r/interestingasfuck • u/lonewolff321 • 10h ago
An online poker bot farm where dozens of synced laptops collude at the same table against real players
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u/TypicalLegit 10h ago
This has been going on for almost as long as online poker has been around. Gambling is stupid, gambling online is just straight up redacted
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u/trippinmaui 10h ago edited 7h ago
I have no clue how people are so stupid they'd put money into a digital slot machine.....
Edit: yea I know poker is not a slot machine...this was focusing on the op saying gambling
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u/Konchroller 10h ago
You should see the redditors that pay for awards.
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u/anon999387 10h ago
Damn that got 15 awards in a 7 minute old comment. Is anything on this site real
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u/Konchroller 10h ago
Tell me about it. Im just trying to have lunch and doomscroll but my phone keeps vibrating like a woman's favorite toy.
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u/The_Frostweaver 10h ago
Turn off notifications for every app
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u/Telefundo 9h ago
I've been so conditioned by this shit that any time I have a notification on my screen with options like (Allow or Block) I automatically click block without even reading the rest of it.
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u/Mikesminis 10h ago
A couple years ago Reddit took awards away and gave people like a month to spend their Reddit coins. Every comment got dozens of awards as people tried to use them up. I just asked for my money back. They refunded me within hours.
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u/rips_n_chel 9h ago
That's pretty smart, but imagine if you'd never spent money on reddit in the first place <taps head meme>
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u/Naud1993 9h ago
Around $250 has been spent on this comment. Just to give Reddit money and to put an image with a large number underneath this comment.
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u/AcadianTraverse 10h ago
Years ago I was staying in a small town before flying out the next morning following a camping trip. There wasn't much going on so after dinner I went to the casino for a drink. Out of sheer entertainment I decided to put $100 into a "high limit" machine expecting to spend it all. I've never played slot machines for the obvious reason, but that was going to be my entertainment for the night. On my 2nd or 3rd spin I hit a win and was suddenly up to $170 or something.
It was thrilling! So I kept going. After a few more spins I was down to $150 and realized how dumb that was. I cashed out and walked away, having paid for dinner and my drink that night.
All of that is to say, I can see how with the right emotional triggers you can rope someone into slots that develop a lifelong addiction.
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u/autofill-name 9h ago
I spent a day on the machines in Vegas with similar results. Started with a hundred, nearly doubled it by lunchtime, but there was fuck all else to do, so spent the afternoon paying it back.
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u/olof2684 4h ago
Remote co-workers and I had a get-together near a casino, first time betting on baccarat, with a ~20 USD bet, definitely thrilling but knowing the mathematics behind it, cashed out after winning 50% of the initial bet. Paid my overnight parking with it.
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u/Lou_C_Fer 3h ago
I turned $60 into $800 and then lost it all in about 4 hours on a low limit roulette table at the niagra falls casino 30 years ago. The rushes from the ups and downs were better than any of the drugs I've done, and my body chemistry mixed it all up for me.
I had expected to go in, lose fast, and head on to the gaming get together I was traveling to. Instead it was slow up and down building it to $500. Then I got impatient because I needed to leave. So, I started betting in big chunks and those swings felt earth shattering no matter which way it went.
I would love to sit down at a roulette table again, but I've never had the cash that I could just throw away like that. It doesn't help that the table limits at the casinos I've been to since are too high. That one in Canada was $5 minimum. The few times I've been to other casinos since were $25 minimum and that is too rich for my blood.
I'm lucky. As much as I hate my mother, she had the uncanny ability to take or leave things that hooked others, and I inherited that from her.
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u/Hanksta2 10h ago
Remember when NFTs came out, and were the most obvious scam in history, yet people still bought them?
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u/iamgarron 9h ago
Some people are going to fall for whatever the new thing is. It's just in their personality and it sucks that things are now designed to take advantage their personality.
I know someone who lost a lot of money on NFTs who then started working for FTX and invested his own income into the FTT coin.
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u/Agitated-Impress7805 10h ago
Poker is not a slot machine. Bots have an edge over most human players but not as big as a casino has for games of chance.
