PokerStars Closes Ten Bot Accounts

PokerStars has frozen 10 player accounts on their site after investigations revealed that the accounts were almost certainly poker bots. The automated poker playing programs were playing nearly identically to one another, both in terms of statistical analysis and in the way they moved up and down stakes over the past few months.

PokerStars’ findings were confirmed by PokerTableRatings.com, an independent poker tracking site that had detailed records on the players in question. What made the bots particularly identifiable was not only the fact that they played so similarly to each other, but also that their play was quite different from any other player on PokerStars. This left the ten suspect accounts in a group of their own, making them easy to identify once investigators knew what to look for.

The first sign of trouble came from a post on the twoplustwo.com message boards, where a player had used PTR’s data to find three seemingly identical players playing no-limit hold’em on PokerStars. Within days, both PTR and PokerStars had launched investigations that found the additional seven other players who were identified as bots.

According to statistics in a report released by PTR, it appears as though the bot accounts had played a minimum of eight million hands of poker, generating almost $187,000 in rake, and making about $57,000 in profits.

In a statement on the twoplustwo.com message boards, a representative of PokerStars said that the complex behavior of the bots contributed to the difficulty level in detecting and identifying the computer programs.

“Our tools for bot detection are sophisticated, but they are not perfect,” the representative said. “No site can guarantee you that they are completely free of bots. What PokerStars can and does pledge is that we use our extensive tools behind the scenes to detect bots as best we can. We detect and remove most bots well before they even leave the development stage, and well before they could play long enough to come to the attention of players or third party poker databases the way these players did.”