The discussion was opened by an unknown user, who has since deleted their account:
[deleted]: "Like ,I don't understand what's stopping people from just opening a solver and using it to play every move online and winning at 15bb/100, do poker sites have a way to detect this like chess sites that can detect engines?"
Yes, It's Easy! Arguments For Cheating Being Simple
Thejoggler44: I think more often online cheating is done with collusion at the table. Get a few people who share identities of hole cards & the team can get a pretty good edge.
TylerRM: This notion is a holdover from movies like "21," where a group of players would cooperate and share their knowledge of cards to beat the casino. In practice, online, this only applies to Omaha (due to the four cards in hand instead of two), but even there, some poker rooms have introduced a rule that a player's discarded card can be dealt on the next street to minimize the damage from potential cheating.
[deleted]: This is a laughably naive take. Online poker is rampant with cheating. Sure, the "decent" online sites do have some anti-cheat software. Overall, their software is atrocious and roughly 15 years behind the curve in terms of information security, KYC, and AML laws.
Even the best online poker sites will not be able to detect a sophisticated VPN -- there goes the theory about frequently joining tables together. Higher than average win rates -- a sophisticated cheater will not make their win rate blatantly obvious. Precisely table select online -- what? That's exactly what you can do in online cash. Obviously much harder to do in a tournament with random seat draws.
I work in software development. I have spoken to some of the top white hat hackers in the world. Online poker is compromised, and no one should play on any site if they value their money (unless you're a cheater, in which case have fun!)
TylerRM: So, it turns out that online poker is compromised, but at the same time, there are plenty of players who come to poker off the street and become winning regulars in MTTs within six months. In cash games, a group of players whose results I track at midstakes consistently shows 7-8 bb/100 every month. Darwin consistently hits seven figures every few years. It's one thing to find a loophole like MoneyTaker69 or PotRipper and win unfairly for a week; it's quite another to win unfairly at poker over a long period of time. The latter is much more difficult, since both the poker rooms and other players have a vested interest in minimizing loopholes, and as soon as they're exposed, they're closed.
[deleted]: Has happened since Omaha 8. That was nearly 15 years ago when Cottonseed and those other two players dominated O8. People 100% are using solvers online. Ali and Jake used a solver all the time with their stable supposedly according to Matt Berkey. Saying the reason they got banned is they played with 100% accuracy.
TylerRM: As far as I know about Ali Ismirovich's situation, his strategy was based on research and pressure to exploit the board. Despite being banned for using a solver, he didn't follow its advice very often in borderline decisions.
Emergency-World-4883: My understanding is if they do have bots which I'm sure they do they're not so much independent as their mimics to their host whoever they may be. I also think the sites themselves or apps have their own bots. And as far as colluding with other players I don't think there's any way they could detect that if done right and not blatant. Every person that's at home could have another friend or associate be sitting right next to one another playing poker on their desktop or laptop and or phone.
TylerRM: Large rooms and apps don't have their own bots, but smaller ones do. Botfarm initially planned its operations as a way to provide liquidity to small apps so that when a real player came to play, they could be offered a game at any time.
Narrow_Cup_6218: If you are not cheating even in small ways, you are in the minority. Semi serious players i know petsonally from doing it have groups of 15 in discord sharing screens and hole cards, larger stables even more. Not hard for a few to end up at same table especially late when $ matters. Obvi there are levels to cheating w bots>rta>super users etc. Don't be naive. You can still win w plenty of study n good game selection but you are still being cheated, most likely heavily.
TylerRM: Semi-serious players are semi-serious for a reason: they share their hole cards, send screenshots to each other, and expose themselves to bans and shaming in the community when it's discovered. A professional player must think ahead.
VacuousVessel: People are cheating like crazy and have been for a long time. Many people are delusional as you see in the comments. Its RTA, bots, and collusion. There have even been cases in the past of super users. Sometimes players are just addicted to gambling/playing poker and can’t admit the obvious because it would damage their fragile psyches, knowing they continue to play in illegitimate games. All that said, it’s still possible to win. Game selection is important. Micros aren’t as infested with RTA and collusion, but cheating is still present, even though some claim this isn’t the case. Imagine living in a third world country and bringing in 15 USD per day.
I’ve also learned from the comments, people aren’t aware of how advanced collusion works. It goes WAY beyond sharing hole cards.
TylerRM: Selection is truly the key to winning at this game. You can be a top-five player in the world and still lose when playing against the top four. There's no problem with not playing in a poker room if the game there seems suspect or too strong.
It's Not That Simple! Arguments Against Cheating Being Easy
Tombos21: GTO Wizard has measures in place to prevent RTA. They monitor activity (the way people study solutions looks very different from how people cheat), and apply daily limits. The security protection locks these users out, temporarily for the first few times, then leading to a permanent ban if continued abuse is detected.
Deepsolver also has security measures in place as far as I'm aware.
TylerRM: Only amateurs can use GTO Wizard or Deepsolver in the game. Every professional RTA cheater has their own pre-calculated database or neural network, which they can access without restrictions.
Whulad: Easily detected by the decent online sites with decent security teams as players flagged for investigation if frequently joining tables together; higher than average win rates- will then look at hand history for out of line play that points to collusion eg folding premium hands for no obvious reasons. The reality is that it’s actually far easier to collude live than online. Also it’s not that easy to precisely table select online anyway.
