Botfarm won $10 Million on WPN

ACR still silent on this after they canceld the bot challenge?

The two bots I have played against recently Vigmosta and CzechMatt are ABI $42 and $38 respectively.
I suspect they wouldn’t play much higher.

they actually released a statement about this immediately after cancelling the challenge

I would like to share a few thoughts on the issue from a regular cash player who has been playing in ACR for the last 5/6 years...

Until 2-3 years ago I never suspected I was playing against bots as I could match most of the other regs playing in my tables in other poker sites (I play in 4 other sites).

But a lot of russians accounts playing let say very weird (all were very agresive preflop, UTG loose or, lot of CC from late, very loose Farha range, mad barreling) appeared and I even reported a couple of them as I suspected I was cheated in a hand playing with them being on a sandwich.

A few months after that and I believe a year ago from now, ACR made tones of refunds (I was refunded for 400$ aprox) and banned like 300 accounts or more (both the accounts I reported from cheating were banned), so you know, even if it takes time you feel kind of safe becasue some justice was made.

From February of last year a lot of the accounts mentioned in the thread have been appearing, it shocked me that they not were only from old URSS countries but some of them are from South America or Central America (different gangs I guess). At first I was skeptical because I had to pass a security exam which consists in recording a live session of me playing recording my entire desk and explaining my gameplays for an hour; so you know, if they made me do this I assumed they would do the same to everybody but I´m not so sure anymore (it was 3-4 years ago).

It´s getting worse every day, there never stop appearing more and more suspicious accounts for the last year and it feels very unsafe to play due to possible card sharing between bots... Once you are in a bomb pot against them, How on Earth are you supposed to act? Knowing that 3-4-5 players might be sharing their holecards. One way to tagged them very easily at first was by country IP because if you cannot match them based on country and gameplay with other regs playing in other sites you got it, but with the Country IP hidding basically it´s impossible.

I believe it all started after Poker King skin started operating, I hope they eventually got their hands into the issue but I´m affraid they need them to not starting having huge overlays in tournaments and to bring more new players because at the end of the day, if you have traffic new players will come even if they are facing against machines....

Anecdotal evidence but I haven't seen any form of collusion. Consensus seems to be that they collude big time on ignition, and on acr it's just speculations wether they share hole cards or not.

Great analysis anton. Could you please confirm or deny that these MTT bots are not sharing cards or soft-playing against others?

PS: Could you also share bots bb/100 winrates?

I have to yet again comment on how amazing it is to me that the botting AND collusion issues have only come to the forefront of the community relatively recently. Back in 2013, WPN was still totally illegitimate. Of course, everyone who tried to speak up about it was silenced and/or banned but...a lot of us could have told you everything you know now a decade ago.

I'm positive there are house players ("prop" players) receiving things like 100% rakeback and colluding with each other. Additionally, I'd be pretty shocked if said house players didn't receive some kind of advantage at the tables on top of this.

This is not just unique to WPN. BOL (Chico Network) has been filled with bots and collusion for years. It's just a much smaller playerpool than WPN so you only hear so much about it. Those games (BOL) are dirty as ****, too.

I remember ChicagoJoey doing podcasts about this years ago. Didn't he even have Phil Nagy on his show? I haven't seen a ChicagoJoey video or pod in years, but years ago, he was literally the biggest voice speaking up about this...

and it seems the problem has only gotten worse.

I have most certainly been scammed by bots on ACR. I know this, because they have refunded me money multiple times, after their investigations. There really isn't a question of IF there is bots. We know there are bots and ACR does not seem capable of fixing this. So I haven't played on this site in forever as a result.

Since there are bots, then it's safe to assume that they have stats on every player on the site, and they are sharing hole cards and colluding. How do I know? I don't.

I just have to assume you are an idiot if you create a bot farm and you specifically DO NOT share hole cards with other bots at the table. Given that we know that other discovered botfarms do this (Like the PLO mid stakes bot ring on Pstars) .

Joey Ingraham? He was definitely the most well respected, outspoken voice about this. Without a doubt. But years before even he had a roll on WPN, WPN was dirty at all stakes and games. And it's affiliates were absolutely cutthroat on these very forums with anyone who even dared insinuate such.

