WPN CEO Says He’s About to Get Tough on Bots

In last weekend’s “Weekly Poker Roundup,” we briefly touched on a player who claimed to have profited $30,000 from his use of a poker bot on America’s Cardroom. Following his discussion of his exploits on Two Plus Two, the Phil Nagy, the CEO of the Winning Poker Network (WPN), which is the network on which America’s Cardroom resides, announced that he planned to bury bots once and for all.

In talking about the development and use of his bot on America’s Cardroom, “themadbotter” said that his initial goal was simply to see if he could do it, if he could create a viable, profitable automated poker playing program that could go undetected. He didn’t plan on using it long-term, but when he had success, he “got greedy” and kept his bot running for a total of about six months before shutting it down and cashing out.

He said that he believes that the poker rooms by and large don’t mind bots:

In general most sites will look the other way for botters unless the botter garners a massive number of complaints from other players. Bots and poker sites have a mutually beneficial relationship. Bots are the most low-maintenance, high-value customers that most sites have. Bot-operators will never complain about cashout times, won’t e-mail support over and over about mundane issues, won’t complain about other players, won’t be ill-mannered, etc. Good bot-operators will remain low-key and continue to churn out rake for sites and fill up the tables to boost player #’s.

Phil Nagy begs to differ, though. In a recent Twitch livestream, the outspoken WPN CEO said that he thinks he has “come up with the single biggest deterrent for anybody who wants to even think about doing bots.”

Nagy was not shy in saying, though, that he was fully willing to take a flamethrower to his network’s player base if it means getting rid of bots, even if non-botters get torched.

“I will make mistakes, I will ban real money people, and I will ban real people because they seem like bots, and I will be merciless about it,” he said in his Twitch stream.

“To do this right, you gotta draw a line in the sand, if you end up being a casualty of war…collateral damage, I apologize, but this is what the people want.”

And just like Nagy doesn’t seem to feel bad that innocent players might get caught up in some mass purge (though he did say, “I apologize”), “themadbotter” doesn’t feel bad about botting.

“I suppose I don’t consider myself a cheater,” he said on Two Plus Two. “I didn’t share any hand-histories or real-time data and I was not part of a bot ring. I probably put in more hours studying sessions, opponents, and general gameplay than 90% of profitable players. Botting is easy, botting well is not. It’s not as if the bot suddenly turned me into a winning poker player.”

Nagy believes that he has “come up with the single biggest deterrent for anybody who wants to even think about doing bots,” adding, “I’m gonna make it very, very clear that other networks are gonna be much more bot friendly that ours. that’s … gimme 30 days.”