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Poker-Bots: The Call Is Now Coming From Inside The House
March 2011: Bots Discovered on Pokerstars
Before he was writing about the surveillance method of the NSA or breaches of trust by Facebook and other big tech companies, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Gabriel Dance penned a New York Times article about bots invading the world of online poker. It was March 2011 when he was approached by online poker player Bryan Taylor who had spotted strange betting patterns by his opponents and became suspicious that he was competing against robots.
Taylor shared his concerns with Pokerstars who investigated the allegation and found that his opponents had indeed been computers masquerading as people. The site shut them down but it was a warning shot to operators that poker bots had evolved to the point that they were capable of beating competent human players.
When interviewed by Dance at the time, then Pokerstars security manager Michael Josem explained that his team were very aware of the threat and were investing “substantial resources to combat bots”, adding that when a player is identified as a bot, “PokerStars removes them from our games as soon as possible, confiscates their winnings and provides compensation to players when appropriate.”
The Emergence of Bots in Online Poker
Dance kept digging, although it didn’t take much elbow grease to make his next discovery. Holdem Poker Bots were available to be licensed online and a company called Shanky Technologies was shamelessly advertising them for the knockdown price of $129 per year. Dance reached out to the company’s co-founder Brian Jetter who expressed a tendentious opinion.
“Using a poker bot is in fact a natural extension of the game of online poker”, Jetter said, via email, claiming that some of his customers used bots for ‘intellectual exercises’, programming them to deploy different decision-making strategies in different circumstances to investigate optimal lines versus the population. The ethical implications of cheating in this manner seemed lost on him as was the degree to which it was against the terms of service of the online poker sites.
Jetter boasted to Dance that Shanky Technologies had sold 5,000 copies of its bot software since it was in introduced in 2008 and then, in a bizarrely braggadocious fashion, told him that over 400 of his customers had been banned by Full Tilt Poker and more than $50,000 had been seized from their accounts. Alluding the liquidity that those accounts had brought to the site, he made a prediction: “We don’t think [that] the other poker rooms we support will make a similar financial decision.” In fact, he claimed that many of them were happy to look the other way when bots are in action.
Ethical Implications of Using Poker Bots
This raised an interesting point and one which is even more salient today. Poker rooms are incentivised to appear to be stopping bots, to reassure the real players that they are trying to stop them but not to actually stop them. The bot accounts pay rake and provide liquidity. The only motivation for the sites to expel them is because human players don’t like to play against non-human opponents in poker.
It’s one thing to have the research hub at Carnegie Mellon University developing poker bots for the purposes of genuine intellectual curiousity as was the case with Claudicus in 2015, Libratus in 2017 and Pluribus in 2019. It’s quite another thing when this type of AI-driven technology becomes a commercially available product. The perception shared by the vast, vast majority of people who play the game is that in-game interference by machines disrupts the essence of poker.
Advances in AI and Bot Technology
In 2020, inspired by Maria Konnikova’s ‘The Biggest Bluff’, Vice columnist Hayden Vernon documented his own poker side quest, quickly realising that the standard of real money poker was a lot higher than the fun poker that he had experienced whilst playing the popular video game ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’. After some early setbacks, he turned to “more nefarious methods”, downloading a poker bot from BonusBots.com.
Vernon described the bots progress as steady as it grinded out a bit of profit in a low-stakes cash game on Bet365. When it went on its first downswing, he contacted the customer support team at BonusBots and a man named Egor informed him that the bot was better suited to tournaments. The intrepid reporter deployed the bot in a £1 tournament and much to his amusement, it won, banking him the princely sum of £220.
Vernon spent the rest of the article discussing poker’s regulatory environment and how it had effectively pushed online poker underground, playing into the hands of operators who have sought to circumvent those regulations. Poker apps and crypto-poker sites have continued to thrive whilst making little to no investment in game integrity and security.
If anything, the Shanky Technologies and BonusBots cases are rather quaint. No doubt these bad actors did material damage to the online poker playing ecology but in a world in which the financial incentives are huge, the serious offenders are not the companies who were being public and transparent about what they are offering. The Poker Bots and Real-Time Assistance (RTA) tools like push-button bots have gotten exponentially more sophisticated, capable of beating the majority of players.
