Winning network goes on the warpath with bots

Recently, WPN was marked by a non-trivial event: on one of the poker streams, a player who was broadcasting his game live, entered the HA of the tournament, where a real bot merged in a disciplined and accurate manner. No, there was no neon sign with the word "Bot" hanging over his silent opponent. Nevertheless, it was difficult to characterize in any other way an opponent who kept the same timings in all situations.

Moreover, emotional stress, it seems, is not alien to automated systems, otherwise it is difficult to explain why a bot, which reached the very end of a poker tournament, suddenly began to fold all of its cards exactly 6 seconds before the time for making a decision. The streamer, as you might guess, heroically defeated the opponent with mini-raises and dragged this tournament. However, the sediment remained. And not only from him, but also from thousands of other people who saw firsthand the unsightly face of online poker and the connivance of the Winning Poker Network security service.

WPN Management Response

There should be a journalistic cliché “the reaction was inevitable and lightning fast”. In fact, the leaders of the Winning poker network took a grandmaster's break and a month later took rather severe measures against all suspicious regular players of the Winning Poker Network. A requirement was made for the selected grinders of the network to undergo a special check. The conditions of the check included:

• The poker player was obliged to play a standard poker session at the usual number of tables (it is obvious that the cunning bot bots did not reduce the number of tables to a digestible minimum and could not continue their bad job);
• The session must be at least 90 minutes long;
• The shot must include a workplace, including a keyboard, mouse, monitor (s) for playing poker; there should also be an audio track with all the sounds of the game session and the player's face should be visible;
• Regulators must again send documents for re-verification.

Imagination is already vividly drawing a picture where the player sits in the family with a very focused face and clicks on the desktop, as if solving a problem on a galactic scale, and his mother takes it all on the phone for an hour and a half.

This check lasted for about two weeks. As a result, 12 fraudulent accounts were banned. Let's face it - sparsely. In comparison, partypoker recently carried out a large-scale purge of suspicious players and, as a result, 277 would-be botanists lost all their earnings. The figure of a dozen people looks even more insignificant against the background of the long-rooted dubious reputation of "a bot's paradise", which has long been famous for the Winning Poker network.

Sanctions and consequences of calculating fraudsters

In the framework of the new policy of "fairness and transparency", such checks will gain some regularity. The WPN will reimburse players $ 25,000 for each case of fraudulent play detected using artificial intelligence. The number is round and beautiful, but if the bot has been working for years, then the damage caused to other poker players may be incomparably greater. And for the very bot that triggered the activation of the anti-bot movement on the network, Winning Poker Network compensated the injured players over $ 175,000.

However, a start has been made and the fight against bots can only be welcomed. For tournament players, the identification of a fraudulent account promises complete oblivion for the offending player and the promotion of all honest players one step up in the tournament results.

What about software, Lebowski?

Separately, in their press release, WPN management went through poker programs and the prospect of their ban. Unlike other poker rooms and poker networks, Winning Poker has no plans to prohibit or tighten requirements regarding the use of permitted auxiliary poker software. Whatever one may say, the possibility of comfortable multi-tabling using WPN Tools Lite or programs for collecting and analyzing statistics (Poker Copilot 6 or DriveHUD) means a lot for online poker. This is not to mention more prosaic and obvious things, like a consistent analysis of your game based on the collected hand history.

Another real help in improving your poker skills is developing hand reading skills. This is where Ed Miller's How To Read Hands In No Limit Hold'em?