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u/AngryT-Rex 9h ago
That depends a lot on what the bot does.
Just 1 bot with perfect probability calculations? Possibly a small edge.
Several bots at the same table that know eachothers cards? Those bots know the probabilities WAY better than their victims (bot 1 has 2 aces and knows that no other bot has any aces, so it knows that there is a really good chance of a 3rd ace) and can have a pretty big edge.
Several bots that know eachothers cards AND are collaborating AND the humans dont even know which players are bots on a team versus independant players? The bots can mutually agree in secret which of their teams hands to fold, which ones to play, then use one that plans to fold to raise so that the one with the best hand only has to match and the human doesn't even know which bot actually wanted to raise. No human stands a chance, not even a pro. The trick is actually not winning too hard, because if the humans correctly feel that they're just getting destroyed almost every hand they'll quit and you'll stop making money from them. You end up having to nerf your own bots to let people win some hands.
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u/BoiledFrogs 6h ago
It's so funny to me that people always think things at casinos are rigged, like slot machines. They straight up tell you the odds are rigged in their favour, they don't need to do anything nefarious.
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u/Russkun 9h ago
My wife treats them like a video game. She likes the lights and noises to unwind after work. She has a strict budget of $20 a week, and with her winnings is only down $40 on the year. Far less than I have spent on mobile games.
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u/BoiledFrogs 6h ago
Yeah, if you're smart about it and don't have impulse control issues, a bit of online gambling is pretty fun and you're not going to lose a ton of money, especially if say you deposit $20, get up to $40, then withdrawal the $20 so you're nice and even. Even better if you have some extra winnings for the next time.
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u/discerningpervert 10h ago
The older I get the more I see that everything's some sort of scam. This is egregious though, like why would anyone gamble online against shit like this. Throw in AI for extra scam.
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9h ago
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u/rips_n_chel 9h ago
There is a refreshing honesty to it, crazy as that may seem to those who haven't been. It is all that you think it is, and it's not even trying to fool you about that fact.
As someone with zero interest in gambling and who never expected to like Vegas, I really do. It's an incredibly fascinating place. I like going and just immersing myself in it all. Vegas is not ashamed of who and what it is.
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u/Emotional-Power-7242 8h ago
I do it as practice for actual in person poker. In person I'm playing for $500 and online I'm playing for $5 so I don't really care what I lose. I don't actually lose though, I am profitable on this exact site in the video. You have to play for some amount of money to simulate real play, if you play on a phone app or something with fake money everyone just goes all in every hand and does stupid stuff. Microstakes online plays at the skill level of like midstakes in person.
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u/UsernamesNotFound404 10h ago
Like watching magicians on tv.
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u/CommunicationKind286 10h ago
I actually enjoyed that show.
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u/GrimmThoughts 10h ago
Wtf I'm watching The Magicians as I'm scrolling reddit, what a weird comment chain to come across st the same time lol
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u/Moroax 9h ago
15+ years ago, in my early 20s, my friends and I got into poker. One of them still plays it as a semi-career.
But we started going to local bars and poker tournies, local games, casinos etc. Eventually the one who still plays, got into online poker and we started messing around in his dorm room. Playing together discussing our bets and the hand etc.
We started noticing that every hand seemed JUICED. Like you never just had the best hand at the table, made a modest bet, got called and everyone flipped and you won. NEVER. It would be upset after upset, to the point it seemed impossible.
I don't play anymore, and this was 15 years ago, so forgive me if my lingo and game knowledge is no longer there but....
it got to the point where the difference in the online games and the real games we played was NOTICEABLE so we stopped gambling online. I think it wasn't long after some of those sites got shut down for rigging games for 'action' - aka there were more good hands and juicy turns on flop etc than statistically normal. They rigged the hands to be closer or competitive so people bet more aggressively thinking they had a good hand, but the odds didn't play out anything like real life in the end.
We noticed it as pretty amateur players and quit to continue to play in real life. I wonder how many got addicted, didn't notice the game screwing them, and lost lots of money howerver.
