What WPT Global is doing to prevent cheating

We talk to WPT Global President about online security, the future of othe game and the recent scandals in online poker.

It was a terrible start to 2024 for online poker with both a major bot scandal and a major super user scandal on other sites. What lessons did you learn from that from the outside looking in?

Alex Scott: Honestly, I am mad about this. It’s incredibly disappointing to see some of online poker’s largest operators failing to take game integrity and cybersecurity seriously, and I want to call that out for the gross negligence that it is. These issues are so important to the long-term health, sustainability and success of the game.

On the other hand, my hope is that it’s a wakeup call to the community. Once again these operators have shown you who they are. Believe them! Vote with your feet! Go play somewhere that takes the integrity of the game seriously, somewhere that will communicate with you honestly and openly, somewhere that you trust.

For quite a while I’ve had a sense that the poker community is full of apathy when it comes to online play. None of the big operators have the sense of goodwill that we used to have when I worked at PokerStars early in my career. Back then, people knew that they would be treated well when something went wrong. It wasn’t that game integrity issues didn’t exist - scandals happened. But there was such goodwill in the community - players knew that the big sites had their back and would make it right.

Now, people play at the big sites with a sense of reluctance. A kind of ‘Yeah, I know I can’t trust them, and they could screw me over any minute, but where else can I play’?

What I’m trying to do at WPT Global is give you that alternative. Somewhere you can trust, somewhere that has the excellent service that you might remember from the early days of online poker, somewhere that does the right thing, even when nobody's looking. It’s early days, and I know that the trust of the community is earned over time. We are going to work hard to earn that trust.

"Players should never have to investigate game integrity cases"

Results tracking sites and tracking software like PT4 have helped poker players uncover lots of cheating scandals over the year, why are both banned at WPT Global?

Alex Scott: I understand why you’re asking that question. Let me start my answer by saying that our entire business is based around the assumption that players should never have to investigate game integrity cases by themselves.

Game Integrity is absolutely core to what we do. A5 Labs is our technology supplier who provides the platform and the tools we use to keep players safe on the site. The founders of A5 Labs recently told me their origin story - they are successful business people and passionate poker players, who got cheated. When they got cheated, they were very frustrated by the response they got from the site. They ended up investigating themselves and producing mountains of evidence against the person who cheated them.

The whole experience - a lack of interest from the site, having to investigate themselves - made them think ‘we can do this better’. They founded A5 Labs to create the safest online poker software, with the best technology. Everything I’ve seen suggests that they have succeeded - more than 99% of game integrity cases are proactively generated without any input from players, and that statistic holds strong even for the types of cases where historically, players have used tracking tools to identify issues (bots and RTA).

It’s important to recognize that tracking software also comes with significant downsides, and as cheaters evolve their strategies, these downsides get even stronger. HUDs, a core part of tracking software, ruin the user experience. Tracking software enables players to target weaker opponents. More recently we are seeing legitimate software like PT4 being combined with very harmful software like RTA. When detailed hand histories are made easily available, they can provide an enormous advantage to cheaters that far outweighs the positives.

WPT Global has a player pool that is completely unique in online poker, and that we work hard to protect so that we can make the experience for recreational players as fantastic as possible. Over a third of players in that player pool are winning, and the typical win rates that good players achieve are much higher than on competing sites. Part of the reason for that is because we have a strong stance on third party tools.

Ultimately, we will reach a point where we give you the tools necessary to track your own play, so you can get insights into your wins and losses and make smart decisions. I don’t think we’ll ever fully endorse third-party software, except when used offline, when you’re not actively playing at the tables.

"We always ensure we have sufficient evidence before punishing players"

I’m sure you cant get into the specifics, but what can you tell me about how things have gone so far since you announced GTO Wizard as a security partner and their fair play check too launched?

Alex Scott: We’re excited that GTO Wizard is working proactively with us and other operators to address security concerns around their product. At this point, we have only agreed to implement the fairplay feature into our processes. We are still working closely with GTOwizard to explore additional areas for collaboration using their tools, and I’m optimistic that we will, but we’ve not come to any formal agreement yet.

Are you happy this partnership won't lead to too many false positives?

Alex Scott: Any partnership, proactive tool or detection mechanism needs to be calibrated correctly. If it’s not sensitive enough, you will not get any false positives but you will also miss genuine cases of cheating. If you calibrate with too high sensitivity, then you’ll get lots of false positives but you won’t miss any genuine cases.

