The Winning Poker Network (WPN) has declared war on bots. Speaking on TwitchTV this week, WPN CEO Phil Nagy said that enough was enough: it was war and “there would be casualties.”
WPN has been criticized for not doing enough to combat the use of bots on its network. This situation was highlighted last week when a self-confessed botter appeared on the 2+2 forums to explain that his bot had won $30,000 from the network in six months, and, having withdrawn the funds, he now intended to retire from botting in order to pursue “something more meaningful.”
The cheat, known as “themadbotter” on the forum, explained how he was able to hoodwink the network and its players by programming his bot to randomly sit out and take breaks every couple of hours.
Moreover, the bot would never play for more than six hours at a time, he said. It frequently switched tables and joined waiting lists. It would mis-click every so often, and was instructed to type very occasionally short comments in the chatbox. In short, the madbotter’s bot was very human indeed.
Single Biggest Deterrent for Botters
To add insult to injury, themadbotter accused unregulated networks like WPN of tolerating bots because they “are the best type of customers for many sites.”
“They play a lot of volume, fill up the tables, and pay rake; they wait patiently for deposits/withdrawals; they never complain or pepper support with e-mails,” he said.
This was a bridge too far for Nagy, who said that within 30 days WPN would become the most bot unfriendly network around. He had, he said, come up with the “single biggest deterrent for anybody who wants to even think about doing bots.”
“I will make mistakes, I will ban real money people, and I will ban real people because they seem like bots, and I will be merciless about it,” said Nagy.
“To do this right, you gotta draw a line in the sand, if you end up being a casualty of war … collateral damage, I apologize, but this is what the people want,” he added.
Themadbotter Strikes Back
With this, themadbotter, who had disappeared from the 2+2 thread after becoming spooked that another poster might have figured out who he was, suddenly popped up again.
“ACR CEO was on Twitch earlier and promised that at the end of the month, the site will become very bot-unfriendly; that botters will no longer be able to operate with complete impunity,” he posted.
After which he wrote simply:
“Challenge…”
Look out WPN, themadbotter is coming out of retirement.