Gambling is fucking scary
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u/GRisForFun 10h ago
A lot of people make a living off of online poker. The problematic sites are the unregulated ones that are currently big in the U.S. since online poker isn't federally legal.
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u/TrueBrees9 9h ago
Bruh you got people in this thread who think poker is just like slot machines or sports gambling lol.
Yall, there are reputable sites for online poker. Professionals use them and they’re fine. They make enough from rakes that they don’t need to jeopardize their business from scamming people.
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u/TheChinOfAnElephant 9h ago
Is the implication that the people in the OP are also running the poker site? Because I didn't get that impression.
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u/crockrocket 10h ago
There was a very brief window in the nascent days of the internet when you could gamble properly.
The current form is a scourge on humanity
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u/TwentyTwoMilTeePiece 9h ago
I gamble online. I have a strict limit I pay into; for me, it's my vice. I don't drink, smoke, shop, etc. I enjoy it. Sometimes (often) I lose my alloted amount quickly but when it hits and the bonus spins go off or the pebble lands on the exact number I bet on, it's fun. Everything in moderation; I believe it's important to note that I don't play to win neither - it just doesn't work like that.
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u/thetermguy 9h ago
well akkktually........ (sorry).
With poker you're playing against other players instead of just the house. So you can actually win.
I interact online with a bunch of actuaries and in the past some of them have played poker - multiple hands and screens similiar to what the bots are doing. Apparently if you're reasonably decent you can actually make money consistently on the lower money tables - like $5/$10 tables. The people playing those are not experts, so you can cleanup pretty consistently.
No idea if that's still true with the rise of the bots.
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u/win_awards 10h ago
Remember, as long as they're making money off the cheaters the site has no incentive to quash them. There is nothing left on the internet that is for you. You are the product. You are the crop being harvested.
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u/Chimie45 9h ago
To an extent. For the crypto sites? sure. There's no real motivation because they don't have huge loyal customers. People get on, play some cash, and fuck off.
But for the big operators like GG, WPT, PS, Coin... They would go out of business. User Ecology in these kinds of services is huge, and they have massive teams of people dedicated to ecology balance. WPT put a lot of effort even in to limiting the skill level at each table so you can't get stuck at a table with people who are way better than you, etc.
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u/boogermike 10h ago edited 6h ago
Same manipulation is happening with sports betting and kalshi. The game is rigged.
Edit: Check this article from ProPublica:
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gambling-problem-vip-fanduel
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u/Affectionate_Show867 10h ago
My favorite saying for those apps is "If you're not banned, you're losing money"
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u/DukeSunday 9h ago
Got banned from several gambling sites while furloughed during COVID lmao, albeit mostly for abusing free bet promotions. Made about three grand or so over the course of a couple months, so less than just like....working, but occupied some of my time while I was in lockdown.
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u/Affectionate_Show867 7h ago
Yeah I have a buddy who ran an algo to make money based on some function or other. He obviously got banned but we took turns letting him make accounts with our ID's and his money. He gave us a portion of the money he won on them before our accounts got banned too lol
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u/jellyhessman 9h ago
Yep, recent journalist piece saying that these site not only encourage problem gamblers to play more, but they restrict the betting ability of accounts that win "too much".
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u/JoeFTPgamerIOS 9h ago
It really is true, anyone who talks about online betting over a long period of time either makes really small bets, or has lost a lot of money. Their bad customers are the winners.
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u/boogermike 9h ago
So true! They will kick out any of the successful players and promote to the losers. Propublica just did a big expose on this.
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gambling-problem-vip-fanduel
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u/LiquidBionix 8h ago
It's actually even worse. You don't even need to be "successful" in the sense that you win money. You just need to place smart bets. If they determine that you place too many smart bets (i.e. you are looking for good deals for the odds), you're out.
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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo 9h ago
Just like how credit card companies don’t like people who don’t carry a balance
Credit card companies still make money on the swipes, though. They would rather 100 guys like that than a single guy who defaults and they take a loss, I can promise that
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u/EamonBrennan 9h ago
Practically everyone who has used a betting app has either lost money, made less profits than a regular investment, or got a huge win that the gambling company invalidated using one or more of a hundred different reasons, like "it was a bug, we didn't mean those odds," or "your account has suspicious activity." Several multi-million winners never saw a cent of their winning. Unless you're in person over cards that are hand shuffled, there's a level of cheating at some point.
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u/Jomotaku 9h ago
How does this work with sports betting? If u're right on the winning team or whatever don't u just win regardless?
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u/Moses-the-Ryder 9h ago
The bot farms actually grow the humans from birth and rigorously train them to become professional athletes, get drafted, etc. Then they wait to see what bet you placed and do the opposite
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u/0110-0-10-00-000 9h ago
It doesn't happen, and it's not possible for it to happen. The ways that bots make money are things like arbitrage (finding bets on different platforms with different odds so that they can bet on every possible outcome and make a profit) or spread betting (buying a succeed/fail bet at different prices on the same market as the odds fluctuate).
They're statistically profitable strategies, and so in a sense they take money out of the winnings pot for everyone else, but as a gambler the way you actually experience that is by the odds being more accurate and not fluctuating as much (i.e. it's only bad for you if you're a gambler who's good at picking underpriced bets).
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u/SeaMenCaptain 9h ago
Yeah sports betting is probably the "fairest" form of gambling. It's obviously not completely "fair" as there always can be outside influences we are unaware of, but the only real variability are the odds/lines... but you are agreeing to those when you place the bet.
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u/TheBeckofKevin 7h ago
If you use those odds/lines in order to arbitrage different betting websites in order to tilt the bets in your favor, you will be banned despite those being the terms (lines/odds) the site set themselves. Its only "fair" when the people running the game are the ones making money. If you take actions that result in you steadily winning money over time, you will certainly be banned.
But i will agree, its certainly the fairest in the sense that the companies who run the sports betting sites are most fairly winning money, you just have to ignore the unfairness of them refusing to be fair when it results in their loss.
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u/DODonion99 6h ago
People need to get it through their heads that sports betting sites will literally ban you or severely limit your ability to bet on anything if you actually start winning money, and that the only way to consistently win money on "prediction sites" is by betting using insider information (like betting on something Google related as a Google employee that already knows what's going to happen).
Everyone else is net losing money.
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u/TheRealChompyTheGoat 4h ago
I was about $1k ahead in Draft Kings and then it started making me wait for a person to approve my bets before they would place. That became a good time to cash out.
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u/tubaman23 10h ago
Market Makers and the Stock Market too. Payment for order flow is basically this video lol
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u/mmicoandthegirl 9h ago
At least in Polymarket the market is so small you're making absolute peanuts in terms of actual money industry money. Push a $200k bet and suddenly you're the market maker and can't effectively hedge. People start trailing you and algorithmically determining your hedge accounts and reverse engineering your strategy and quant. You can probably squeeze $20 million yearly on very popular (and competitive sports) sports with very little overhead but there are no avenues for scaling, besides trying to lobby for deregulation (tax benefits, casino ads for kids) to increase the market.
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u/LuxNocte 8h ago
Okay,...so I know I'm focused on the wrong thing here...but it just seems so inefficient. You could run this all on virtual machines so much more cheaply. Do they really need screens? Laptops are so much more expensive and power hungry than a comparable desktop.
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u/Suspicious-Prompt200 8h ago
Perhaps easier to obtain the old laptops in this country / easier to spoof hardware
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u/Calm_Stress3334 8h ago
I was thinking the same thing. Regardless, we know that there are poker farms essentially designed to steal peoples money from online poker.
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u/Ohitsworkingnow 8h ago
Different device IDs to avoid detection? Wouldn’t bovada know if you’re running 20 tables in a virtual machine?
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u/RandomRageNet 8h ago
If properly setup, VMs could have separate MAC addresses, and they should all be running on separate VPNs to avoid detection by the website. The only reason I can think of why you would want these all on physical computers with monitors is that you might need occasional human intervention and it's easier to walk around and look at the monitors to know when you need to intervene instead of toggling through a bunch of virtual displays.
