In the matter of countering the dishonest game, which some irresponsible citizens are undertaking through special bots, progress has appeared. Recently, two such accounts were identified and blocked on the oldest poker network WPN.
This was a consequence of John Ingram's demarche, which he took in order to bring the problem of bots to public discussion. Despite the fact that such a hype negatively affects the image of gaming operators, WPN's decision does her credit, as it sets a precedent for other rooms as well.
The situation was like this. Eric Collier, known in the poker world as TheKamist, played on American Cardroom, which is part of WPN, and also streamed on Twitch. The tournament was quite ordinary - the participation fee was $ 16.5, a guaranteed prize pool of $10 thousand.
In the heads-up were Eric himself and a certain FoxRox, who suddenly began to behave, to put it mildly, inadequately. He folded the button and the small blind, and during the big blind every now and then made a minimum 3bet, and always at the nine-second mark.
Naturally, Collier's subscribers drew attention to these nonsense, as a result of which the video received a large number of views, including from the WPN security service. Based on the results of the consideration, it was decided to close the FoxRox account and withdraw more than 175 thousand dollars from it in order to return them to the players from whose accounts they were debited in his favor.
It is curious that WPN decided to return the entire unjustly received amount before the rule came into force on debiting from the bot to reimburse the victims of no more than 25 thousand dollars. That is how much was removed from Gluckauf - such a login was on another suspicious account.
Both he and FoxRox came from Latvia - during the investigation, WPN security guards tracked the localization of both accounts. In total, almost 5.5 thousand network users suffered from their actions, which indicates the serious scale of such a negative phenomenon as bots.
The WPN case is the second landmark in the operators' fight against foul play. PartyPoker pioneered the successful anti-bot countermeasures, where 277 fake accounts were blocked in four months, and nearly $ 735,000 were returned to users affected by their actions.
