"The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker" (Bloomberg)
This is posted in the bot thread but I think it deserves a separate thread as its a good, well researched piece that is very relevant to the current online landscape.
The tweet link should provide un-paywalled access but here is another just in case.
I wondered about the resources that seem to have been spent on this article relative to the niche industry they are covering as he seems to have done a huge amount of digging and spent time on this article. After a little searching I see he has done recent stories on roulette and horse racing about people using technology to gain edges. These stories all seem to be part of a larger project he is working on releasing as a book.
He certainly did some extra investigation, including meeting with the developers, but a lot of the info included had been shared on this forum and gypsyteam years ago.
First mention here in the forums:
Corporation BotFarm - the biggest bot fa...
Some company files uncovered:
Bot farm uncovered and exposed.
Old American branch website:
Neo Poker Lab
New name and website:
Deeplay
Everything was originally posted on the Russian gypsyteam forum in the thread below.
BF Corporation - investigation and facts...
Thanks for posting those links. I wonder how many other companies like this are out in the wild but have stayed in the shadows. It is kind of crazy when you start to think how advanced all of this was in in 2019 and how far AI has development since that time in terms of what current day systems might look like and are capable of as completely autonomous systems.
I mean the story is obviously all true judging on the links provided by MCAChiTown. Did it ever get uncovered in any of those threads which sites were using house bots? This line from one of the threads is pretty scary and an angle I had never considered. Given how shady GG have been in the past, they seem from the big sites at least a lock to have used them in the past.
One of their business models is the so-called "eco-room". The idea is that the bot uses different strategies against regular and recreational players so that the latter wins and the former loses. The goal is to maximize the poker site's profit. They sign contracts with poker sites.
That software you linked looks old hat at this stage but maybe its state of the art for the clubs, I am not in the weeds on this stuff. Loads of companies offering software that scenescapes, feeds to a database and displaying the info to you as you are playing. There was an incredibly slick one based in the UK that was that was fairly new and openly advertising on YT up till a few months ago but they seem to have removed the videos.
I'd love to ask the bot creators from the article more questions purely from a curiosity point of view. Maybe they would do a Q&A? 
The original system they created seemed to be more MDA where it was then used this as a database of answers based off some data processing they were doing rather than training an AI. I presume people have combined the current GTO solutions with this kind of MDA analysis. This would mean the latest systems are using pool data to calculate the GTO solutions so in way you are being displayed an exploitive solution in real time? It doesn't feel like this should be that technically difficult.
Thanks for posting those links. I wonder how many other companies like this are out in the wild but have stayed in the shadows. It is kind of crazy when you start to think how advanced all of this was in in 2019 and how far AI has development since that time in terms of what current day systems might look like and are capable of as completely autonomous systems.
I believe what I read in one of the threads is that these guys gobbled up many of the other bot developers during the 2010s and then started leasing out their software so that most of the bots in operation were originating from them and connected to their "brain" as they call it. I think it's likely that there are other, smaller groups in operation, but probably not many, if any, that rival that scale and profitability of this botfarm operation over the years.
Did it ever get uncovered in any of those threads which sites were using house bots?
Only suspicions. I wish he would have gotten that information out of the developers when he met with them.
What I gather is that it's primarily the app clubs and some smaller sites that are using them for liquidity these days.
Translated so some of it may be a little strange but taken from that thread towards the end from some TG link.
To begin with, I would like to systematise all known information about BF (BotPharm).
So, BF was founded in 2005-2006 by Svyatoslav Kapustin and Valentin Yakunin. They recruited a team of promising programmers who wanted money, and were not particularly concerned with the way of its extraction.
The goal was to write a bot for playing poker and make money out of it.
At first they had little success, as there was no strong player to help them write the game algorithm. So in 2006-2007 they attracted a third accomplice - Vlasenko Peter Andreyevich (a well-known poker player at that time with the nickname Peter_Rus).
To cover their fraudulent activities, they first used the Primasoft group of companies owned by Kapustin.
With Vlasenko's arrival, things took off. BF's bots fraudulently won several million dollars, mostly playing limit hold'em at PokerStars.
Naturally, when sharing such profits, disagreements began to arise. To strengthen his position Vlasenko pulled in his friends from Poker Moscow - Roman Shaposhnikov, Vitaly Makarov (Bob) and Vitaly Lunkin.
Yakunin Valentin, although he was the originator of this group, was kicked out of the company. In retaliation, he leaked a list of bot accounts with BF money to PokerStars. PokerStars confiscated over a million dollars from these accounts.
