A player called ''themadbotter'' claims he has won over $30,000 by running bots in the WPN and Bovada networks.
Last week, a poster called ''themadbotter'' started a thread on the 2+2 forums titled Confessions of a Botter (ACR/WPN). The poster shared some interesting details about his operation of running bots in Americas Cardroom. He has profited over $30,000 in a 6 month period and said the following about his success:
''I have decided to retire from botting and focus my energy on something more meaningful. I have carefully timed this post after steadily withdrawing all funds from ACR. I hope to shed some light on the current economy of botting and to help people understand the relationship between botting and poker sites. Over the past 6 months, my bot has played 500k+ hands on ACR mostly at 50-100NL. With various promos and bonuses factored in, it has generated around $30k of profit. I can't give much more details on results because, despite the fact that I don't have any money tied up in the network, WPN still has all my personal information and I would prefer to remain anonymous.
Currently, there are quite a few viable solutions for prospective botters to help connect the bot engine to the poker room. **** and **** accomplish the task well, but they have some technical limitations; **** is a open-source project that is better for custom-building a bot for a specific system and poker room. Plug-n-play systems generally require minimal technical expertise whereas **** and similar frameworks will require intermediate programming experience. In general, bots in 2016 all come equipped (or can be equipped) with stealth technology that will remove any overt indications of the software running during a session; they will generally show up as some nondescript process running in the background on task manager.
Finding or building a bot is the easy part. The more time consuming endeavor is getting the bot to play well. Plug-n-play bots generally come preloaded with profiles that--at best--are capable of playing slightly winning poker at the lowest limits or freerolls. There are forums and marketplaces where a botter can buy better profiles, but these can't play very profitably above 10NL on most sites. The best solution is to write your own profile. This used to be the barrier to botting a couple of years ago but with the proliferation of PPL (or oPPL), it now takes only a couple of hours to learn the syntax of coding your bot profile. Making it play exceptionally well is still extremely time-consuming and it requires a lot of trial runs and hand history reviews. For me, it took me about a week to write a profile that played well enough to beat 10NL and about a month of reworking that profile to beat 50nl at a solid clip. Over the course of the next few months, I steadily improved the bot's performance based on manual review of hand histories and results.
If you construct a good bot, it is impossible for other players to suspect the bot. For example, in addition to the stealth, my bot would randomly sit out and take breaks every couple of hours, never played for more than 6 hours at a time, frequently switched tables and joined waiting lists (with the aid of a hopper software), misclicked every so often, typed short comments in the chatbox on rare occasions, and had randomness built into the playing profile. It wouldn't always play the same hand the same way, wouldn't always play a missed flop the same way, wouldn't always valuebet the same amount, etc., and would use the half-pot/2/3 pot instead of typing in weird bet amounts. Around month 3 is when the bot really took off, after I worked tirelessly to integrate a Poker Tracker database with the bot profile. Depending on VPIP, aggression, cbet%, fold to cbet%, etc., and overall results of a particular opponent, the bot had close to 15 different 'branches' of play. It would play a nit much differently than it would a lag, a fish differently than a rock. It would exploit players based on tendencies: e.g. those who folds to 3bets too often, those who 3bet light OOP, those who folded to positional cbets unless they had top pair+, etc.
50nl was the bread and butter, and 100nl was profitable to a smaller degree. I never attempted 200nl because the reg pool thins out a bit and the overall better caliber of players made me hesitant to throw a bot in there: 1) because it would take constant reconfiguration to adjust to the regs adjusting to the bot, and 2) because the small pool of better regs might discover the bot's existence much faster. I was happy sticking to the lower levels, because for me, it was more about the technical challenge of the project, not necessarily the money.
I would suspect that probably 10-15% of the players on ACR 50nl and below are bots. Most probably run ****ty bot profiles, some are probably part of a larger bot ring (these are mostly operated by eastern and northern Europeans) that share hand information during the course of play (i.e. colluding bots). The single-operator bots (mostly US operators) that are good will be good enough in both play and acting 'human-like' to avoid any suspicions. In general WPN and Bovada don't mind bots. As long as the bot isn't the target of multiple complaints from a whole bunch of players, both sites are pretty bot-friendly. Bots pay good, steady rake and seldom complain about anything on the site.
There were a couple of skeptics in the thread who didn't believe that he would give up such a lucrative venture and he answered the following:
" I'll attempt to answer some of the questions.
*Please note that my OP has been edited by a mod so as to censor the software stacks for botting so I assume that I cannot go into too much technical detail.*
I think a lot of people are surprised as to why would a profitable botter would quit? The surprise is based on an underestimation of exactly how much work it takes to maintain a successful bot. It's not a "set it and forget it" system. I have to check through the hand histories every day after a session to make sure the bot didn't display any major leaks, that it didn't do something weird, had to check connection logs to make sure there were no unusual downtimes. Even after the bot was profitable, I would notice and subsequently correct small bugs. Poker is a game where there are too many 'unusual' possible situations to code for all them before-the-fact. It's an endeavor of constant re-writes, additions, and modifications of a ever-expanding body of code. I had both the time and passion to put in the hard work during graduate school. However, I am beginning a more lucrative career this September and it's just not worth it to me to have to come home to put in a second shift of having to stare at a computer screen for hours.
To be honest, my original plan was just to do it as a proof-of-concept; I sort of stayed on for a few extra months just out of greed I guess. I think I am happy with how things turned out and I am happy to quit while ahead to start the next phase of my life. For some time i debated selling off the profile code to interested parties but have since decided against it.
The second most common sentiment seems to be about whether I feel guilty or not. The answer to that is a resounding NO. I suppose I don't consider myself a cheater. I didn't share any hand-histories or real-time data and I was not part of a bot ring. I probably put in more hours studying sessions, opponents, and general gameplay than 90% of profitable players. Botting is easy, botting well is not. It's not as if the bot suddenly turned me into a winning poker player. I was a good cash game reg before (on a different site) and a big part of the reason why I was able to construct a good profile was because I was a solid player with close to 2M hands of 6-max playing experience.
The last undercurrent that I want to touch on is why I would bother writing this thread. I had actually planned to do this thread when I first started looking into botting. I told myself that if I was able to do it successfully, I would one day make a post detailing the experience. It's sort of my "I outsmarted the sites and beat the game on a whole new level" brag. Unlike regular players, a botter can't go into the 6max forums and start posting graphs or subtle-bragging about their results. It's months of unappreciated work and staying off of people's radar. This is the first, and probably only time, I can talk about the successful completion of a project that I put a lot of time and effort into, and one with results I am quite proud of."
Themadbotter has also answered a couple questions regarding the security measures that various rooms take against botters and whether Pot Limit Omaha games are safe.
He answered that he has never tried running bots in other rooms because his screenname was already known in most other rooms by the regulars and the frequent software updates also make botting difficult in these rooms.
Big rooms are pretty effective at detecting bot activity which makes the risks too big, but there are rooms which are quite bot-friendly, such as Bovada. The reason for this is the fact that most bots are reported by players and Bovada games run anonymous.
Themadbotter also said that PLO bots are easier to program in theory, because the Pot Limit Format vastly decreases the number of available betsizes.
Most players were angry at Themadbotter for cheating, however much work he put into it, but also welcomed some of his suggestions, such as staying away from Americas Cardroom and Bovada.
We would like to advise all our players to report any suspicious activity that they see in any of the rooms they frequent!