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u/PhatCatTax 7h ago
Also might be cheaper hardware to use a bunch of ancient shitty laptops than one computer with enough juice to run a a dozen VDI's
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u/SafePostsAccount 7h ago
Separate mac and IP are not enough. I've worked on systems to detect this.
We fingerprint drivers, hardware, non-deterministic GPU artifacts, correlated system slowdowns, and a few more esoteric things I can't even say.
There are VMs that are undetectable for a single user, but there are no VMs I know of that can run an undetectable swarm on one machine.
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u/neighbour_20150 8h ago
I’m actually surprised that so many clients can operate from a single IP address. Usually, that gets banned very quickly.
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u/pumachecker 7h ago
There's basic anti-cheat. You can get popups to answer basic questions. This setup allows a human to oversee the pokerbot farm, and beat those basic anti-cheats.
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u/Anxious_Ad9233 8h ago
Server expert here. This might just be classic software engineer issue. No one really knows how to DevOps and they end up making silly mistakes. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a common issue that the architects don’t know how to actually deploy and scale after they write the program
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u/cbftw 8h ago edited 8h ago
A lot of online sites will detect and ban VM users
<Edit> looking at the video that looks like ACR and they definitely look for VM usage.
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u/Tricky-Ad7897 9h ago
You gotta be stupid to play table games where other players have an effect online. People cheat in multiplayer videogames with no financial incentive.
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u/zwifter11 9h ago
Not only that but the house / casino can cheat when it writes the software code.
For example, online slot machines and online roulette
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u/Opinion87 7h ago
Made a tidy amount 15+ years ago using poker bots.
Before bots, you just had to use a female name. People would spend more time typing messages out than playing their hand.
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u/aBrickNotInTheWall 10h ago
Why would you set all that up and then record it? If I were doing something like that I'd want to draw as little attention to it as possible
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u/jpsreddit85 10h ago
Entirely possible they got busted and the video is taken after.
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u/lool270 10h ago
Or they are flexing to their friends
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u/Kaldricus 9h ago
It's like the scene from "The Big Short"
"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?"
"They're not confessing. They're bragging."
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u/Gold_Ad_9325 9h ago
Because why not? These types of set ups are an open secret for any sketchy online poker site. Also, it’s not like anything will happen to them. Even if you are able to pull the usernames from this video, they probably already are constantly switching accounts.
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u/adfawf3f3f32a 9h ago
i'd bet the site owners are affiliated with these groups. at the very least demanding a cut.
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u/FrostyD7 9h ago
Because these are full blown operations with employees. Cammer is probably only risking his shitty job doing this.
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u/Prior_Dimension_6680 10h ago
This is the ol "If a tree commits fraud in the forest but no one is around to hear it, did it really commit any crime?" Now imagine if the Charmin bears had cameras. Still with me?
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u/ReversedNovaMatters 8h ago
Nice of them to show us what I knew was happening all along.
Back in the day it might have just been one guy with 6 laptops at one table or a group of a few friends at one table messaging each other back and forth what cards they had.
There are certainly many of these farms across all poker sites. It was never a safe place to gamble and now is only less. We knew 15-20 years ago the sites themselves were cheating players and nothing has changed.
Do Not Gamble Online
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u/KRandMG 7h ago edited 1h ago
*Do not gamble.
Invest in a nice, safe, total-market index fund and retire in your forties or fifties instead.
Google “bogleheads” or “FIRE movement” if anyone might like to learn more about how your money doubles every 7 (nominal)/10 (inflation-adjusted) years if you can simply park it in a low-cost index fund like VOO or VT and forget about it until you’re ready to retire young.
If you can hit $250k invested by age 35, you’ll have over a million dollars to your name at age 50 without ever having to invest another cent past age 35. Or, you can keep pouring gas in the tank and hit that $1M mark even sooner.
Steady compound interest is how the average person becomes rich and the kind-of-rich person becomes obscenely wealthy.
