Behind the Curtain: The Russian Bots Taking Over Online Poker
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It was a "glimpse behind the curtain". That's what Bloomberg Senior Writer Kit Chellel told PokerNews about his latest article published late last week.
In 'The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker', the award-winning journalist writes about Bot Farm Corporation (or BF Corp.), a Siberian bot farm founded by Russian students that offers botting services to players. It also offered bots to poker sites to artificially inflate their liquidity.
PokerNews spoke with Chellel to dive deeper into the topic and get his thoughts on botting and its impact on the poker industry.
The Elephant in the Room
Chellel spent a year researching the article and says that, before writing it, he was aware of the problem of botting poker but didn't know its extent. Now, having attended live tournaments, played online, and interviewed countless members of the poker industry, he says that people in poker just weren't acknowledging the elephant in the room.
"I asked almost everyone I met, 'Do you worry when you’re playing online that there are going to be bots?' And they said they knew about it but didn’t worry about it. It felt to me after a while that poker exists in a kind of world that no longer is reality. It's still in the world before this technology came along and hasn’t quite adapted to it yet."
The article has been covered by a wide range of poker media outlets, and Chellel says that its publication led to conversations about bots, which he thinks are "overdue."
"The game has changed, and in the last five years, this technology has become more widespread and much cheaper. I think you just have to be aware that it exists."
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Russia and the Bot Farm Corporation
Much of the article is centered on Russia, with the current geopolitical landscape making it difficult for actual reporting to occur in Russia. Chellel would eventually meet those behind Bot Farm Corporation (or BF Corp.). in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, but he says that Russia is still the "center of gravity" for the practice of online poker botting, in part due to the level of technical skill on display in the country.
"Russia is the sort of habitat where bot makers can thrive, for the same reason that computer hackers do. There are a lot of highly educated, technically-minded people, and probably not quite as many opportunities for them as they might have if they lived in California, for example.
"So that makes these kind of activities that are sort of lucrative grey markets, shall we say, enable you to use your expertise to make a bit of money quite appealing."
As exemplified in the Bloomberg article, this expertise is being used in the Siberian city of Omsk, on the Russia-Kazakhstan border. There, BF Corp., founded by Russian students, set up shop and slowly expanded. Other groups merged with BF Corp., while professional poker players offered their expertise and external investors provided the necessary backing.
Slowly but surely, it expanded, and the organization is now a fully-fledged corporation with HR teams and recruitment programs cherry-picking math, physics, and economics students from top Russian universities.
"I certainly didn’t expect this practice to be so deeply embedded in the DNA of poker"
"What surprised me most," said Chellel. "Was that I had an idea in my head of what a poker bot operator would look like, which was some guy with computers in his garage making a bit of money on the side. I hadn’t expected it to be so systemic and organized. It’s as organized as any tech start-up you could imagine, and that gives them a big advantage. I certainly didn’t expect this practice to be so deeply embedded in the DNA of poker."
By 2012, they'd created "the world’s most advanced poker-playing software" that was being used profitably on every major poker website. Having met those behind BF Corp., Chellel says they were proud of their work and the years of progress needed to achieve their goals.
"It’s extremely hard to create a winning bot that wins enough. It’s not difficult to use software that can play basically unbeatable poker, but that’s not what sustainable bot management is. Sustainable bot management is creating a bot that wins just enough and looks like a human.
"That’s their real skill set, and it’s taken them decades to get it right, and they’re justifiably proud of these technical achievements."
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A New Kind of Bot
Fast-forward to 2020, and a new company called Deeplay was set up, with offices in Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg. The difference here was that these bots were not for players but for operators. This meant they could populate poker lobbies with "liquidity bots" that masquerade as real money players.
By using these bots, operators can create the illusion of a healthy player base, which can be especially important for newer sites. By adjusting the win rates of these bots, operators can ensure players win just enough to extend their sessions and play more often while still losing in the long run.
Although the major customers for this type of bot were online clubs, Chellel says he doesn't think it's exclusively to this area of the industry.
"Online poker is crowded with new entrants, and I think that new entrants are definitely using these tools as well, simply because you don’t really have a choice.
"If you launch your poker website from scratch, even if you get a blaze of publicity, you won’t have full tables for the first few weeks, maybe months. And if it’s such an appealing, affordable solution to that problem, you can’t imagine they’re not using it.
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Bots Still a "Thorny" Issue
Whether it's GTO bots that are impossible to beat in the long run by real players or liquidity bots artificially inflating tournament prize pools and average player numbers, bots remain a "thorny issue" says Chellel. Part of the problem, he says, is that having to acknowledge this problem publically is an issue for many poker sites.
"Even the best gaming integrity teams and methods can never be perfect," he said. "There is no perfection here. It is simply impossible to have a poker site without bots. There will always be them.
"Even if you detect them very quickly, you’re relying on methods that take many, many hands to identify what is definitively a bot. So there will always be burner accounts that come on, use bot technology, and leave again. I’m not sure there is any way to stop that happening. You can limit it, but you certainly can’t prevent it."
"It is simply impossible to have a poker site without bots"
While many sites continue to expand and improve their game integrity methods, the industry is still locked in an arms race between the botters and the sites. However, this arms race continues to swing back and forth.
"When you have fully staffed corporations employing physics PhDs and computer programmers who are dedicating all their time to getting around your game integrity systems, they’re going to find ways to do it."
Questions for the Poker Community
One of the reasons why poker grew in popularity in the first place is the concept of incomplete information. Players do not know their opponent's cards, which makes poker exciting. But now there's a new question of incomplete information that players should be aware of, and it's got everything to do with bots and who you're up against at the online felt.
"Playing online poker – how do you know which [sites] are most effective in excluding bots? How do you know that what you’re playing against isn’t a Russian market-bot that is playing GTO poker designed to bleed your money over the course of hours? How do you know you’re not playing a liquidity bot that’s been put there by the sites to play a level of poker designed to keep you playing longer? You can’t know that.
"I didn’t write the story as a reckoning for the poker industry, per se. I just thought it was worth it for people who play poker to know that this is how the world of poker really works if you look behind the curtain. And I think the starting point for adapting to this new reality is the players realizing that this goes on."
