Martin Zamani took to Twitter to expose raw video of a bot farm. It appears that the bots were running on Ignition/Bovada.
The video pans through multiple rooms full of laptops and PCs running one to two tables, autonomously cycling through hands. A few operators are seen relaxing, probably just waiting for a report on the day's profits.
The post has already picked up over 200 comments, almost 300 reposts, and 1.5K likes.
Joey Ingram asked, "Any idea why they have known about it for ages and done nothing?"
"They do not care where the rake comes from," a reader quickly replied.
"It might be as simple as that," Joey agreed. A large portion of the commenters also agreed that the rake could be the reason.
"Me and others have submitted 100% CLEAR evidence of collusion weekly for months," Snoopdoug chimed in. "They would gaslight everyone and say there was zero cheating lol even tho we all could see everyone’s hole cards 24 hours after the mtt…so everyone stopped sending in reports. I’ve racked up thousands of MTTs on the site over the last few years and never once have they reimbursed me for cheating/collusion. They literally don’t care as long as they pay rake.
"Its about as damning as you can get," said Charlie Carrel in a YouTube video shot the next day.
We are looking at computers lined up, which are apparently card-sharing. The software can do that. They can play at a certain level, a very, very high level of poker, without any human intervention whatsoever.
Now, I’ve got some bad news for you. If this is bad news for you, then you’re a little bit late to the game. These things have been going on for an extremely long time, and it’s not just on Ignition or Bodog. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me over the years, giving me evidence of bots on other really, really big sites.
Here’s how this works. The sites often know about it, and it is absolutely in their best financial interest in the short term, not karmically in the long term, to not do anything about it. They have extra players in the player pool, and everyone else gets to play against them.
Especially in the case of GG, these bots were allegedly breakeven, maybe slightly winning, and sometimes even losing small amounts. And that opens up a whole new can of worms. Allegedly, did the site know about this? Did they have a hand in it?
Because if the bot farms aren’t really making money from the poker itself, maybe they’re making money through rakeback or something similar. But the site is benefiting from this the most. The regs who are crushing these bots are benefiting quite a lot. And the recreational players are getting absolutely obliterated, because they still can’t beat a bot, even one that is intentionally making a lot of blunders.
I would strongly recommend staying away from a lot of these different sites.
Ignition bravely responded, saying the video was old news.
The video in question is outdated, dating back to 2022. All accounts shown, along with associated accounts uncovered during review, have already been terminated.
Customer security and fair play are central to Ignition Casino’s mission and values. We actively monitor the network as well as our products and respond quickly when issues are identified.
But it was quickly rebuffed by Zamani, with receipts.
This is from the same person who sent the video. This tourney is dated 2024.
Not that anyone believes you scumbags. We’ve all played on the site. We believe what we can see, which is infinite stalling and collusion, not you lying f***s.
The screenshot appears to confirm what Martin says. The tournament, if it is from the bot farm in the video, is dated February 18th, 2024.
Just ten minutes before replying to Martin Zamani, Ignition had posted a statement to their own Twitter.
There was literally not a single supportive comment we could see. All responses asked about repayments, doubted the site's integrity, and claimed that their own reports had been brushed off. Plenty of players asked the site to reactivate player names, instead of anonymous names. Some complained that this is nothing new on Ignition, which Brian Hastings appears to agree with.
Mobius Poker also brought up a scandal in March 2024 (continuing a January thread), where bots were spotted auto-folding for over 30 minutes. Mobius also posted over 20 hands showing what appeared to be collusion.
Pads also reposted some suspicious action another player witnessed.
"Nothing has changed I see," said Brian Hastings, unsurprised. "On the bright side, I’ve never seen this stuff happen on any other sites."
We contacted a poker bot company and asked for their win rate, posing as a customer playing on Ignition. The representative responded, "18-22bb/100 hands is the average win rate based on private development statistics." They also explained that bans were not something to worry about. "Room security updates are released frequently enough without tweets. We update our software promptly as poker room security updates are released. There are no ban issues if clients follow our recommendations"
Hopping into the fray, CoinPoker representatives replied to Zamani's original tweet.
"Yeah, but like who cares since all the regs get markup and free rolls to play MTTs on your site," Zamani retorted. "That’s almost worse than these shitty bots."
Martin was not swayed, and now appears to have added "F*** CoinPoker too" to his Twitter bio.
However, they also recently proclaimed, "Following a recent investigation, 98 bot accounts were permanently banned, and $156,446 was refunded directly to affected players." This does set a different tone to other operators, since we seldom hear about bots being banned, and hearing about repayments is even more rare.