Online poker site QQPK has banned 893 accounts following a major cheating investigation, but bot hunter Vojtech Cervinka claims the problem could be much bigger.
In a post on his MTT Database Review account on X, Cervinka published a list of 11,469 nicknames that he said he was “virtually certain” were bots.
In an investigation that he conducted between July 16 and October 11, Cervinka looked at 24 million player-hands across 3.78 million hand histories.
He claims that “roughly 17.5M of those hands (over 70%) were played by bots.”
Cervinka believes the problem could be even bigger than that. He said, “I believe there are at least several hundred additional suspicious nicknames for which my database does not contain enough hands to make a high-confidence classification.”
Big Daddy Bot
Cervinka also pointed out that the list of nicknames showed evidence of mass generation, “with hundreds of accounts following the same naming templates.”
One account was singled out by Cervinka – 郑鱼F (which roughly translates to 'Zheng Fish F') – who dubbed it 'Big Daddy Bot' because of its extraordinary volume. Cervinka claims the account played 153,000 hands in his database, compared to just 5,000 for the next most active suspected account.
The account's SharkScope profile also showed 8,329 tournaments played in just 33 days – an average of more than 250 tournaments a day.
The PokerStars comparison
To test his findings, Cervinka says he applied the exact same detection filters to a PokerStars MTT database and found no players that showed signs of being bots.
He said the same was true when he loosened the criteria on PokerStars. Relaxing them even further identified “just three random fish.”
It paints PokerStars in a very good light, although it’s not proof in itself that there are zero bots running on the site.
QQPK bans 893 accounts
QQPK, also known as QQPoker, is an online poker platform primarily targeting Asia and particularly China. It lists high-stakes regulars Danny Tang and Punnat Punsri as ambassadors.
It hasn’t ignored the issue of cheating.
Cervinka first went public with his claim that he’d found “thousands” of bots playing on the site on October 11.
On October 13, the QQPK X account announced that 724 accounts had been banned “following community reports.”
On October 15, it published an investigation into what it called a “collusive cheating syndicate.” It confirmed that multiple accounts had been sitting at the same tables and sharing hole card information to gain an unfair advantage.
QQPK said it had banned 893 accounts and set aside $300,000 as compensation for affected players. Just $64,627 of this came from the banned accounts, with QQPK contributing the remainder.
Of the banned accounts, 567 were identified in the original external investigation, while another 326 were uncovered by QQPK's own security team. A further 2,020 accounts remain under review.
It has promised to publish details of the affected tournaments, accounts and compensation payments by October 17, with funds subsequently credited directly to players.
The operator admitted that its security systems had failed to identify the activity sooner and said, “We sincerely apologize to our players for our risk control system's failure to detect this novel cheating method earlier."
QQPK maintained that its underlying random number generator (RNG) was “objective and fair.” It also announced an 'Integrity Bounty' for the researchers who helped uncover the cheating and invited them to act as external risk advisers.
Cervinka had an immediate response: “How much is the integrity bounty paying for each bot? Because I just posted a list of over 11 thousand bots. Slightly more than your 893.”
It remains unclear how many of those accounts overlap with the ones already investigated by QQPK.
Who is Vojtech Cervinka?
Cervinka has a successful history of uncovering bots on online poker sites.
Back in 2024, he helped expose a bot account on ACR Poker that was leading the chip counts in its flagship $12.5 million guaranteed Venom tournament. ACR Poker banned the account and others shortly afterward.
At the time, Cervinka told PokerOrg that ACR Poker appreciated his work and had become more responsive.
“The average time between me reporting a bot and the bot being banned essentially went from one-to-two months to one hour.”
CoinPoker ambassador Patrick Leonard responded to Cervinka's findings, writing, “This guy is a sharp guy. He says it’s not 724 bots but in fact 12,000. Interesting.”
Leonard also praised QQPK for publicly addressing the cheating allegations and taking action.
“Regardless of anything else this is really really good. The industry is still waiting for some sites to post about one player whilst in less than a week a much smaller site posts this. Really good. Hold the sites you play on to these standards on bots/superusers.”
But Cervinka's latest allegations raise a much bigger question: How many bots could still be playing on the site?
PokerOrg has reached out to QQPK for comment.