Ultimately, we prefer to calibrate our proactive tools to be quite sensitive, so that we don’t miss genuine cases of cheating, and then it’s the job of our team to filter out the noise. When it comes to taking punitive action against accounts we always ensure that we have sufficient evidence and can justify our actions.

In short - yes, of course, we expect false positives to come from the GTO Wizard partnership, but this doesn’t mean that those false positives will turn into unfair actions against players. Our team is smart enough to filter out the genuine cases from the false ones.

"Most cheats are caught via automated systems"

Last month 888poker revealed how much they refunded players affected by bots and RTA in 2023, PokerStars have done something similar. Will WPT Global release similar information (and is there any you can share now)?

Alex Scott: We’re not ready to make this information public yet, because WPT Global is part of a poker network that shares liquidity with other operators and this affects them too. That said, we definitely want to be more transparent about this and we’re working on something that we’ll share in the future.

PokerStars revealed 95% of their cheats are discovered internally proactively, does WPT Global have a similar ratio where the internal measures outweigh players reporting their suspicions?

Alex Scott: The overwhelming majority of issues are proactively identified by automated systems (more than 99%).

I’m not sure why PokerStars’ number is as low as 95%, it could be a difference in how they measure things, but if I were playing there regularly, I’d want to know why.

You have a background in security. From your experience, are poker players being more proactive in reporting potential cheats than they did five or ten years ago?

Alex Scott: One of my very first roles in poker, back in 2006, was working on collusion cases (and later bots) at PokerStars. There were certainly a lot of reports back then and at the time, we were more dependent on player reports than now, because the proactive detection tools were much less advanced.

It’s difficult for me to tell if players are more proactive in reporting potential cheats these days. Today, players have more sophisticated tools available to them to analyze the game, so in theory, this could empower players to report more cheating.

I prefer to get more player reports than less. I would rather have the opportunity to talk to a player about their concerns and set their mind at rest, rather than the player feeling like they won’t be taken seriously and never contacting us at all. When players do report their concerns to us, the hit rate is high, and I don’t want to downplay the importance of this.

At WPT Global we probably incentivize player reports more than anywhere else, because of RIP (Rewarding Integrity in Poker), our whistleblowing program for game integrity violations. This program has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to players who have brought verifiable evidence of wrongdoing. These high-value reports have helped us to improve our tools and detect problems earlier, before cheaters can scale their operation to cause real damage.

"There might be a period where we have to give up some freedoms"

I have a view that the future of online poker will require us to give up some freedoms to ‘prove we are human’ when playing online. I think that will be true of lots of facets of online life. Can you see that future too?

Alex Scott: This is deep stuff Barry! I think there’s definitely some truth in what you say. For sure, it is necessary to be able to distinguish between human and AI-created content and interactions in lots of important scenarios.

It's getting difficult to distinguish between real videos and photos and AI-generated ones. Real human voices and AI-generated voices. Human-written academic essays and those written by ChatGPT. If we take the latter example, how are schools and universities going to cope with students using AI to write their essays or dissertations? Do they require students to be monitored under exam-like conditions as they write the essay, to prove that they are human? Or do they change the way that they assess students so that essays aren’t relevant?

Like you, I think there will be a period where we have to give up some freedoms, especially privacy, online in order to demonstrate that we’re human. One of the tools in our game integrity investigation toolbox, for example, is the webcam interview. We speak to players online and ask them questions about poker, or ask them to play under supervision so we can monitor what they do. This is a really useful way for players to exonerate themselves if they’re under suspicion, but obviously, it’s uncomfortable for the person being interviewed and we have to explain why it’s a fair and proportionate way of investigating a case.

Long term though, I think that people will find clever ways to make this easy on the end-user. Human verification will happen in the background or in a minimally invasive way. Maybe it’s a quick wave at the camera, or FaceID-style check, while you’re playing to demonstrate that it's a human at the controls. Maybe it all happens through real-time analysis of big data using machine learning models (which is pretty much how most game integrity tools work these days). Maybe it will be done using some sort of online ID system, tied to your Apple or Google ID. I’m not really sure how it will turn out, but I am optimistic that any ‘friction’ online will be seen as an opportunity by a smart tech company, who will try to solve the problem.