Nearly $175,000 seized from bot accounts
Continuing its crusade against rule breakers, partypoker announced on Wednesday that it closed another 121 online poker bot accounts in July. Most of the bot accounts – 89 of them – were on the international .com client, while the rest were on the .eu site.
Most of the money that was confiscated, though, was concentrated in the .eu bot accounts. Those accounts accounted for €88,351, or approximately $98,070. PokerStars seized $76,267 from the .com accounts.
In a blog post, the poker room said: “partypoker continues to invest in resources aimed at safeguarding the safety of its players, spearheaded by a specialist Poker Fraud Team comprising a collection of former poker professionals whose duty is to investigate suspicious activity and aid partypoker in ridding the site of unscrupulous accounts.”
Poker bot users are cheaters
Online poker bots are automated programs that play poker with little or no human intervention. While many bots are not necessarily better at poker than humans, they still pose a significant problem. Poker bots do not get tired, do not go on tilt, and do not get distracted. They can play many tables for as long as their user wants them to.
When we hit a mental or physical wall, an online poker bot keeps going.
Because of all of this, a bot that is programmed to play a solid game of poker will almost always outplay a human in the long-run. When we hit a mental or physical wall, an online poker bot keeps going. They generally eke out a small win rate, but over countless hours and multiple tables, the money adds up.
Botters typically get caught because they want more. When they find that they have a winning bot, they often deploy it on more accounts. Those accounts naturally have the same patterns of play and eventually raise red flags.
More than 600 bot closures since December
partypoker began providing monthly updates on its online poker bot captures back in April. At that time, it said that it had closed 277 bot accounts from December 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019.
The poker room spoke of a Poker Fraud Team “comprising a collection of former poker professionals who are equipped with the necessary knowledge and expertise to investigate suspicious activity.”
partypoker revealed that more than 75 percent of those account closures were the result of detection by the Poker Fraud Team.
All told, partypoker has seized $1,176,364.57 from bot accounts.