These threads are still around from 8+ years ago. You can find Khan being a condescending shill across all those threads

True on both counts but the key thing is that a lot of individual posts and posters were just deleted/banned from those threads. So, everything was actually infinitely worse than what it even looks like now in retrospect.

I am not gonna read all the pages ITT, I pretty much know what it says already.

I'm sure someone else has said this... but AI has essentially solved Python programming. I have no formal training in python and I have been developing apps with Python. Imagine what someone with an actual dev background would be capable of programming in a short amount of time versus having to be a coding/IT wizard, reading multiple books, having full stack app dev experience, in years past.

The barrier to entry for cheaters is exponentially lower than when ChicagoJoey tried to shine light on this issue years ago. I think your analysis is spot on. It wouldn't surprise me if its much worse today than in years past.

It seems nothing has changed about the site... and it's likely, nothing ever will.

Other than us alerting other players, if a rouge unregulated poker site wants to allow cheating... and it's been happening for this long. I think we're well past trying to reform the site. I just hope more people make the choice not to play there.

One of the most tilting things I remember happening on the site is when I had a gigantic chipstack in a $500 MTT weekly major, ACR was nowhere close to getting the guarantee (IIRC, a million dollars away from the guarantee) and their site suddenly gets "DDoS'd"

This was well over 5+ years ago and the chip chop I got was not representative of how far I felt like I could have went in the tourney. That was the last time I played any tournament/game of real value on the site.

Where is/whatever happened to that kahntrutahn character? He had a few affiliates

Probably made generational wealth and ****ed off

Man these bots are mashing volume, it's disgusting

Ran just 3 of them through SS using date of first game and games played:
Vigmosta - 9.3 games/day (finished 2nd for 5k in a $44 on 1/14/24)
clearheaded - 6.22 games/day
czechmatt - 5.9 games/day

It's interesting to notice in their graphs what I believe to be a relatively high number of 2nd, 3rd, etc. MTT finishes, where good regs would tend to have a higher % of 1st place finishes.
The bots are very exploitable short handed/heads up.

or another account in their bot network came 1st. only one bot at a time can win a tournament.

that guy was the woat, he shilled so hard for merge and the day they stopped his affiliate money he couldn't be found

ACR New Statement
http://https://www.acrpoker.eu/blog/acr-...

Fwiw as someone who plays with the cash game names mentioned before, out of those 32. At least 30 or so have been active in the last week

They said they had them play with cam on and after that they put them on "time out", so maybe thats why they were still playing?

Thats just me hoping for the best tho...

Would appreciate an update if you are still running into them if you're playing over the weekend.

What's crazy is that there are multiple solutions to these issues. Didn't they hire nanonoko as the security consultant years ago? Good poker player, but other than knowing poker, what kind of information security background does he have?

I've always wondered if the solution to this is some sort of multi-factor, real time authentication mechanism combined with a virtual application environment, rather than the traditional client/server application architecture that is currently being used.

Back in the day when this issue first started getting attention, you'd get hit with random captcha to solve in the middle of the game. I don't know if that's a thing anymore and there's ways of getting around this.

When I say multi-factor real time authentication, what I mean is a real player verification protocol.

Think about all the hoops the crypto exchanges make you jump through for KYC regulations.

I've even wondered if issuing SmartCards for verified players would be a good 2nd/3rd/4th factor with periodic prompts to ask suspected/questionable users to input their 2FA code (from Google Authenticator type of application, etc) ever so often. Users who miss these prompts would get auto banned for X amount of days/weeks/etc. Users who clear them 100% would get rewarded somehow.

In an unregulated market, there is no incentive to do any of this but in a regulated market, this would make more sense.

One suggestion of many possible suggestions. It is clear this company does not know, or does not care about player security.

Actions speak louder than words, and the actions tell me it's likely a mix of both.

It does not seem like a lack of technical knowhow, they certainly know how to build applications and infrastructure that is designed to make them more crypto.

Overhauling all of their infrastructure would likely not be good for their bottom line, so I don't see anything changing.

If you use a bot couldn't you just play in its place during the cam session?

Just come back from vacation. Topic update from me - tomorrow.