Wherever there is money involved, some individuals will do whatever it takes to get their hands on it through unscrupulous means. Online poker is no different. You only have to browse through PokerNews' news stories to see stories about bot rings, players colluding with one another, and the use of Real-Time Assistance (RTA) tools. Those three things are among the primary reasons why some poker players prefer playing live instead of online.
Online poker sites constantly fight to ensure cheaters do not prevail on their platforms. Each poker room takes a different approach, and most keep their methods under wraps. However, PartyPoker continues to be transparent, open, and honest with its customers and the wider poker community.
Recently, Jaime Staples sat down with Juha Pasanen, PartyPoker's Head of Game Integrity, and had a frank discussion about how PartyPoker is fighting the fight against individuals attempting to gain an unfair advantage over their opponents.
Pasanen is a former professional online cash game grinder who began playing in 2004. By 2014, with poker booming, Pasanen started noticing suspicious-looking accounts at the tables, groups of players playing an almost identical style to one another. He and his friends began reporting these accounts to the online poker sites and noticed these dodgy players vanished from the tables.
In 2017, a role opened at PartyPoker which Pasanen applied and was successful. Over time, Pasanen's team has evolved into several former professional players, data analysts, and product managers who work around the clock to ensure PartyPoker remains a safe place to play online poker.
The first crucial step in fighting bots is discovering them. Pasanen reveals that his team starts on a basic level, looking at high-volume players, those who are playing very close to perfect Game Theory Optimal (GTO) or, in the case of larger groups, players who are statistically very similar.
Pasanen moved the conversation in a different direction once he'd gone over the basics, not to shy away from the subject but because revealing too much could help bot users evade detection for longer.
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Players using RTA are a major threat to online poker's integrity. Indeed, it has spilled into the live poker realm with accusations thrown at the 2024 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event champion, Jonathan Tamayo. Some players do try to use RTA while in hands at PartyPoker, but they don't usually get far.
The biggest challenge for Pasanen and his team is differentiating between someone being a very good player and someone using assistance to cheat. Pasanen's team has requested players suspected of RTA use to record a video for them, they have asked for them to live stream, and have even requested they come into the PartyPoker office to play in front of them.
"In the most extreme case, we actually sent two of our guys to a player's house for a week, so that one of them was with him every time he was playing."
The team gathers as much information as possible in a controlled environment before analyzing and comparing hand histories to the player's historical play.
The poker community has uncovered several cheating scandals over the years, mainly through sharing hand histories, analyzing the data, and revealing players with unrealistic and impossible win rates. However, PartyPoker players can only download their own hand histories to their machines the day after their sessions, and their opponents' data is anonymized. Does this pose a problem?
Pasanen said the decision to change hand history files was made five years ago when it became clear that some players were importing hand histories into tracking tools and creating detailed profiles they used to exploit those players. Some players were datamining hand histories that enabled such profiles on opponents they had not even played against.
The ecosystem's benefit is so great, and the Game Integrity team is so confident in their ability to detect cheaters via other means that having anonymized hand histories is not seen as an issue.
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Collusion between players is another issue PartyPoker must tackle. They do this by feeding every single hand through an in-house tool 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The tool automatically analyses these hands and flags suspect hands for the Game Integrity team to review.
Specialists in each poker variant and format review these hand histories and other data with a fine-toothed comb, leaving no stone unturned.
Visit any poker forum or discuss poker for long enough and someone will claim that online poker is rigged. They claim that the big stack always wins, or that aces always lose, there is a "doom switch," and poker sites juice pots, etc.
Pasanen revealed that the deck is shuffled before each hand at PartyPoker, and no further shuffling takes place. Some online poker sites use a continuous shuffle, where the unseen cards are continually shuffled until a player takes action.
He goes on to claim there is no incentive to "rig the game" for or against a player because PartyPoker takes rake from cash games or charges a fee for tournaments, so the site does not need to worry who wins or loses a pot because they make the same amount of money.
Regarding the Random Number Generator (RNG), PartyPoker's RNG is audited by a third party every month, and the results get published on PartyPoker's website.
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The PartyPoker Game Integrity team welcomes all reports of suspicious behavior on the site. Players can either submit a report via the Safer Poker page on the PartyPoker website or by sending an email to [email protected].
Someone from Pasanen's team will contact you to acknowledge receipt of your report before reaching out and letting you know the outcome of the investigation. Due to privacy laws, PartyPoker cannot give you specifics about player aliases etc, but you will learn whether or not action was taken and why.
Pasanen rounded off the interview by stating that PartyPoker and other online poker sites must continue investing in game integrity to keep ahead of technological advancements in bots, solvers, RTA, and other tools.
Be sure to check out the full 23-minute interview.
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