Nacho Barbero uses GTO Wizard while playing on ACR

I'm in the exact same boat - no other options. I've played on the site for 10-15 years , and only a couple times made a withdraw. I always assumed I was playing against bots, mega multi tablers and all kinds of RTA devices , even though they were "explicitly' prohibited.

Before Black Friday, on Pokerstars my Sharkskope was rated 99.5% in tournaments. I made a decent amount as a college kid. And I kid you not... the second tournament I play on ClubWPT Gold I win ... and it had 1,000 entrants.

Lmao listening to Nacho go “ohhh broo I can’t believe I posted that stupid ****ing picture of GTO wizard bro” during the PokerGO cup is peak content

The gall to have that conversation on livestream after getting away with such a huge blunder. Surely ACR have to cancel his ambassadorship at this point. What a joker.

I don't understand why it's so tough for people to understand.

There is zero way to stop RTA online. Zero. Nada. Stopping RTA not a thing. RTA is the inevitable future of online poker.

Someone can simply buy two laptops, have them next to each other, and it's impossible to prevent.

Even if the site does something sophisticated like machine learning to detect players that are too close to pure GTO lines, firstly its impossible to prove they cheated or studied a lot, secondly it requires a massive amount of technical talent and compute resources which an unregulated costa rica operation is never going to do, even a legit operation will probably not do due to massive cost. And even if they do it, it becomes an arms race where then the RTAers just need to jiggle some decisions to avoid detection. Its an arms race but one where the RTAers always have the advantage.

Furthermore, you dont even strictly need two computers, as long as someone owns the computer, if theyre sophisticated enough they can do things like intercept system calls (what one program like a poker site would use to detect a solver software), and just remove the solver software from the list. That way they can do it automatically as a bot.

Now, is it brazen from Nacho and ACR to ignore this? Of course. Very much so.

Are we once again facing the stupid double standard where players like Alex Foxen will call for "committes against cheaters" when people they dont like Ali/Jake get caught doing something like sketchy and nothing when a popular player does it? DNegs also bashd Ali and has said nothing about Nacho. Or even worse, guys like Chance Kornuth calling for Martin Kahbrel to get banned for imaginary cheating while saying nothing about Nacho? Also yes. The poker "community" has always been a joke and ONLY and ALWAYS considered cheating only bad when an unpopular player does it.

But, it doesn't change that the future of online poker is you will either RTA, or lose, because from a software engineering perspective RTA is impossible to prevent. The only people who feel differently dont know much about software engineering. Anyone who understand computers, the internet, and software will understand this.

If anything, the only shocking part of this story is not Nachos behavior but the behavior of Isaac Haxton. Haxton is generally a very smart guy, and who studied Computer Science at Brown yet is asking Nacho an incredibly stupid question. Isaac should be smart enough to know that its impossible to prevent therefore itd be a stupid waste of money for ACR to try to prevent it. He's seriously asking why a business doesnt invest money in preventing something that's impossible to prevent? That's the most shocking part of this story.

It's the exact same situation as chess and chess has zero serious online events for this reason, and is not played for money online despite being a very popular game to play for money in person, because its impossible to prevent cheating online.

So in a sense this whole chain of events isnt surprising because of course they dont care about RTA because you must RTA or lose.

Now, I dont RTA because I consider it cheating and I dont want to cheat so I simply quit online poker. But I realized my options were either RTA, or lose.

People are suggesting people will quit playing over this? Not really. Because online poker is going in the direction of all other online forms of gambling. Slots, blackjack, etc, are dumb but people still play it so why not poker? Some people want to pass the time clicking buttons and watching the graph go and up and down, but mostly down. If you haven't stopped yet, you won't stop now.

All arguments against this come down to, "but RTA is bad and I dont like it and therefore we should stop it". Which again, misses the point that its impossible to stop. And anyone trying to convince you otherwise is either badly misinformed or trying to lie to you to sell you something.

To the extent online poker is beatable to any extent, its RTA stables vs RTA stables. Just accept it because there is no way to stop it. If you don't like it, don't play online poker (which is my choice).

edit: I will note that its possible that the super elite guys like Llinus can still outplay RTA because its still an unsolved game and the solution libraries are not infinitely big and are often inaccurate if you take it off common lines or you use sizings that it doest have in its solution. So, while RTA is impossible to prevent, right now some elite players can still beat RTA opponents. But, the RTA will improve every year, while the human players will remain about the same skill distribution, and even guys like LLInus might be beatable by computers within a few years.

