iPoker lying to customers

dohadeer

Right, I'll try and keep the poker jargon and the length of this story to a minimum.

Basically, I'm looking for advice on who to take this issue up with, to have it resolved fairly and impartially.


I've made my living as an online poker player for about 3 years.

Around 18 months ago, I moved to play on the iPoker network, basically a group of sites that all run together as one poker network, so for example William Hill, Betfred, Paddy Power and many others all have their poker sites on the same network, which is overseen by iPoker.

Now, on the terms and conditions for these sites it says they don't tolerate cheating, have sophisticated tools and a team of experts in place to detect cheating and will deal with cheating severely.

However, I have been alerted to substantial evidence that this isn't the case and which suggests iPoker actually quite happily allow cheating, (obviously the cheats pay money to play as well, so the site makes more money by not kicking them off.)

Basically, some players are running 'bots' on the site, which are computer programs which play instead of a human player. This is illegal in poker and iPoker claim they don't allow bots.

We have evidence, for example, of a player on the site who has played 137 hours, (5 and a half days,) in a row, without a break. Clearly this is not possible for a human and this is a bot. I should point out it's also against the rules for other players to play on your account, so that can't be used as an explanation for this 137-hour session.

I have reported it to iPoker who say they have dealt with it but can't tell me what they found. As the player is still on the site, they clearly took no action.

Now, I've trusted this site with my livelihood and I've paid them about £15,000 - £20,000 to play there, over the past 18 months. They have told me, (it's in the terms and conditions,) that they will detect and remove cheats. I believe I have evidence that this is a lie.

Companies aren't allowed to lie to customers like this, so I feel I'm due some sort of compensation for any money that I may have lost to cheating, due to them not dealing with cheats as seriously as they claim to.

I have reported this initially to the regulatory authority, who regulate the site, but several people have raised concerns as to whether this authority are as impartial as they claim to be.

I am just wondering, if the regulatory authority fail to deal with this, where is the next place I should take this ?

Please feel free to ask any questions or ask me to clarify anything which you do not understand. Thanks.

RadoJo

I suppose the difficulty is in proving that you have lost out financially to the cheats.
Could it not be that someone has just stayed logged in for that length of time and isn't actually playing? Can you show that you have been negatively impacted by their allowing bots to play? Is taking your business elsewhere not an option?

mynameisdave

There was something about this on Cardplayer the other day.

Edit: sorry, not CP but BBC and it was about Stars.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11250835

Also, Phil Laak has played for 115 hours without sleep.

mynameisdave

Out of interest, how have you gained the evidence that this player was active for 137 hours?

dohadeer

There are plenty of websites out there that show players' statistics.

This player was clearly actively playing for 137 hours continuously, it wasn't that the player was just logged in for this length of time.

If it was some sort of one-off world record attempt then fair enough, but it's consistent 72 and 48-hour sessions without breaks.

Somebody mentioned Phil Laak's 115-hour session, but I assume he had breaks for food, toilet and even sleep in this time. This player has no such breaks and despite playing many tournaments at a time, always makes every decision in exactly the same amount of time, around 2-3 seconds. It's clearly not a human player.