If you’ve ever played in DON (double or nothing) Sit N Go’s over at PokerStars you will likely have come across the user name rs03rs03 at your table. I did, but thought nothing of it. When he was on my tables day after day after day I started to get suspicious. There is actually quite an interesting story behind it…

If you find the same user on your table all the time one assumption could be that the player has been taking notes on your play and believes you to be a fish worth hooking. It is possible to basically follow you around the poker site and play at whatever table you decide to hit. I didn’t think this was the case with rs03rs03 as I’d previously taken notes on this player to the effect that they were very tight and not a very strong player to be honest. So I decided to have a mooch around the Internet to see what was with this rs03rs03 guy.

Apparently rs03rs03 is pretty famous (or infamous) over at PokerStars. There are entire forum threads questioning how rs03rs03 seems to always be on the DON tables, to the extent that other players have been questioning whether rs03rs03 is a poker bot or not (a poker bot in this instance would be a piece of software that is programmed to automatically join low level Sit N Go games and play via a pre-programmed algorithm on a large scale – hundreds of tables at a time). It seems that player rs03rs03 had been on the radar at PokerStars for some time and unusually PokerStars themselves decided to make public their investigations into the legitimacy of the player.

Just to add some perspective to this. PokerStars confirmed that when rs03rs03 was playing to full capacity his averages would be – 175 concurrent tables 100,000 (approx) hands in a single day Now some people are comfortable in multi-tabling. It isn’t that unusual to hear people playing 30 odd tables at once, but 175 at once! Of course it would be pretty much impossible to play this many tables at once without some custom tools… something that PokerStars would be very much aware of so they took the step of analysing rs03rs03’s play by running several tests as described in the following quote from PokerStars themselves –

We have been monitoring and examining ‘rs03rs03’ using those tools for quite some time, and the player has always shown very human characteristics, and an ability to pass various tests, including CAPTCHA and many others. Despite this, we, too, have been concerned with the seemingly astonishing volume of play exhibited by this player, especially in recent weeks as his volume has increased dramatically. As such, we recently froze his account and asked the player for a controlled demonstration, and the player agreed. We dispatched a PokerStars representative to the player’s home to observe several hours of play on June 1st, 2010. That observation convinced us that the player is not using a bot. We cannot violate the player’s privacy — the player has asked to remain anonymous, and not to discuss their strategy. However, among our observations: 1) The player uses a set of self-written hotkeys similar to many commercially available suites (TableNinja.com comes to mind). – The hotkeys manage automatically joining tables without regard to opponent selection – The hotkeys close unnecessary popups like “It is free to check”, automatically – The hotkeys require the player to enter every bet, raise, check, or fold manually 2) Both in prior play, and during our in-person observation, we witnessed many “mistakes”, such as pre-flop folds of AA and KK. 3) The player was able to verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play. 4) We took video of the play at various times, and conducted tests at various times during the observation (such as unexpectedly asking the player to remove their hands from they keyboard, to observe whether play stopped… and it did). We observed well over 3 hours of play, and then compared the play we observed to historical records of past play. We cannot divulge exactly what we compared, though we can say that it did include comparing his hand selection, action timing, and many other aspects. The resulting comparison very strongly indicates that the prior play is statistically identical to the observed play. In short, our bot detection tools have borne themselves out here very nicely. The tools always indicated that the player appeared human despite ever-increasing hours of play and concurrent tables. Now, through our observations, we’ve independently confirmed those findings.

It must be said that PokerStars should be applauded in terms of the breadth of the tests that they have carried out and also in making this public. To actually attend the player’s house and watch a few hours play is incredible and is a great testament to the rigorous standards PokerStars places on fairness in the game. Well done PokerStars! Full post at over at the Two Plus Two Poker Forums