TL;DR
Found suspicious play; investigated; reported; automated play confirmed; bots banned; players get a refund.
Also: Botting is a massive deal, and for some reason this is not talked about much at all.
Prelude
Ever since the 2011 bot ban on Ongame (They were $500k pre-rb winners), We've been working to identify and report bots.
In almost all cases the sites don't discuss any of this publicly. They do not even answer emails on the subject. Ongame never made any statement about this in 2011, but the accounts disappeared.
Things went similarly on Party and iPoker in the past years. Reported bots, no response, accounts disappear. Despite iPoker working together with PokerStrategy employees, the last PokerStrategy news on bots I know of on iPoker dates back to 2011. And on Stars: they have a pretty solid bot investigation unit afaik, but in the most recent player meetings, which are non-public, this subject was not on the agenda.
Why does no poker room talk about the huge bot problem?
My best guess is the bot topic is a big publicity no-go.
Microgaming 2015
To my delight, Microgaming seems a bit more open on the subject.
When a friend of mine first suspected bots on Micro this year and we went over some evidence, I contacted Alex Scott, Head of Microgaming Poker. He responded quickly and I was assured I was talking the right man.
By chance I briefly met Alex in person in January, shortly thereafter I emailed him our list of players and a few points on how we identified the bots. They took the issue very seriously, and after only a few days this is the result:
Alex Scott: Head of Microgaming Poker. 20.Feb.2015
The investigation process is about 75% complete. We have confirmed that some of the accounts in your list (not all) have indeed been operated by bots. As you noted yourself, some of the accounts have the same playing style, and we have also identified other factors that make us certain that these accounts were not operated by humans.
We have already locked and banned the accounts in question.
Here is what we are going to do next:
- We are going to confiscate the funds remaining in the accounts.
- We are going to determine who was negatively affected by playing against the bots (i.e. who had a net loss against them). For each of these players, we will determine a fair compensation amount. We will then give this money to their poker room, who will credit them with the appropriate amount and write to them with an explanation.
- We will allow anybody who had a net win against the bots to keep their winnings.We are going to investigate why we did not identify these automated players proactively, and improve our tools so that we don’t miss this again in the future.
I hope you agree that this is a fair way for us to proceed.
Because the number of hands played by the accounts in question is quite large, these next steps will take some time, so we appreciate your patience in the meantime.
Best Regards,
Alex Scott, Head of Poker
Alex blogs here and tweets occasionally, show him some support
So:
If you have an account on Microgaming (Betsafe, Betsson, Triobet, ...) that was active in the past few months, you may be receiving a refund payment in the next few days.
bots busted
Online Botting
This is great news. But everybody needs to understand that the doom of online poker through bots is full underway, this can't be pushed under the rug. Snowie is getting stronger as you are reading this. And the Russian programmers don't sleep much either, I heard.
The shadow figure of how many bots there are currently playing online may be well into the thousands. FL HU is solved. CAP and SNGs are reasonably close to solved. 100bb NL is not close to solved, yet bots are crushing. If you believe there are no bots in your games, think again.
For this reason we need to demand the sites to provide easy bot reporting facilities, and outspokenness of sites about anti-bot measures.
Condemning data-mining and anonymous tables are not the correct policies when bot detection relies players reporting things.
