It is a constant struggle in the online poker industry to fight cheaters and frankly, online poker rooms have fallen well short time and time again for the past couple decades. There are many reasons for this: lack of effective detection technology, unwillingness to admit that cheaters abound, or even an acceptance of such accounts, as the more activity the better. Fortunately, as players have become more aware of things and regulatory pressures mount, the online poker rooms have been under more scrutiny and have stepped up their games when it comes to cheating and fraud detection. Partypoker, for instance, has begun a public effort to rid its room of bots and has once again announced that it has flushed a few dozen down the toilet.
In a recent blog post, partypoker revealed that it dumped 94 bot accounts in April 2019. Bots are a serious matter because they are able to play essentially flawless poker without fail (of course, “flawless” is relative, as the quality of the bot is up to the person who programs it). Unlike humans, automated poker programs do not let their decision making become clouded by emotion, they don’t miscalculate, they don’t chase losses, and they don’t get tired. Bots can certainly be exploited and most aren’t going to felt you in a matter of minutes, but solid ones are able to grind out small profit margins long-term with almost total reliability.
In the blog post, partypoker said 39 bot accounts were closed on the “dot com” site, with $143,908.10 confiscated from said accounts. That money will be going back to the players that were cheated by the bots. Players on partypoker reported 15 of those accounts.
The other 55 bot accounts were on the “dot eu” partypoker site, which servers customers in France and Spain. Five of those accounts were originally spotted by players and €34,546.17 was confiscated.
Partypoker encourages players who see something suspicious to e-mail reports@partypoker.com.
Last month, partypoker made its first official bot purge post, announcing that it closed 277 bot accounts between December 1st, 2018 and March 31st, 2019. $734,852.15 was given back to customers. In that post, partypoker said that more than 75 percent of the bot accounts that were closed were caught by its new fraud team.
The poker room has promised to provide monthly updates on how many accounts it has closed. Skeptics might say this is just a public relations ploy, but it is good to hear from the poker room and to see concrete progress made toward cleaning up the tables. There was a time when online poker rooms wouldn’t allow even a peek behind the curtain, almost to the point of being offended that customers would ask about how the companies were protecting players. And though we should not expect partypoker or any online poker room to divulge security secrets, lest a cheater figure out how to skirt detection, it is good to see partypoker making an effort.