Young people are quite literally setting themselves up to work for life by gambling online and missing out on the HUGE ADVANTAGE of investing in their twenties to leverage that extra decade of compounding at the base. $20k spent gambling by age 30 means you forfeit what—if invested—would have grown to $640,000 nominally at age 65 without any additional contributions whatsoever.
Yes, you read that right.
Edit: In case anyone wants to play with the numbers themselves or test my figures (note that the S&P 500 returns about 10.5% annually when entering your input for the “Estimated Interest Rate” field).
https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.” -Einstein
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u/mello12345 4h ago
If you still insist on playing online poker, let this be a lesson that you need to play extremely tight. Playing as a fish here against stacked odds will bankrupt you quickly.
While the bot farms have a big advantage, they won’t know when you actually have the nuts explicitly. At an 8 person table assuming the other 7 are colluding, they’re seeing 14 cards that you aren’t. Thats roughly 27% of the deck. With the 5 middle cards they know 36.5% of the cards in the deck.
Fold all non-premium starting hands, check/fold all speculative flops, and when you have the nuts bet very aggressively. Bluffing is meaningless here as they have more info than you do about what you could statistically have. But if you have the nuts, the info available to the bots will show it still as unlikely that you have your hand (example: flop is A A 10, turn K river 4 | your hand is AK | Bots worst case see 1 Ace and 2 kings in hands. The likelihood you would have AK when 3/4 of each are accounted for is 1/33 x 1/33 or 1 in 1,089. If the bot is good they would fold after seeing the K, but you had a premium hand pre flop and the nuts since the flop. Thats where TAG play can still be profitable with discipline.
But to summarize, still playing rigged online poker is not a great idea.
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u/doc_skinner 7h ago
How do they ensure that their bots are at the same table? I assume it's like a video game lobby where they are randomly assigned tables, right?
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u/four2theizz0 7h ago
Nah, you can choose what table to sit at. You See the list of players and open seats and you choose on your own.
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u/CompleteCreme7223 10h ago
This is why you never play online tables for cash.
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u/Tongue8cheek 10h ago
Yes. I heard of someone maxing out a $50k credit card in their last attempt to win it all back. This is why they allow you to link your credit card to the account.
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u/leiwand1zer 10h ago
why cant the websides detect those bots? i get asked on every random webpage wheter or not iam an robor lol
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u/Worriedlytumescent 10h ago
Then they'd lose most of their player base. Same reason Reddit and Facebook don't do anything about them.
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u/Truly_Meaningless 10h ago
Considering that a decent chunk of right wing accounts across Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and other social media apps went strangely quiet when those bot farms in Russia got bombed, it makes sense that they'd keep bots around to keep "activity count" high
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u/Slumunistmanifisto 10h ago
That weekend on Reddit there was far less incel and tankie posting too.
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u/LostVisage 10h ago
I only ever see this talked about in a casual manner by commenters or social media posts/memes. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'd appreciate seeing a reputable source if you or anybody else has one so I can see it for myself.
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u/Current-Wealth-756 9h ago
Same. I saw tons of headlines asserting it, and then all kinds of people who had seen those headlines parroting it, but I never actually saw anything that demonstrated it.
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u/Sodis42 9h ago
Ukraine did an analysis on known bot accounts, which posted less a day after the strike.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 10h ago
Detecting headful bots is much harder. Headful = rendering complete UI (visible or not) as if a human was sitting in front of the PC. Best you can hope is catching them from behavior patterns, but they look human from the servers perspective.
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u/18randomcharacters 10h ago
Maybe the humans there just go around doing recaptchas over and over?
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u/runescape_pker 10h ago
there are services that sell captcha solves for like 1 cent each, every pc is probably on a vpn so not the same ip
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u/Only-Cheetah-9579 8h ago
I think so, thats why they have so many screens, otherwise it would be just headless browsers
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u/DukeSunday 9h ago
Why would they want to? The websites usually make a small percentage of the pot. More bots = more games played = more money for them.