Good post. I have 20 straight winning years online playing without using any software but see the writing on the wall and that the issue is quickly accelerating. Agree that there are no real solutions, especially none that are rec friendly.

Know for a fact that many winning MTT regs even in "soft" PA fenced sites are all at the very least frequently colluding and data sharing, and I'm sure the number using blatant RTA is way higher than most would think.

There's no solutions even ones that aren't rec-friendly.

The most common misunderstanding about technology Im seeing in this thread is that they can distribute some software that scans your machine for cheating software. The problem is that the way you write that software is you do things like make a call to the operating system that says "give me a list of all stuff running on this computer" - this is called a syscall. But if Im running your software on my operating system, I can change my operating system to say, when someone makes a system call, change what the system call returns.

This is why if you ever get malware you should always re-format your machine because if someone installs a "rootkit" (root access to the operating system) , then you can never even detect the malware because it can intercept the syscalls and hide itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_call

en

System call - Wikipedia

The closest ACR could come to preventing RTA is to literally make their own computers with a custom operating system and say you can only play on this custom computer. Which still of course doesnt fix the problem of the other computer being in the room.

I think people keep imaginign that custom software could detect cheating softare on the machine. Or even solutiosn like a webcam providign a screenshare of the player, again anything can be intercepted. So any sort of camera feed or screenshare could be intercepted and tampered to hide cheating.

So, I disagree that "there's no rec-friendly way to prevent RTA" becauuse it doesn't go far enough. There's no way to prevent it. This is what people really need to wrap their head fully around. The only true way to prevent is to have a physical person, not a camera but a person, monitoring you as you play, so if you had some sort of physical location and players could only play from that business location. But at that point, might as well just play live poker.

I believe you. I'm not a tech expert. The only ideas I've brainstormed are like speed poker or randomizing blind structure hand by hand. But even ideas like that could be gamed eventually too I think.

Of course, maybe more complex games could start taking over from NLHE as well, but again, temporary solution and likely not going to be popular at all.

I agree with you that there's no way to completely stop cheating, but it's a numbers game. If you can keep the percentage of cheaters low enough that honest players can still win against the fields then that's far better than the games becoming completely unplayable.

The way you do that is by making it harder to cheat and having real deterrents, like legal consequences or whatever. Even if it's just making an example out of a small number of people that get caught and sending them to prison that would make a lot of others think twice.

As far as making it harder to cheat the most obvious first step would be making sure any idiot can't just login, open up GTO Wizard in a browser window and cheat. Sure a sophisticated cheat will find a way around any measures you put in place, but the sites could at least be trying to stop the simplest forms. As Nacho said in that recent video, ACR is not even trying.

Speaking of Nacho, I don't know if it's fair to throw him into the same category as some of those other cheats. I don't know enough about the situation to have an educated opinion, but the consensus from people in the know seems to be that he wasn't actually cheating in a systematic way. Sure he might have been breaking terms of service by coaching with GTO Wizard open while he or his students played. I'm not excusing that, but it's not the same as someone like Ali who was blatantly cheating. I think the reason Nacho is sort of getting a pass is because a lot of people seem to believe he wasn't actually cheating.

Regarding Ike, I think he was likely playing dumb when he was talking to Nacho on that stream. I think he likely just wanted to see how Nacho would respond, and it worked to get a genuine reaction didn't it?

Anyway, I don't mean to come across like I'm arguing with your post. You made a lot of good points. I'm currently focusing on live poker and not even playing online for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. It's a sad state of affairs.

I personally know of sophisticated good players that are mass tabling 100 NL. These are like borderline world class players that crush high stakes live, but the best they can do is grind out $30/hour or something online?

Anyway maybe I'm overly optimistic but I feel like there has to be a way to limit the amount of cheating to a level where it only marginally effects the games. Maybe if a new site made this a priority they could dominate the market and become the new leader in a few years?