The Rise of Botfarms: A Deeper Investigation
Back in 2019, casino owner and poker event organizer Rob Yong called on sites to sign up to the ‘FairPlay Initiative’, asking for a collaborative effort to stop bots and address other security issues. It was a nice idea in theory but getting rival poker sites to share data would have been problematic and almost certainly unfeasible with GDPR in the EU. The initiative never got off the ground and the problems it sought to address didn’t go away. The inexorable march of technology meant that they actually got significantly worse.
In September 2020, when German online gamer turned poker cheat Fedor Kruse hit the headlines for his use of a ‘dream-machine’ (a two-computer setup whereby he played on one while accessing pre-solved GTO solutions on the other), he said that the use of RTA in its various forms was widespread and insisted that ‘Russian Bot-farms’ were in the $5 SNG pool.
The BFC
Rumors had certainly been rampant on poker forums about the existence of Russian Botfarms but it wasn’t until some excellent investigative journalism from Kit Chellel for a recent Bloomberg article that the full story was pieced together and presented to the mainstream. His research led him to the city of Omsk in Siberia and a sophisticated operation known as the Bot Farm Corporation (BFC).
According to Chellel, BFC had a board of directors, training programs and a human relations department. It had come a long way from its gamer frat-house origins, scaling up its operation year on year, undergoing a merger of sorts, attracting external investors and striking a deal in 2012 with David Fairlamb, a former casino executive from Michigan, who helped them exploit their technology’s broad commercial potential under the name Neo Poker Lab.
At the Annual Computer Poker Competition in 2012 and 2013, the adapted Neo Poker Lab bot competed against, among others, an early bot designed by Carnegie Mellon. In 2013, it defeated the highly rated bot designed by the team at the University of Alberta. This was the period when game theory optimal (GTO) was entering the poker vernacular and the Neo Poker Lab bot was built with a default balanced strategy but also programmed to deviate exploitably when it recognised consistent leaks in the play of its opponents.
Allegations Against Americas Cardroom
The BFC crew turned the bot into a poker training product and Fairlamb built a company around it, persuading other American gambling executives to join him. The next year, the product won a startup award at the Global iGaming Summit and Expo in San Francisco. Chellel dug up an article from the time which claimed that Chris Moneymaker was an advisor to the Neo Poker Lab’s management team, something the 2003 World Series Of Poker Main Event champion denies. In any case, the company was wound down shortly after and the BFC returned to the shadows.
At the start of this year, I interviewed Moneymaker on The Chip Race podcast. It was in the midst of the Americas Cardroom (ACR) bot-ring scandal and the botched public relations response by the operator. Moneymaker became the face of ACR back in 2021 and there were serious questions to be answered regarding the site’s game integrity and security.
During a vigorous 30-minute back and forth, I made it very clear to Moneymaker my deep concerns when it comes to unregulated poker sites like ACR and all the poker apps that have sprung up in the past decade. He was sympathetic, particularly when it came to the difficulties with money-laundering, problem gambling and site security but he did argue that ACR were doing as much to combat these issues as many of the regulated sites.
The growing issue of real-time assistance was discussed in detail, as was mass data analysis and different forms of collusion. However, the majority of the conversation revolved around the other pressing subject of poker bots, the long-standing rumors about the existence of botfarms on ACR and the very specific accusations being leveled at the time.
TylerRM
On January 3rd 2024, forum user ‘TylerRM’ posted evidence of the suspicious behaviour of some ACR accounts on TwoPlusTwo. Providing a lot of data to back up his claims, his contention was that these accounts there were bots which seemed to “employ exploitative tactics” before being retired after approximately 3 months to be replaced by more evolved bots which were modified for subtle changes in the meta-game.
TylerRM went on to say that the issue is not exclusive to ACR, pointing to Ignition and GGPoker as two sites which he believed had also been infiltrated and compromised. To those sites, he offered a warning to poker operators everywhere: “If any room management believes that regular players can be replaced by machines – you are mistaken. In such a scenario, the game would inevitably dwindle or even cease to exist, reaching an untenable scale.”
Wise words from the whistleblower but far from heeding them, it appears now that some operators are not just dealing with an infestation of bots on their sites but that the source of those bots is, in some instances, the operator themselves. Evidence for this was supplied in a recent article by poker writer and industry veteran Jonathan Raab who was independently investigating BFC and its links to poker operators for months.