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u/AlwaysAtBallmerPeak 10h ago
they can, but they also have an incentive not to unless they start losing players, since their income depends on rake
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u/Yololio69 9h ago
If the house is in a regulated country, I assure you they do. And by default they block the accounts associated. That about being beneficial for the house is half of the truth. In terms of money it could be, in terms of risk it is not worth it. Of course you need to identify bots and not every company is good at it.
Gambling laws are one of the most horrible things to deal with (I worked with regulations in US, LATAM, EU and South Asia). They put a lot of rules that are meant to protect end users. Stupid things like you get fined thousands, if don't pay a user winnings in less than 24 hours and they go to the police. (Not withdrawals, to the user account in the platform). If you have a money printing machine, you just don't allow bots. The margins for online casinos in some countries are absurd (Malta, Curacao, Bahamas...), you don't need bots.
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u/comrad1980 10h ago
Why individual computers? I would virtualize and automate this. Makes it even more scalable.
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u/AlwaysAtBallmerPeak 10h ago
I'm guessing because the poker clients do device fingerprinting to detect bots, and faking that with VMs is incredibly difficult.
Probably they run on different internet connections as well
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u/Chimie45 9h ago
You would be banned before you even joined a table on any real site.
When you play, they have full access to everything you're running on your computer, they have full access to your desktop, they know your system specs, they know it's a virtual machine.
Trust me, there are online games where people win quite literally millions of dollars. If it was as easy as "just run a VM" there would be lots of people doing it. And yet they're not.
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u/comrad1980 9h ago
and with access to the full system they cannot find out that a bot software is running the game?
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u/DerGottesknecht 9h ago
If the bot commands come via emulated keyboard/mouse from an external controller it gets difficult. You'd need to analyze the mouse movements to find out if it's a bot.
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u/r3dm0nk 8h ago
it's cheaper (as in, instantly generating money) and faster to buy some second hand market shit laptops that just need to run a flash equivalent of app, than it is to sit and develop a working vm that will need to be constantly keep up to date with anti-cheating measurements - to put it very simply, as its late and im tired too much to explain using big words
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u/unr3a1r00t 9h ago
Whoever set this up is obviously intelligent and has skills that could be used to better our world and contribute to society, but they would rather be selfish, cheating, worthless, slime-ball pieces of shit scammers.
The amount of effort these assholes put in to cheat a system makes me irrationally angry.
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u/bigfunben 9h ago
You have accurately described the brain drain caused by private equity/venture capital/etc. Those people used to be engineers or chemists or physicists, now they write algorithms to make money.
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u/sk1939 6h ago
I have a friend that is an expert in their field, biomedical research. He makes significantly less than a mutual friend that works as an analyst at Bridgewater.
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u/cuntmong 2h ago
We don't need medicine that can help humanity, we need slightly higher returns for shareholders
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u/Significant-Law-2646 9h ago
There was news from Vietnam that criminals are turning to scamming rather than drug dealing because it makes more money. It also doesn't draw the death penalty too.
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u/robsteezy 7h ago
Be mad at the society that led to and incentivized this.
Why tf would I go flip burgers for criminal wages when crime pays?
I don’t agree with it but I’m mature enough to see the reason. You being flabbergasted is honestly more shocking than the crime.
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u/PopeofFries 10h ago
If you play online poker with real money you kinda deserve it
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u/A___Unique__Username 10h ago edited 10h ago
I mean i have played online poker for real money but it's only ever $1/2 buy in games. Playing online poker with fake money actually sucks.
Edit: judging by the downvotes I'm guessing people love playing poker with fake money? Poker is a fun game when people play properly and the only place you get that is by playing with real money...
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u/GRex2595 10h ago
Playing with fake money can be fun, but only against people who are also playing like it's real money. Playing with fake money against people who don't care, like at BWW, is no fun.
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u/crudude 10h ago
Yeah adding real money adds stakes. I don't get why people say you deserve it, it's a hobby like any other game. Personally I enter a 10 dollar tournament like once every couple months.
Something like 100 players and 1st place is 1000 dollars or something like that. It's fun and if you get knocked out you only lose 10.
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u/isoldmywifeonEbay 8h ago
Because people are mean, especially online. I feel like Reddit is increasingly mean-spirited recently.
