December 20th, 2007 7:56 pm EST
Full Tilt Poker Makes Another Major Bot Bust
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A few months ago Full Tilt Poker busted a number of "bots" operating in their mid limit Heads Up Limit games. A substantial amount of money was confiscated from the "bot" accounts and redistributed to the victims, and the bots were banned from the site.
Now Full Tilt Poker has banned a number of other "bot" accounts. Actually, they banned these accounts about a month and a half ago, but just started distributing the seized funds yesterday.
"Bot" accounts seem to either prefer the really low limit No Limit Hold'em ring games or the mid limit Limit Hold'em games (heads up). The rationale for operating bots in both games is easy to see: in the case of the low limit No Limit Hold'em games, you could employ a fairly basic strategy of simply pushing all-in if you held a certain range of hands. Due to the weak play at these levels, you are going to get called by extremely weak hands. Heads Up Limit Hold'em is another obvious choice for people employing "bot" technology because the artificial intelligence needed to play a heads-up game is presumably much easier to program than in a short-handed or full ring game.
A few months ago, a number of "bot" accounts were banned from Full Tilt Poker, including "japinthesack" and "beatme1." Hundreds of thousands of dollars were confiscated and returned to the victims of the "bots."
Now, Full Tilt has banned another batch of bots operating in the heads up mid limit Limit Hold'em games. One of these accounts is "pokergirl z", who has apparently had about $47k confiscated from her account. There were a number of other alleged "bot" accounts banned as well.
The owner of the "pokergirl z" account has been posting on 2+2, proclaiming her innocence. As I said earlier, her account was actually banned about a month and a half ago, but Full Tilt Poker just recently started distributing her seized funds.
Her account was initially frozen on October 12th. After a number of weeks of investigation, Full Tilt banned her account permanently, saying that they had assessed her hand histories and "playing patterns" and had determined that she was using an artificial intelligence program. As per their usual policy, Full Tilt is being tight-lipped about exactly how they determined that she was "allegedly" a bot, but one can assume that they use statistical analysis, timing tells and maybe even screenshots of her desktop to come to their conclusion.
"pokergirl z" is obviously not pleased, but there is no way for her to really do anything as Full Tilt has the final say.
It makes you wonder how many alleged "bot" accounts are operating on Full Tilt or any other site at this exact moment.
Filed Under: Online Poker Rooms
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