Rise Of The Poker Bots At PokerStars' High Stakes Cash Games
July 20, 2010 8:03 amTen accounts at the world’s biggest online poker site PokerStars, have been frozen after it was determined they were, in fact, computer programs otherwise known as poker bots.
Suspicion was first cast on the accounts by 2+2 poker forum member “malloc” on 13/7/10 who, despite breaking the Terms Of Condition of PokerStars by looking at other player’s statistics on PokerTableRatings, noted three players with remarkably similar patterns. As he mentioned in the thread:
“All of them starting playing at 200nl, played similar numbers of hands at similar winrates (if breakeven is a winrate). They all moved DOWN to 100nl within a 3 day window and repeated the pattern. They then moved DOWN again to 50nl and continue.”
Initially, other members speculated that it was impossible for bots to beat the NL game at those high levels, and that they could possibly be short-stackers or simply players colluding with each other.
However, after launching an investigation PokerStars have concluded that at least 10 accounts had played around eight million hands with such similarity in their statistics that they could only be the work of bots.
All in all, the 10 accounts managed to generate around $187,000 in rake and turn a $57,000 profit, showing that bots had indeed been beating their human counterparts at the higher stakes games.
The 10 accounts frozen are 7emenov; bakabar; craizer; mvra; nakseon; kozzin; demidou; koldan; Daergy; feidmanis.
Commenting on the issue, a PokerStars spokesman said:
“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.”