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Confessions of a Botter
I don't think anyone would be surprised that Bovada was an easy target and/or looked the other way.
From 2+2:
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.
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Originally Posted by 4uk4life
