Most of the Hands on This Poker Site Were Played by Bots

If you've never heard of QQPK, you're not alone. It's an online poker site that only turned up on the industry's tracking databases back in April, serving mostly Asian markets, running on a gaming licence from Anjouan in the Comoros. I even had a friend reach out to me a few months ago trying to get me to play on it.

Then one fastidious poker coach decided to go through its hand histories.

They post as MTT Database Review, they are anonymous, and they do it for the love of the game. Over three months they pulled 24 million player-hands across 3.78 million hand histories out of QQPK's tournaments, which is the kind of volume most poker sites would need a security department to process. Their conclusion, published on Wednesday, was that roughly 17.5 million of those hands, more than 70 percent of everything played on the site, were played by bots.

They put the number of bot accounts at around 12,000. Then, rather than simply asserting it, they published a list of 11,469 of them on a public page where anyone can check the work.

A poker bot is software sitting in a human's seat. It never gets tired, never tilts, never misreads a spot, and it can grind dozens of tables at once while its owner sleeps. On a normal site, a handful of them quietly skim money off everyone else. On a site where seven hands in ten are machines, you are not really playing poker. You are feeding a server farm.

Anyone can run filters over a database and find patterns. Torture the numbers long enough and they confess to anything. So MTT Database Review ran the identical filters over a similarly sized database of PokerStars tournaments, as a control.

Zero hits. They loosened the criteria. Still zero. They loosened them significantly further and turned up three players, all of whom looked like ordinary bad recreational players.

The accounts themselves were not subtle either. Hundreds of them follow identical naming templates, which is the digital equivalent of a thousand people turning up to a casino wearing the same outfit.

To be fair to QQPK, it has not denied there were bots.

Three days before that analysis landed, following a separate community investigation on the Two Plus Two forum that flagged 2,587 suspicious accounts, the site announced it had permanently banned 724 of them for "unauthorized automated play and serious violations of our Terms of Service." It has since published an investigation report promising $300,000 in remediation.

So: 724 accounts banned by the company that runs the games and holds every hand history on its own servers. Around 12,000 identified by one anonymous person working from the outside.

QQPK has promised a fuller report, reproducing the analysis against its own server records. That was due on October 17.

Which brings us to the part that should bother anyone who plays online.

MTT Database Review did this with third-party tracking software. That is how you pull hand histories in bulk and hunt for patterns no human could produce. It is the same way a coach named Patrick Howard analyzed 32,780 hands last month and flagged the player at the center of poker's hole-card malware scandal. These guys deserve immense credit, they are shining lights in an increasingly dark online poker world.

This week, GGPoker, the biggest poker site on earth, banned all third-party software from running alongside its client. PokerTracker, Hand2Note, Holdem Manager, the lot of it.

The stated reason is security, and after the malware business that is not an unreasonable position. But the practical effect is that the only people who can examine the data from here are the people running the games.

For twenty years, online poker's immune system has been players checking each other's numbers. It is being switched off, one site at a time, in the same month it caught two scandals the operators missed. The only reason anyone knows about QQPK is that somebody with a database and three months to spare decided to look. Poker sites are making this kind of peer-review increasingly difficult.