Poker Bots are still a problem for operators

The game of cat and mouse continues as online poker bots, i.e. automated scripts that play poker hands without human intervention, are once again swarming on a few poker websites.

In particular, the Winning Poker Network has been under fire lately for having a large bot population. It is not surprising that poker bot operators would try to run their programs on the WPN, since it has robust rakeback and vip programs that pay quite a bit of money to “grinders” who play tens of thousands of hands per month. Bots, since they aren’t human and do not fatigue, are often run 8-12 hours per day and subsequently play a large volume of hands. Thus, they pay a lot of rake, and tend to earn a lot of kickback rewards from the rakeback and VIP programs.

These bots tend to operate on the principal of screen-scraping, i.e. reading the action in a game of poker by tracking certain pixels on the screen to note whether a certain action has been taken by other players, or to take a certain action themselves.

The WPN, which includes America’s Cardroom, Black Chip Poker, True Poker, Ya Poker, Poker King, and a few other odd 3rd party brands, finally figured this out and took action against the bot operators.

A ton of them were shut down, balances confiscated, and players reimbursed with the confiscated funds.

However, not all players are satisfied with the response claiming WPN waited too long to take action. I can’t help but agree, they took their sweet time figuring out something that I figured out in about 10 minutes of looking at poker bot focused websites.

In any case, here is a more detailed news story if this sort of thing interests you.