posts it on 2+2 forum. I think it is getting better compared to the beginning of the year, but to my knowledge there are still some cash game bots playing.
As for Sit & Go bots, that is a bit unknown, but there were (and potentially still are) bots playing massive amounts of Jackpot SNGs. It is hard to investigate directly, as this is something I have never played myself, and I couldn’t even find any stables (maybe stables are aware it is not beatable, so they play on other sites?) or high volume regs who would share their experience and hand histories with me.
The only reason I know is that at some point the bot ring decided to switch some of them to MTTs, where I detected them very quickly. And then, looking at their Sharkscope, you would see an account with, for example, 25,000 games played. 100-200 would be MTTs from the last few months, and then around 25,000 Jackpot SNGs. I have no way of directly detecting them in those SNGs unless I get access to data directly from ACR, so I’d recommend everyone avoid this format for now.
Are your lines of direct communication with ACR Poker still open? Have they given you any insight into their security process regarding bots/bad actors, or why seemingly normal players are getting banned for no apparent reason?
I send bot names directly to them, but as an outside person, I don’t really get much insight into what they do. I asked about the player bans, they said they will look into it but can’t discuss any details with me. As far as I know, the players I asked about are still banned.