This didn't stop the scammers and they continued their work, developing algorithms for different types of poker and increasing the number of sites where they continued their fraudulent activities.
In 2012, the OCG opened a new cover firm, LLC Progress, of which Kapustin became the founder. Around the same time, partners from the United States are brought in: Rob Gallo and David Fairlamb. An American branch of neopokerlab.com is founded (this site is still available). Fraud continues to make millions on poker sites.
The creation of top players who will carry weight in the poker community begins.
I will post the names of these players, and the reasons why I suspect them, later.
2016. New milestone. BF Corporation opens a new firm Neolab, the American name was to taste, and the name is already on the rumour mill. The Neolab group is made up of Neolab LLC, Neolab-Nsk LLC and Neolab-NT LLC. Petr Vlasenko becomes the founder of the first two. A new stage of business enlargement begins, the crooks have their own logo (clearly visible on the screens, which I have posted in the public domain), their own website. The OCG makes the first attempts to create a legal business with the money obtained by fraudulent actions.
Valentin Yakunin comes to visit me, I show him our island, entertain him as a guest, and he, having had a few drinks, tells me about the BF. I don't take it to heart as I've been away from poker for a long time.
Continued tomorrow....
As soon as Chinese apps start to take off, the bot-building boom begins. BF quickly captures this market, continuing to multiply its millions. Smelling the profits, Valentin makes a deal with BF and becomes their partner. Later he bragged to me that he had earned over 2 million in six months with only 35% of his total winnings. He also asked me if I knew any freelancers for his new project. I had an acquaintance, the leader of such a team, and I suggested that she contact Valentin and vouch for his honesty.
What was my surprise when she called me and told me that Valentin had ditched them after a few months of working together.I contacted him, but the matter could not be resolved. In fact, I was later contacted by his
and using original turns of speech and vague hints threatened me, saying that in case of what happened, ‘no prisoners will be taken’.
This is how my topic appears on GT, and then on 2+2. I must say that cheesy vanya tried from the very beginning not to give the topic a go. He even threatened to ban me. But, apparently, his employers from the BF realised that this would only cause more publicity, so they held him back.
After the topic appeared, Peter Vlasenko quickly resigned from Neolab's founders.and one Frolov becomes a founder.
What happens next is even more interesting. Frolov and his Neolab-Nsk are suing to have the defamatory material removed defamatory, in their opinion, but absolutely truthful information from my topic. The modders of GT (supposedly independent site) fulfil this demand with zeal, at the same time cutting out other companies and surnames.
Then deeplay Ltd. opens. With a new founder - Anton Moiseenkov (Purity). The site Neolab disappears and instead of it appears the site deeplay. Instead of vacancies in Neolab there are vacancies in deeplay. Strange? What happened? Did my theme somehow interfered with the scammers? It's possible. Because Google was quick to match Neolab to scammers. I guess that's why they had to rebrand it. I'm sure it was for nothing. I'd love to expose deeplay, too.
But, interestingly enough, almost simultaneously with deeplay Ltd. is created Neolab JSC, with the same
with the same address as deeplay Ltd. Well, that's the word fraudsters like. The founder of JSC Neolab is Polunin Alexander Yurievich.
I have not yet studied it, if there is information - please share.
I believe what I read in one of the threads is that these guys gobbled up many of the other bot developers during the 2010s and then started leasing out their software so that most of the bots in operation were originating from them and connected to their "brain" as they call it. I think it's likely that there are other, smaller groups in operation, but probably not many, if any, that rival that scale and profitability of this botfarm opera
That makes sense for the time period. This thread documented the first solver that seemed to be available privately around 2012-2013. That is why I said in a previous post, the early iterations of what they were doing was largely MDA coupled with programming the bots with conditional logic to pull from a database after some sort of data processing. It said in the article this was 3 terabytes in size at the time. This sounds very much like a sort of brute force approach. It make sense that all of the people involved would want to come together and pool resources because your still trying to figure out the bot stuff along with pooling resources for the database that is being used. That database is the secret sauce and considering most of it came I imagine from scrapping sites, it wouldn't have been re-creatable by just anyone.
Once though we get the introduction of the new approach, calculating the Nash Equilibrium, then pretty much anyone with resources/compute can run out a database of solves. This obviously gets easier as the compute improves. So we have the first iterations of a solver we know of around 2013, Pio appears around 2015 and then Noam Brown's team beat the top humans heads up in 2018.I think it was around 19/20 when I noticed lots of requests for freelancers to put together RTA systems on regular programming websites. Once you have the database, this is a fairly trivial app for most developers to build. I would say you have any number of fractions these days given how accessible it is for anyone to build.