Also, in case I wasn't clear I think the emphasis has to be on stopping bots and automated cheating. If you can just ensure that there is an actual human being sitting there clicking buttons for each account that would prevent one person from leveraging 1000 bots to cheat for them, and help immensely to keep the ratio of cheats/honest players as low as possible.

very good post.
all you say is 100% correct.

wanna add:
the thing that pisses me off the most about this situation is the entitlement and brazenness of both (Nacho and acr).

nacho as "ambassador" basically spitting in people's faces (and think about it, the guy gets paid by them to represent them)
and acr not firing him instantly, thereby spitting even more in people's faces

**** them all.

There is an easy solution to stop RTA and cheating in general.

Every single player who is winning will be subjected to record their live play multiple times per year.
Until they do so, they are not able to withdraw from the site.
If they deviate during this sample, they are subjected to further similar tests.
If they fail, just assume they are cheating in some way and they get banned.

I was submitted to this myself on WPN and passed it with no problems.

It’s quite stressful for players but solves the problem efficiently and quickly.

https://codigopoker.com/noticias-generales/no-va-mas-acr-poker-echo-a-nacho-barbero-de-su-team-pro

Codigo Poker

No va más: ACR Poker echó a Nacho Barbero de su Team Pro

GG Nacho: he got fired as ACR ambassador

Funny. They didnt fire him because of what he did, but because of the things he said on stream about how the situation was handled.

So they end up cutting ties with him, while upholding the image that they dont give a **** about cheating on the site. Well played ACR.

So much this

Which PA players are you referring to?

RTA is very easy to stop if sites pay attention or care at all.

If somebody is winning a ton of money you can subject them to 1 hour of game play and if you've been using a solver, you'll quickly be exposed.

Winrate
Time usage
Explanation of game play

Incredibly easy stuff if the website at all cares.

I've been a pro for nearly 10 years, I went back and looked at my stats.

For players with sub 2 hands:
2016-2020=33bb winrate
2020-2025=39bb winrate

Sub 10hands:
2016-2020=30bb winrate
2020-2025=20bb winrate

Sub 100hands:
2016-2020=12bb winrate
2020-2025=13bb winrate

Sub1000 hands:
2016-2020=9bb winrate
2020-2025=11bb winrate

It's basically the same because the average person is playing poker to have fun/gamble, not try and understand MDF by using MDA to figure out people's FCB3BP and how to exploit high/low ones. And the large majority of money is going to come from these types of players punting, not some sick 4b pot 8% pot cb vs 12% cb to exploit some other reg who you have 100 4b pot hands on. Humans as a whole will never get good at poker, it's the same reason why slots/roulette and other objectively stupid forms of gambling exist, the average person just wants to gamble/have fun. Poker is no different.

Subject them to 1 hour of gameplay how? Where? Why does a player have to articulate their thought process out loud? You do realize that can be challenging for some people, right? Are they cheating because they might stutter?

And you do realize that people are almost certainly going to play differently than they usually do when they are under the microscope of this "interrogation room style, coerced poker play" simply because of the circumstances, right?

God damn, I've been back on this site for less than a day after being away for like 7 years, and I'm already back on forum tilt.

Sounds like a great way to "legitimize" a poker site stealing money directly from players.

You are, of course, 100% correct. It can't be stopped completely. Sites should be obligated to check for banned software on the devices that the poker software is running on, but as you pointed out further down in your post, that can be easily sidestepped with a modicum of technical knowledge.

It would seem the only people getting caught are the stupid people.

Why would anyone open this up on the computer they are playing on?

How hard would it to get a camera set up from a separate computer pointing at the screen and then scrape the cards from the video feed into the non connected computer.

This technology has been around for decades and is used in the food industry to read QR codes, data matrix codes, UPC's and printed best before dates and lot codes on products to make sure they are correct before they are packaged.

One brand is cognex which also has AI learning and the ability to correct any symbol.

D.

I agree they should try and do more to stop it. But anyone who thinks RTA isn't rampant in 2025 and isn't going to get way worse is naive at best.

If somebody is crushing the game, they should have no problem explaining themselves. It's extremely easy.

Lmao it's interrogation to record yourself playing?

Honestly you shouldn't have come back, you're already crying and tilting over a very standard protocol that has already been happening lol.