Online poker operators around the world are in a constant battle against bots at the virtual tables. A new report now offers some insight on a complete “bot” operation believed to be based in Siberia that basically functions as a corporation that even franchises access to the system.
Bloomberg reports that the group is known as Bot Farm Corporation (or BF Corp.) and has absorbed other rivals in the region through the years. BF was started by a group of students who were into computer games and studied math, physics, and economics. The group began playing in the poker boom of the 2000s and online poker offered the chance at a higher income than what many of them might have found in Russia.
The students’ poker collective continued to grow and even attracted investors like a local real estate developer. Poker pros like Petr “Rus” Vlasenko also became involved and the group eventually transitioned into creating poker software as well, according to the report.
“In only a few years, they’d managed to substitute the human talent in their operation with an alternative that didn’t need to eat or sleep; that could connect automatically to a platform with minimal supervision by the founders and their friends; and that could sift through millions of potential scenarios to find the best move from a 3-terabyte database of past games, right down to exploiting a given opponent’s tendencies based on their record of play,” Bloomberg notes.
Poker Training To Bot Operations
The players’ software, named Neo, competed in competitions around 2013 and 2014. The group planned on releasing software for poker training at one point, and used Chris Moneymaker’s name to promote the software, apparently without his knowledge or approval, according to the poker pro.
The training aspect never developed, however, and by 2015 poker operators were using software to weed out bots. The Siberians then hired programmers to fine-tune their software to mimic the operations of a player at the online poker tables – everything from believable mouse movements, to realistic chatbox conversations, to using different time intervals to make decisions.
The operations also began to take the shape of a full-fledged company.
“The partners who ran the farms acted like independent franchisees,” Bloomberg reports. “Typically, they’d rent office space and computers, hiring employees to operate the software. The partners also needed hundreds of real people to open ‘clean’ accounts for the bots to use, supplying proof of ID if required. BF Corp. offered a menu of different brains, tailored to high- or low-stakes games, or to variants such as Omaha or five-card stud.”
Leaked emails and internal documents noted that at one point the operation was making $10 million annually by selling access to the system to individual “players.” BF also expanded into the growing phenomenon of online “poker clubs” in 2020 as well – and still operates today.
“The poker entrepreneurs from Omsk (Siberia) continue to sell their shovels,” the author notes. “They show little interest in how the bots are being used or who’s using them.”