Poker is fun. If people want to gamble a bit, they should be able to without being cheated. They don’t deserve to be cheated.
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u/gadnskyy 2h ago
I've never understood the appeal of online gambling. I can think of hundreds of ways to rig an online game that would be extemely difficult to pull off in a physical casino.
Think about it: when you see a face-down card on your screen, what's actually stopping the software from deciding what that card is whenever it wants? They could literally program an "I win" button, and from your perspective, it would look exactly like a legitimate game.
I'm not saying every online casino does this, and I know physical casinos already have the odds stacked in their favor. But there's a huge difference between playing a game with unfavorable odds and having to blindly trust that the people running the game aren't manipulating the outcomes behind the scenes.
Online gambling requires a ridiculous amount of trust in the very people who stand to profit from it. And that's before you even get into things like the bot collusion shown in this post.
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u/WigiBit 6h ago
how they solve issue where 100 players come from same ip? that would result ban quickly. btw VPN is not solution, because most vpn-providers ip-address space is well known and that can also result ban. Also cash out is also mystery. Obviously they cant use same bank address
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u/_mmmmm_bacon 10h ago
Why have them each on laptops set up as though someone will sit at it?
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u/audigex 9h ago
You still have to do some setup and configuration, presumably it’s easier if you can just sit down and do it rather than having to mess around?
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u/Lunchboxsushi 9h ago
Nawh, running headless is an issue, in this case they have an AI agent actually moving around the screen and interacting like a real user to avoid detection
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u/fate0608 9h ago
Bro the other day I played online and got this feeling that I get outplayed somehow. Like fr - I’m not saying I’m a great player but it felt off. I guess you can never know. 😵💫
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u/3FtDick 10h ago
I'm not even close to some savant at poker but for some reason my brain is bizarrely attuned to detecting bots in card games. I cannot explain it, but I just know when I am being colluded against, it "feels" a certain way. I regularly worked with two different online casinos to track and report these bot groups. To where I've had conversations with the guy running the bot group who's like yeah this is my job, they have a system to spin up sleeper accounts like nothing. At one point online poker was advantaged and you could do pretty well if you were moderately good at poker, but now it's almost unplayable, the bots are ubiquitous.
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u/dashuhn552 10h ago
Everyone here fails to realize collusion happens on real tables as well. Go to a casino; or a poker hall and land in a table of regulars and they will absolutely collude to bully you out (especially if you start winning. )
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u/PointToRight 10h ago
Which sites? Cash/tournaments? I feel like online is still profitable on the right sites. Many have decent enough RTA detection
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u/Mr-Klaus 7h ago
I love the fact that most criminals come with an inbuilt weakness where they have the irresistible urge to brag about and show off their crimes.
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u/FTG8888 5h ago
They aren’t colluding at all. There is basically no point in collusion. They are MDA bots. They use mass data analysis based on millions of online hands and use that to determine what action to take. If based on MDA they find player pool under x/r on A high board and overfolds to flop and turn barrels, the bot just bets 100% of range in that spot. Imagine there’s a spot when theory dictated a player should call 50% of the time and fold 50% of the time. If a player calls 45% and folds 55%, the optimal play is to barrel 100% of the time with any hand, bc they are overfolding. These bots aren’t running shit on ignition, in fact they are super beatable. They are just able to win enough off recreationals and shitregs to make up for what they lose to pros.
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u/abcdthc 4h ago
Theres a little point to colusion. If the bots are 6/8th or 4/6th of a table each one knows 8-12 cards missing out of the deck. In any given hand it might not make a difference or it could be a massive difference. Over a large sample size its printing.
If a player calls 45% and folds 55%, the optimal play is to barrel 100% of the time with any hand, bc they are overfolding. - this is only true in a vacuum. I do agree that a good chunk of th time (especially in zoom) it is playing in a vacuum, but not always.
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u/MythicMango 1h ago
How the heck do people have such bad morales to think this is ok?
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u/Darkkiller059 10h ago
Those are the same bot i argue with on reddit