Peter Falconer found a way to beat the bots on Ignition Poker, and it earned him a swift ban from the online poker room with no explanation or recourse.
Falconer sat down with PokerOrg to tell the story that started in early February when he joined the training site NachosPoker. The goal was to leverage the group's data to exploit the growing number of bots on the site.
"Playing and studying was pretty much all I did for the next two and a half months, from late February until April 30," Falconer tells us. "I think I won just under $51,000 in April alone."
Falconer took the weekend at the end of April to celebrate. But then he checked his emails and saw that his account had been locked for a security review.
Ignition asked for a series of documents from Falconer, all of which he says he returned within the hour. It was a standard request: his passport, a photo, and other address verification. He heard back a short time later with a request for more address documents and he passed them along. Falconer did not hear from Ignition again for some time.
On July 3, exactly two months after the original suspension, Falconer received an email that said his account was re-enabled.
"I probably woke up the neighbors with how loud I screamed," Falconer says. "It was a pretty long two months. I logged back in immediately and withdrew as much as I could, which was around $10,000 Australian ($6,504 USD)."
Too good to be true
Falconer then tried to open some poker tables, but he couldn't. Instead, there was a message to contact customer support again.
He was asked to provide a security number, which he'd never heard of before. "I was talking to the customer service agent to reset my PIN for probably two or three hours," he says, "and then they told me my account was restricted. Bye. I can't play poker on Ignition anymore. I could play casino, but not poker."
Falconer pressed for an explanation and Ignition closed the live chat. He followed up with an email to customer service who confirmed his account was restricted, but with no further details.
"Ignition is the site I played 95% of my volume on," says Falconer. "It's one of the only sites I had access to, so it's a pretty big deal for me to lose it."
'It's not sustainable'
NachosPoker is a training site started by Patrick Gerritsen, who is known online as FreeNachos and is a columnist here at PokerOrg. The platform uses data from millions of hands to help develop winning strategies. Lately, they've taken a keen interest in bots.
"Peter has obviously done very well and has won a lot, and at the same time, I'm in a group of high-stakes players that are being led by Patrick Howard that is trying to get rid of these bots," Gerritsen tells us. "Realistically, this is not a sustainable ecosystem for us to operate in. We’re doing very well right now, but it's not sustainable."
Falconer joined the group in February as his frustration grew over the growing number of bots on the site.
"One of the reasons I joined Nachos was because I heard that they were starting to work on exploiting the bots," Falconer explains. "These bots are so obviously cheating, it makes them easy to identify."
The group has studied the data and developed ways to exploit the bots, who can't adjust on the fly because... they're not real people. They're coy on the details to prevent the bot engineers from catching up, but it's all in the data.
"What I can say is that the bots are doing very specific things," Gerritsen adds. "To give you a random example, they are leading textures that shouldn't have any leads, and they do it for very big sizes as well. They play a very unorthodox style."
Falconer explained another scenario.
"There was a line the bots used to always take where they would try to go multi-way with you. Two bots and you. And then, no matter what, they would get to the river together, so all three of you are together. And then they would try to sandwich you between raises to force you out of the pot. Some of us figured out that all you had to do was get into a pot with two bots, get to the river, and just never fold and you could very consistently win a lot of big blinds.
"And then it was posted on Twitter with a thread of about 20 of those hands. The very next day, that exploit was gone. I haven't seen it since."
The group is working together, farming the data and studying it for exploits, but they're clear that they are not colluding or cheating in any way.
"It's not like six guys are on the call while one guy is playing," Gerritsen says. "We are not colluding or trying to team play. What we are doing is studying together. And because we can share the information as a group, we are able to identify these exploits."
'Harder to justify that it's just incompetence'
For now, the ban sticks, and Falconer can't play on Ignition. He has received no response from the site since his account was restricted. "I've been banned, and I can show that I am not cheating in any way," he says. "I probably have days worth of footage of me playing that I offered to provide, but they just ignored that."
"They don’t do anything, and the bots are allowed to keep playing," Gerritsen adds. "And now, one of the legit players that is playing on the site, who is not cheating or using a VPN, isn't allowed to play poker anymore."
But is the ban a result of a less-than-competent approach to site security, or is it something more sinister?
"It becomes harder and harder to justify that it is just incompetence the longer they do nothing about the bots," Falconer says. However, as Falconer also said on the Only Friends podcast with Matt Berkey last week, it's more likely to be incompetence. The problem is that the level of incompetence you'd have to boast to ignore obvious bots and ban the one legitimate player is sky high.
"WPN [ACR Poker] had a similar scenario with similar bots, and they cleaned house," Gerritsen explains. "There's a group of high-stakes players that are informing the guys on WPN. They investigate, and the account gets banned if it's found to be a bot. But in this case, there's nothing. It's like the wild west out there and a legit player gets banned while the bots are still rampant."
Gerritsen thinks it should be relatively easy to mitigate the bot problem, considering other larger sites have taken the steps to do so.
"So it is incompetence, but at the very least, it's also an unwillingness to do anything about the problem. And then we can only speculate why."
Getting rid of the problem
Despite the profitable inside track on beating the system of bots, the group wants to help. They recognize that it's a short-term exploit and the sustainability of the site is more important.
"Within a day, Ignition would have all of the information that we have about how to identify bots," Falconer says. "We'd be able to help them, and it'd be such an easy problem to solve, at least in the short term. If this is just an issue that they're way out of their depth, we want to help, and we'll help for free."
"The vast majority of the money that a site like Ignition makes is from the casino and sports betting," Gerritsen adds. "So it might just be a matter of them being unwilling to set up a team that takes care of these things and just accepting the fact that this is the way the poker ecosystem is heading. Who knows? No one knows who the owners of these sites are."
The perfect outcome for Falconer?
"I would get my account back," he says, "and that would then lead to a mass ban of bots."
