PokerStars Cracks Down on Poker Bots

The world’s largest online poker room PokerStars.net, has seized numerous poker accounts after uncovering a massive bot cheating scandal.

Suspicions of the accounts first came about last Tuesday, when a Two Plus Two forum member by the name of “malloc,” noted similarities in the play patterns of three players at PokerStars.net. In addition to that, malloc observed that the players repeatedly wagered the same stakes and moved down after almost the same number of hands in a short time span.

Reactions from the poker community were mixed at first. Some players sought other explanations for the similarities in play, while others immediately believed they were bots.

However, shortly after the allegations were brought to the forefront PokerTableRankings.com (PTR), a site which records the results of numerous online poker players and offers tools that allow customers to track their opponent’s play record list, listed the statistics of the supposed bots. PTR also published an extensive report showing, “overwhelming evidence” that ten accounts on PokerStars were, in fact, bots.

This prompted PokerStars to begin a massive investigation into the scandal, which concluded that 10 accounts had played around eight million hands with such resemblance in their statistics that they were undoubtedly poker bots.

The poker bots managed to pulled in more than $187K in rake and turn a $57K profit.

The 10 accounts seized are 7emenov, bakabar, crazier, mvra, nakseon, kozzin,  demidou, koldan, Daergy, and feidmanis.

A PokerStars spokesman said the following about the incident:

“Finally, to address why these players played for a relatively extended period without detection, we can say that upon conclusion of this review that the bots were fairly sophisticated in certain aspects, including their human behaviour modeling and their stealth capabilities.”

The spokesman also noted that while PokerStars’ system for detecting poker bots is very effective it is not perfect.

Full House B says: Sadly, the poker bots were obviously beating their human opponents. Those behind the scandal should be forced to pay back every penny they stole along with face jail time.  They’re disgraceful.