When I played on euro sites between 2008 and 2010, I played a ton of these bots. Before the first ban wave I remember counting 44 accounts playing between 2/4 and 10/20 on Everest Poker alone, and I remember also playing those on Party and Ipoker. I know from 2+2 they also played at least on Prima, 888 and even some on FTP. A couple 2+2 threads from that era (there were many more):
What has been fascinating to me ever since, is that today still, doing machine learning for a living since 2017, I have no idea how they programmed their bots. They exhibited playing patterns that simply no one else exhibited in these games at that time, so these behaviors just cannot be learned using supervised learning on a massive HH database like some suggested. To me it really looks like emergent behavior learned from self-play at a massive scale. I thought about the 2 most known kinds of self-play:
- Deep Reinforcement Learning, but no one was doing this in 2008, the most popular training algos started appearing in 2013
- "Old-school" evolutionary algorithms, like genetic algorithms, but I'm not sure if it's even feasible in terms of representing the game state in a detailed enough way, and considering the computing power available at that time
Another possibility, maybe the most likely(?), is that they implemented some kind of heavily-bucketized Pio-like software with CFR etc, but all points tend to 2012/2013 for the first private solvers, so they would have been wayyy ahead.
You have to understand that in 2008 already, these bots were doing things at the table that the regs from this era were mocking, but ended up actually being part of a GTO strategy years later when solvers appeared, including:
- Implementing a balanced limping range in the small SB when absolutely no one else was doing this at these stakes
- Having a very small cbet sizing on most flops when everyone was using at least 2/3rd pot 95% of the time
- Having small overbets on the turn and big overbets on the river often, same thing, no one played like this
I wish these guys would come out and explain how they did it, it was 15 years ago, I guess no one cares anymore but it's been bugging me the whole time, this was an incredible feat of programming in my mind.
It would be great if Sauce could weigh in on what he knows from back then. I am not sure if he still posts here at all, but if anyone has a contact and could draw his attention it would be cool to hear some of his stories. I read he was into the botting side of things with his father and even entered the same completions the article mentions Neo Lab competed in back then. He would probably have far more insights than most outside getting the developers themselves to talk about what they were doing back then.
Here's an article from Jonathan Raab, who first encountered the bots on Jack Poker, and it's basically an extension to Kit's Bloomberg article. They shared the findings with each other but Kit didn't want to name any poker sites.
A Further Investigation into the Existence of the BotFarm Corporation
PokerPro – online poker – live poker – cash games poker
Here's an article from Jonathan Raab, who first encountered the bots on Jack Poker, and it's basically an extension to Kit's Bloomberg article. They shared the findings with each other but Kit didn't want to name any poker sites.
A Further Investigation into the Existence of the BotFarm Corporation
https://en.pokerpro.cc/poker-news/a-furt...
That is exactly the type of thing I imagined when I read the quote from the original 2+2 thread.
One of their business models is the so-called "eco-room". The idea is that the bot uses different strategies against regular and recreational players so that the latter wins and the former loses. The goal is to maximize the poker site's profit. They sign contracts with poker sites.
You are essentially able to create a honeypot in these sites for players. You could even control the experience they have by giving them a couple of winning sessions to start with as a positive experience after they begin playing on the site. Your getting to some kind of weird tailored AI poker grift to extract the maximum amount over time from a player without the need for any actual winning players on the site.
If you are currently playing on a site that you don't trust, I think their is probably only one of those currently. You are insane.
I understand that for some folks the play live option doesn't exist. But with all that is coming out about online poker why would anyone with live options play online? Of course, when this is mentioned the naysayers come back with you're just not good enough to play/win online. Well, it's your money and time so enjoy your delusions.
Lol...I remember Peter_rus from these forums waaaayyyyy back in the day. Also remember neo poker lab b/c you could play 6max against a table full of their bots. Guess I was unwilling training the bot. Probably the same thing with "Sonia" for anyone who remembers.
I was wary of online poker from the very beginning, without having much in depth knowledge of programming. As a more mature and experienced losing player (lol), I was called crazy by the majority of my friends when I mentioned potential in-house bots on GG. Where there is potential to make passive money in the world, someone will develop a way to maximize it.
Your getting to some kind of weird tailored AI poker grift to extract the maximum amount over time from a player without the need for any actual winning players on the site.