Raab Followed the Breadcrumb Trail
Back in April, I met Raab in a cafe in Malta where he shared his findings with me. There were so many disparate parts and so much detail in what he was researching but he did a very good job in threading a through-line to paint me a picture of his discoveries. To say that Raab was agitated would be an understatement. He is an esteemed member of the poker community, a man who loves and cares about the game, and it was obvious from the outset that he was disturbed by the scandal that he was unearthing.
Consistent with what ended up in Chellel’s article, Raab explained to me the origins of BFC with the only difference being that his narrative weaved backwards through time. He was following the breadcrumb trail, each time uncovering a piece of information that begot a previous mystery. The first crumb emanated from a simple online poker room review that he was tasked to do as part of his new job as editor at the affiliate site PokerWired.
The poker room was Jack Poker, a site with which Raab was not familiar so he made an account and played on the site for a few weeks to get the feel for the software, user interface and various poker offerings. It’s fair to say that Jack Poker found ways to stand out from the crowd, offering very large deposit bonuses, which included ‘Instant Cash’ that could be immediately used in cash games. There were a large number of active players, 1500-2000 at any one time across the different formats. Yet despite that, there were lots of overlays and seemingly no efforts being made by the site to manage them.
Jack Poker’s ‘Nuclear 4s’ Series Main Event
These three data points in combination raised Raab’s suspicions but it was during Jack Poker’s ‘Nuclear 4s’ series main event when his brow really furrowed. The tournament had a $40 buy-in and a $44,000 guarantee, an impossible ask in his opinion. About thirty minutes before the tournament began, he was the only player registered. With ten minutes to go, he was still the only name in the lobby. A few players started trickling in and by the time virtual cards were in the air, 30 players had taken their virtual seats.
What happened next was ‘jaw-dropping’ according to Raab. The number of entries had quadrupled in the space of just ten minutes. An early bad beat sent him to the rail but not before he witnessed plenty of weird plays from his opponents. After busting, he kept a close eye on the lobby, observing a very consistent pattern of ten new entries every minute. By the end of late registration, there were over 1400 players in the tournament and the only explanation that Raab could muster was that the site was absolutely teeming with in-house bots.
Keen to better understand exactly what he witnessed, Raab’s cyber-sleuthing began with a TwoPlusTwo forum thread about BFC which in turn led to an epic 92-page thread on the Russian poker forum GypsyTeam. On page 91, he found a post which specifically named BFC as the owner of Jack Poker. If that was true, then it would corroborate the in-house bot theory.
Fake It Till You Make It
So what became of the BFC after their break with Neo Poker Lab in 2015? Well Chellel tracked down some of its original staff who said that their team did not go quietly into the night. Rather, they got busy, developing new product lines, including ‘off-the-shelf’ bots which were sold to private individuals. BFC also had the temerity to diversify for a time into the world of ‘bot detection services’ which they offered to online poker operators.
BFC is now a wide-reaching organisation with subsidiary companies all over the world, including one in the USA called ‘Neo Poker Bot’. As Chellel probed further, he discovered that BFC had actually approached some online poker operators, offering them ‘liquidity bots’ that make it look like there is substantial human traffic on their site.
The Strategy Behind the Bots
The grift goes like this: Players are fooled into thinking that a site is a vibrant place with juicy prize-pools and the prospect of overlays where, in fact, they are being pitted against bots, versus whom they have no chance. The cynicism doesn’t stop there. The bots are actually tailored to a player’s skill level, which BFC unironically says is ‘better’ because the bespoke experience encourages re-deposits.
In reality, poker becomes a calibrated, simulated affair for anyone who logs on. Also, to ensure that the site extracts the maximum from losing players without sharing any of it with poker professionals, BFC deploys stronger bots as needed to outplay and demoralise the would-be winning players.
The objective of this ‘fake it til you make it’ approach is three-fold. The site gains future equity from the appearance of being a thriving place for poker action. It benefits from the rake paid by an influx of players who are attracted to what seems like a good proposition. The site also benefits from bot profits. Within this model, playing poker is no different to playing slots or other casino games which are rigged in favour of the house.
