Following the news earlier this week that a suspected bot had climbed to the top of the chip counts in ACR Poker’s $12.5m GTD Venom tournament, the site took action against the account and others by blocking their player privileges and blinding their stacks away.
But the news seemingly only came to light thanks to hard work put in behind the scenes by Vojtech Cervinka, the player and coach behind the X account ‘MTT Database Review’. His post quickly went viral and directly led to the ban wave seen at ACR this week.
In a follow-up tweet, Cervinka said, "It is not just the 4 bots in Venom, but it looks like around further 50 MTT bots (usually playing $5-$215 stakes) which I reported are banned now. MTT streets look pretty clean today."
We talked to Cervinka about this week’s revelations and future plans to keep fighting the bots.
How long ago did you contact ACR?
Vojtech Cervinka: I started looking into it pretty soon after ‘TylerM’ made the 2+2 thread about it. I messaged Phil Nagy in early January to offer him my help if they needed it (based on having experience coaching hundreds of players by analysing their stats). I soon joined the HS regs Discord where we have communication with site reps and started posting there. In February I was already sending them a list of new bots I had found.
What was their response to your work?
VC: Mostly ‘We will look into it’. To be clear there definitely were some ban waves based on my findings and findings of other players like Tyler. But it was very slow and some of the reported accounts kept playing.
For example ‘ipilinno’, which I reported while it was maybe up $22k, but stopped playing (assuming banned) with $50k profit. I am guessing some of the accounts managed to pass the security protocols and ACR just doesn't have a robust enough system to analyze play style in great detail to catch bot tendencies.
Were you surprised when they acted in the middle of Venom?
VC: Not that much. It is their largest guarantee ever, so letting a bot potentially reach a final table would be a PR disaster. I imagine alarm bells were going off in the office and they had to act fast.
Have they thanked you since or made any move to collaborate in the future?
VC: They did say they appreciate the work and I am now in direct communication with a representative from ACR who takes my input very seriously. The average time between me reporting a bot and the bot being banned essentially went from one-to-two months to one hour.
They very clearly want to work together in the future, but there isn't any sort of specific deal in place yet. I also had a long call with ACR’s Head of Security and we discussed ways to better detect the bots.
So you have been basically doing their security for them for free?
VC: So far, yes.
What do you think this says about their stated aim to properly act against bots on their site?
VC: Which statement exactly? The one from April, 2019? Well clearly there seems to be a big shift in their approach in recent days. If they continue it is going to be really good news for the poker community. And I believe that in the long term their bottom line will massively profit too.
In the end the $12.5m GTD Venom was won by high-stakes crusher Dominik Nitsche - check out the story of his win here. You can follow MTT Database Review on X.