From the pokersite operator's perspective I don't think there has ever been a need for winning players. From their perspective winning players are a problem even, because if the losing players go broke too fast, they will stop playing, and the winning players will leave, meaning no more rake will be paid.
With that in mind, if you look to Deeplay's mission from the operators perspective, I can get how they can see it as a legitimate solution to an actual problem they are facing:
From https://deeplay.io/eng/#about
We develop robot animators for card games like poker, bridge, mahjong, preference. Animators create action in the game platforms and attract more users.
Deeplay mission is to provide a comfortable environment for gamers. Our robots employ different strategies to maintain in-game balance. So, non-professional players lose less, enjoy game more and keep staying in the game longer.
I mean, if you had gotten to the point of applying a PVI based reward system to address the problem above, justifying bots that win from regs and lose to fish while "providing liquidity" may not need that much jumping through mental hoops anymore.
Not saying I agree though, man this is a sad situation for online poker.
I agree with others that GG have certainly used these kind of services. It may be from other companies who developed similar technology in China but when they arrived on the scene they always talked about the game in this similar eco-room rhetoric that you see plastered around the Deeplay site. They had huge liquidity on the site from early on, other stories around loads of shady stuff that has happened around them and at the time when we had all the toad licking stuff, plenty of people were talking about their shady origin stories.
Deeplay look like they are a very big operation now. They claim to have over 500 staff and are openly advertising for all sorts of
.
I am wildly speculating :p
I would be very confident though that if you asked anyone who has been around the Poker community for a while who had a gun to their head to get this question right from a truth point of view, even Daniel. Do you think any stage GG has employed house bots on their site? Almost everyone would answer, yes.
There is a line that has stayed in my head since reading the article that the Bot makers said when interviewed. Something like, 'this is capitalism we just play in the system we are given;.
I think about how someone's morals stops them from using RTA online. Lets be honest here, that is really all it is, your not going to jail, the punishment is having an account closed (lol). It is literally some dumb internet game that is PvP anyway. On the other side of this you have people who at mass scale are taking probably hundreds of millions out of the ecosystem while saying its all part of the bigger system in which we live,.
We have aeroplane companies that believe its better to make planes cheaper and the stock price go up than keep them in the sky, corps that knowingly poisoning people, poker sites actively trying to make the games so player can't win . . . I could give such a long list of examples where no one seems to care anymore about doing the right thing.
We want some guy on the internet to hold himself to account while watching the world burn. Sorry this is a way off topic rant.
"it's all in the game"
There is a line that has stayed in my head since reading the article that the Bot makers said when interviewed. Something like, 'this is capitalism we just play in the system we are given;.
I think about how someone's morals stops them from using RTA online. Lets be honest here, that is really all it is, your not going to jail, the punishment is having an account closed (lol). It is literally some dumb internet game that is PvP anyway. On th
This here is what what we need regulation to prevent, but it's impossible. How can you regulate things that don't exist without preventing innovation?
Here's the contradiction we face and why we must accept and expect morality. If we don't, people are driven to max exploit rather than produce value.
This here is what what we need regulation to prevent, but it's impossible. How can you regulate things that don't exist without preventing innovation?
Here's the contradiction we face and why we must accept and expect morality. If we don't, people are driven to max exploit rather than produce value.
I don't want to derail this thread as I think the topic itself is very interesting and would love to hear from more of the people who were playing and have stores from back then. That said maybe they are all one in the same thing and even before this story broke this topic was being discussed in the, what's the point in playing thread. I am loathe to quote tweet Scamath for reasons Strasser outlines quite well but he does eloquently in this tweet capture my own views on what we are seeing. Poker is an early glimpse into what we will see AI do across the economy.
Sam put this out yesterday -
That is exactly the type of thing I imagined when I read the quote from the original 2+2 thread.
You are essentially able to create a honeypot in these sites for players. You could even control the experience they have by giving them a couple of winning sessions to start with as a positive experience after they begin playing on the site. Your getting to some kind of weird tailored AI poker grift to extract the maximum amount over time from
Interestingly, video game companies are allegedly employing matchmaking systems which primarily aim to maximize “player retention” rather than simply create fair matches. Instead of players naturally settling to a 50% wr around their skill level, the game artificially creates winning and losing scenarios to keep players “on the grind” so to speak.
The game Fortnite matches you against loosely disguised bots for your first 3 matches, maybe this is for calibration purposes but it also gives players a false sense of achievement right out the gates. The bots aren’t clearly marked as bots and named in ways such that new players could easily mistake them for other new players.
