Is online poker in a fight for survival after major allegations of a botfarm were made at ACR? Alleged bots at ACR It has been a terrible start for online poker in 2024. GGPoker discovered a super user on its tables, the first notable case of such a thing since 2007.
In any other time, this would have been the biggest talking point of the year, but ACR did something so stupid that we have all but forgotten about it.
In an attempt to calm fears about a botfarm taking $10 million from the player pool, they challenged the poker world to create their own bot. If it lasted 5,000 hands without detection, the creator would get $100,000.
They swiftly reneged on the challenge when it became clear they had set a very easy task for motivated computer geeks. In doing so they both managed to scare many into never playing online poker again and simultaneously put the idea of creating bots into the minds of the tech-savvy. Bots are a bigger threat than super users
A super user caught at GGPoker The ACR story is much, much, worse for poker in my opinion. A super user story is much worse PR because it is precisely what non-poker players worry about in the online game. That was down to a security glitch and was thankfully dealt with swiftly.
Bots represent a much bigger threat to the game in the long term and the fact that it was handled in such a flippant, even combative, way by ACR is very concerning. We often talk about what is good or bad for the game, but I think the ACR story has genuinely put off a lot of people ever playing online again.
It’s frustrating because ACR is an unregulated site and we do not have anywhere near the level of concern about cheating on regulated sites like PokerStars, Unibet, 888poker, iPoker, WPT Global, and so on. Yet they may get tarred with the same brush because of ACR. Another existential crisis for poker
Will AI help us tackle cheating? Poker has been in existential crisis […]
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