WIll online poker beat the bots?
Is online poker in a fight for survival after major allegations of a botfarm were made at ACR?
It has been a terrible start for online poker in 2024. GGPoker discovered a super user on its tables, the first notable case of such a thing since 2007.
In any other time, this would have been the biggest talking point of the year, but ACR did something so stupid that we have all but forgotten about it.
In an attempt to calm fears about a botfarm taking $10 million from the player pool, they challenged the poker world to create their own bot. If it lasted 5,000 hands without detection, the creator would get $100,000.
They swiftly reneged on the challenge when it became clear they had set a very easy task for motivated computer geeks. In doing so they both managed to scare many into never playing online poker again and simultaneously put the idea of creating bots into the minds of the tech-savvy.
Bots are a bigger threat than super users
The ACR story is much, much, worse for poker in my opinion. A super user story is much worse PR because it is precisely what non-poker players worry about in the online game. That was down to a security glitch and was thankfully dealt with swiftly.
Bots represent a much bigger threat to the game in the long term and the fact that it was handled in such a flippant, even combative, way by ACR is very concerning. We often talk about what is good or bad for the game, but I think the ACR story has genuinely put off a lot of people ever playing online again.
It's frustrating because ACR is an unregulated site and we do not have anywhere near the level of concern about cheating on regulated sites like PokerStars, Unibet, 888poker, iPoker, WPT Global, and so on. Yet they may get tarred with the same brush because of ACR.
Another existential crisis for poker
Poker has been in existential crisis for as long as I have worked in the industry. Poker players were worried that televised poker was going to kill the game and make it unprofitable. The UIGEA was the next threat to the online game. Black Friday came around and that truly did look like it could kill off poker.
There was a time when tracking software and HUDs were talked about as the thing that would kill poker. Ironically it was tracking software that saved us from another existential crisis, the Ultimate Bet super user scandal. In more recent years solver technology has been the boogie man that threatened the game. In general, the concern about Bots has been ever present as long as poker has been played online.
My point is that there is always something that threatens the online game. That is the nature of anything where money flows so freely that there will be bad actors that try and ruin it for the rest of us. I have listed just a few examples but one could argue that many of the things we worried about actually helped poker in one way or another (Televised poker grew the game, HUDs helped find cheats, Black Friday made poker more regulated, solver technology is being used to find cheats).
We should be very concerned about what has happened in the last month and call it out as loudly as possible. The poker rooms want the game to survive just as much as we do and I hope that one day we look back at this time as being something that helped the online game shore up its defences. GGPoker have committed to doubling down on its security and ACR must realise they are in a fight for survival right now.
I may be naive because I don't have the technological acumen to fully comprehend the threat we face, but I remain optimistic about online poker. I think AI will assist us in finding cheats and the poker rooms will put a lot of money behind protecting the game. I suspect this will mean customers have to give up some freedoms to prove they are human, but that is a price most poker fans will be willing to make.
Does the Bot story concern you? Let us know in the comments:
