PokerScout: DoingPoker utilizing bots to boost traffic?
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Popular player traffic reporting site PokerScout ran a piece earlier this week about their suspicions regarding the use of bots at online poker room Doing Poker.
Doing Poker is a new room that is not part of a network.
PokerScout was careful to note that the suspicions were just that - suspicions based on observation of what PS considered unusual traffic patterns at DoingPoker. PokerScout lays out a fairly compelling case in the article. Excerpt:
Some players may consider the use of bots to be a harmless extension of the concept of proposition players, or props. Most players have no problem with playing against human props, but not everyone is comfortable playing against robots, especially when those robots are programmed and managed by the house.
Even if the bots are not cheating and are easy to beat, there is another thing to consider. A site which has almost no real players also has very little cash flow, and may have difficulty paying the players who do win. This is especially true when any money won on the site is likely to have been lost by the site’s robot players. In other words, unlike every other poker site, at DoingPoker the players are playing against the house, giving the house even more incentive not to pay out. There has been at least one unsubstantiated claim that the site refused to pay out winnings to a player.
As stated above, the existence or non-existence of bots cannot be conclusively proven by observation. Players are urged to do their own investigation and to use caution when deciding to play at a new site.
DoingPoker responded to an email from PoekrScout and denied the use of non-human players on their site. Excerpt:
DoingPoker.com has not been officially launched yet. We are still testing our software and for that purpose we have both modes available, play money and real cash. We have a testing facility that gives jobs to a lot of people and those we use, for playing money mode and also real cash games as well. We also use our own programmers in India, programmers in China and friends to help us test our software. Most of the people we have playing are not that much of poker savvy, but we get great feed back. DoingPoker.com does not have any kind of Bots as mentioned in your email to fill in spaces.