More Breadcrumbs
Raab rightly paid tribute to the investigative journalism of Chellel but his own article actually joined the dots more clearly between BFC and its current role in the industry. He showed how the content on former websites of the BFC has been scrubbed from the internet but could still be found using the Wayback Machine (WBM). He was also able to substantiate the abiding rumours propagated on TwoPlusTwo and GypsyTeam forums which connected the Neo Poker Lab website to the Neo Poker Bot website.
Raab kept following the trail and kept finding more breadcrumbs. The author of the ‘page 91 post’ which specifically named BFC as the owner of Jack Poker claimed to have extracted this info from a page on Deeplay’s internal website. The front page of that website was transparent about its in-house liquidity bot business. Its mission statement read:
“We develop robot animators for intelligent card games: poker, bridge, mahjong, preference. Animators create activity on the game platform, attracting users. The goal of deeplay is to create a comfortable environment for players. Robots apply different strategies and characters to maintain a balance of power. Amateurs are less likely to lose to experienced users, enjoy the process and stay in the game longer.”
Making Connections
Could Raab link Deeplay to existing operators? To do so would be a truly groundbreaking discovery. He googled “deeplay jack poker” and on page two of the results, found what was apparently an open staging server for Jack Poker’s website and testing environment.
Using various free web tools, Raab discovered a subdomain tracking site, on which several scans of Deeplay’s website were found. These revealed URLs of subdomains bearing the names not just of Jack Poker, of which there were many, but also several other online poker sites and apps. In total, eight other operators were mentioned – Pokersaint, Wepoker, Full House Crypto, hhclub, infinity poker, ppp poker and the significantly better known ClubGG and Poker Bros. More recent scans actually show a significant increase in URLs relating to all of these sites.
Raab finally had enough to publish his findings, which included the more than curious wrinkle that there were also significant links between Jack Poker and PokerWired, the company for whom he was editor. The owner of PokerWired actually owned the JackPoker dot com URL, a conflict for which Raab could not stand and so he resigned his position. For the second time, it seemed as if the call was coming from inside the house.
BFC is Rinsing the Last Drop of Value Out of Poker
In defense of ‘the wizards’ who were changing the poker landscape around him, Phil Laak once told me that the creation and adoption of poker software was simply “the natural inevitable evolution of information”. It was 2017 and he was stoical about how the game had transformed and would continue to metamorphose. Reasonable people always come to terms with how technology disrupts the status quo but they also figure out ways to hold onto to fundamental values in a shifting environment.
One core principle we have in poker is ‘don’t cheat’. Fair play is the basis for every game, even one which emphasises deception. Another precept, which is also poker’s unique selling point is that ‘a game needs to theoretically beatable’. With just a modicum of ability, anyone could run well in the short term and a skilled player can overcome the rake and registration fees paid to book a profit over the long term.
A cheater using a bot corrupts the integrity of the game that they are in. A bot-ring being deployed on a site corrupts the integrity of that site’s ecosystem. A site flooded with in-house bots corrupts the very nature of poker. The game is no longer the game.
At every juncture, BFC has unscrupulously sought ways to line its own pockets, tooling and retooling its primary product for the highest bidder, playing all sides of the industry. It has cheated, facilitated cheaters and aided security teams who catch cheaters. It has helped honest players improve by designing cutting edge training products and now it is rinsing its last drop of value out of poker by flooding sites with liquidity bots that target those honest players.
Can Players Trust a RNG?
How can players possibly trust the Random Number Generator (RNG) of a site that is so committed to turning poker into a non-social, algorithmic experience which can be tweaked by the silicon overlord to manipulate our endorphins? Confidence gets quickly eroded when the only winner is the house.
BFC has spent years slipping lead into boxing gloves and now, under the laughable guise of helping to balance the game of poker by giving recreational players a better experience, it threatens the entire industry with lead poisoning.
With this new existential threat to the game, players need to be extra vigilant going forward. We need to vote with our feet if we suspect any subterfuge. We need to be wary of those sites that Raab listed and we need to be watchful for the telltale signs that he described.
Since publishing his article, Raab has received word that two poker affiliate sites are ending their affiliate relationships with Jack Poker. He hopes that live poker event operators who are promoting the brand will follow suit. If an online poker site has engaged BFC for analytics or bot detection services, perhaps it can come clean now and claim plausible deniability but any site that has secretly deployed bots against its users can never be trusted.
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