TylerRM: I also think it's easier to cheat live. If something goes wrong online, it's always quickly revealed because empirical data is quickly accumulated from playing and experience is shared between regulars. But in live poker, even questioning anything based on empirical results is embarrassing because any result over such a long period is always just a fluke.
NomNomNomNomNomm: Often solvers take too long to run to be of any use during a hand. Even if you have a super computer, unless you’re playing 1 table it would be difficult to use effectively.
TylerRM: Since the Reddit post, calculated solution services a la GTOWizard have developed, and bot operators have also developed neural networks that instantly generate solutions for any situation. Imagine, in a couple of years, AR glasses technology will be developed that can pick up the hand at the table, sync with cloud databases, and generate a solver proposal with a pre-calculated dice for the required frequency, exploiting the proposal of one neural network, exploiting the proposal of another neural network, and the player sits and chooses which decision to make based on three or four types of prompts that are completely independent of the device they are playing on. That's truly inspiring.
[Deleted]: You wouldn’t win at 15bb/100, people play incorrect preflop which disturbs the whole equilibrium. Good players aren’t making huge EV mistakes, mostly frequency mistakes which means copying a solver doesn’t help you THAT often and doesn’t punish your opponents main leaks. And using a solver vs fish gives you a much lower winrate than knowing the basic theory of poker and using ur brain.
So to know WHEN to use it you have to already be a good player, then you need a library of sims for the whole gametree including different sizes AND you need to move up the stakes slowly and gradually improve so its not suspicious or they make you play on webcam and the game’s up.
TLDR cheating via solver is not a big threat to the game and its zero threat at low stakes.
TylerRM: In HU, your opponent's preflop mistake is guaranteed to result in a win for you. But when playing against multiple players, a deviation from equilibrium by one player won't necessarily result in a win for you if you're playing a solver. For example, they might enter the game tighter, and by playing GTO against this line, you'll lose more than you gain from their overfolds, while a third player will gain the advantage. You had a great article on this topic; it's just turned 11 years old.
Solvers do not try to "win", they play optimal strategy at equilibrium under the assumption that other agents are doing the same. In a game like that nobody deviates from GTO strategy and thus over infinity samples, everyone's win rate is 0bb/100. This is what a solved game looks like and nobody would play poker if this were the case since everyone would be losing to the rake.
The most practical way of using solver is in a heads-up match where its possible to do the inputs and calculations for 1 table max. You can see this sometimes in Heads Up Sit and Go matches where someone is taking 5-10 seconds for the most trivial decisions on every street.
TylerRM: During my cash game experience, I was losing 4 bb/100 to the solver (you can check this stat by loading hands into GTOWizard). Professional cash game players have lower EV losses. I saw a 1 bb/100 EV loss against a solver from one reg who was deliberately learning all the solutions, but the average is probably similar to mine. So, among regulars, a solver might show 3-4 bb/100, but the players' entire profit is based on the fact that a fish enters the game and loses 50 bb/100, and the solver will also take a significant chunk out of that player. So, a player with a solver tip, playing with a good selection, can expect 10 bb/100 or more.
Then there's the winrate, you wouldn't get 15bb/100 that's for sure. GTO is about balance and being unexploitable not about highest winrate. If you played NL50 there's much more money to be made with exploits than blindly following GTO. If you played NL5k you're playing against VERY good players and IMO your edge wouldn't be that big. Pool is small, again very good players and at some point would probably notice strange plays that come only from solver.
TylerRM: In fact, nothing changes at NL5k. The best players still play the brazen exploit, it's just more well-executed. At higher stakes, fewer EV mistakes are made, but players' ideas about appropriate and inappropriate scenarios for bluffing/bluffcatching/merge-betting/any other frequency-based solver action remain.
[deleted]: In a field where people don't fold, a solver would still bluff at optimal frequencies but still be small 2bb/100 win rate due to the fields mistakes in other areas. Meanwhile a human that never bluffs (deviate from solver) will be crushing that field with a 15bb+/100 win rate. On top of that, solvers take time to calculate and needs parameters from the users on ranges, stake, bet sizes, etc. This is impossible to do while multi tabling.
The most practical way of using solver is in a heads-up match where its possible to do the inputs and calculations for 1 table max. You can see this sometimes in Heads Up Sit and Go matches where someone is taking 5-10 seconds for the most trivial decisions on every street.
Google "solver bots" and you will find cheat programs that claim to solve in real time for you. All they do is relay the information to a program like GTO Wizard and back to you. Nobody uses them because they are so inefficient at what they do, your better off playing the game yourself where you can win even more by using your brain.
TylerRM: I disagree with this thesis. In practice, the biggest winners against amateurs are very loose professional players who bluff and bluff-catch a lot, thereby fueling the field's desire to make even more mistakes against them. A tight strategy works, of course, but given FGS and the stability of the strategy over time, it's better to play looser. A solver needs bluffs to get paid for value, and similarly, a professional player needs to demonstrate their looseness to provoke opponents to play wider against them.
In today's world, ranges, sizings, and stack sizes can be set in seconds, but the most difficult game to solve is tournament play, where prizes are awarded as players are eliminated. The strategies offered by the solver assume a certain non-zero win rate for each player, and this win rate affects the FGS and distorts the stack values initially assumed by the solver. This leads to very complex dilemmas, such as those in Mystery Bounty: with a large stack, a player may decide to sacrifice their win rate to collect the bounty, but doing so will result in them playing at a negative win rate and reducing their chances of finishing high in the tournament. Therefore, tournaments will continue to develop a high-quality solution.
