A Further Investigation into the Existence of the BotFarm Corporation

By now, many people will have read or become aware of Kit Chellel’s article in Bloomberg’s Business Week, which pretty much confirms the existence of what had been dubbed “The Bot Farm Corporation” (BFC).

It had been easy to dismiss as a conspiracy theory until now, and Kit has done a great job of exposing the BFC’s actual existence. Discussion on it has been limited to a few internet forums for the last several years, but now it’s impossible to ignore.

What is odd is that it has been ignored for so long when there has been a large amount of evidence publicly available for a long time. It’s not even the case that the BFC was “outing itself” when Chellel interviewed some of its staff. It already did that on its own website.

The current website of the BFC, deeplay.io, clearly states on its homepage that its business is to develop “robot animators” to be deployed in card games such as poker, to “attract users.” 

The content on former websites of the BFC (which have now been removed) can still be viewed on the Wayback Machine (WBM). This is the link to the WBM Neolab website content and this is the link to the WBM Neopokerbot website content. Content on these site scans proves the link between Neolabs and Neopokerbot.

This has all been discussed in several threads on TwoPlusTwo and on GypsyTeam, yet surprisingly, very little further discussion about it has been generated on these forums, with links to it existing for over a year.

Cliff notes From Kit Chellel’s Bloomberg Article

• Bots have been ever present in online poker for a long time.
• Initially, bot operators worked independently, with the goal of making easy money from new, inexperienced, and bad players.
• Independent botters then started working together and gradually became a single organisation, which was able to benefit from AI poker robots that one arm of the group was developing.
• Noticing that recreational players were leaving soon after registering, due to losing very quickly (perhaps hastened by being preyed on by bots, as well as pros), the BFC sought to find a new way to keep recreational players in the game, ultimately to keep them depositing longer, but dressing this up as “improving the player experience.”
• The group diverged their product lines, including selling off-the-shelf bots to private individuals.
• They also ironically sold “bot detection” services to online poker operators.
• They subsequently engaged some online poker operators to deploy “liquidity bots” on their poker sites, which would fool human users into thinking there was real “human” traffic on the site. Unknown to them, these real players were being pitted against bots.
• If the real players were poor at the game, the BFC would deploy lesser-skilled bots designed to make the player’s deposit last longer. Their justification for this was that they were giving players a better experience, (however the goal was really to increase re-deposits). Players might feel they are better players against these bots, but in the long-run they will lose more through increased redeposits, with a false sense of security.
• Pros and more skilled players would have stronger bots deployed against them to make them lose and ideally get them to leave the site. This would ensure the site itself could extract maximum value from the fish without having to share it with winning players.
• The site would benefit fully, both through increased rake and from bot profits. 
• Kit Chellel met and spoke to some of the original staff of the BFC, who confirmed their existence and methods, matching many of the allegations that had already appeared on a GypsyTeam forum thread.
• It is a wide-reaching organisation, which had subsidiary companies in many countries, including in the USA, where one of their companies, neopokerbot dot com, had developed AI bots capable of beating most, if not all, humans.
• The article ended with the BFC employees almost claiming to be altruists, seeking to “balance” the game of poker and give recreational players a better experience.

However, while the article is groundbreaking journalism, it also stopped short of naming any sites that might be involved in this. It did not fully address the very relevant questions that arise from this:

• Which online poker sites are involved?
• Can any online poker site that has secretly deployed bots against its users be trusted?
• Can any site that has engaged the BFC for analytics or bot detection services be trusted?
• How could any company that has engaged them, even if only for such auxiliary services, not be aware of the mission statement on the Deeplay website?
• Do such poker sites do any due diligence, and if so, what does that consist of?

The baton has been passed on, and it is now my turn to reveal the research I have also been working on for several months. This research seeks to advance the story further and make the poker community aware of what the current situation might be regarding the BFC’s ongoing operations.

My Research

Independently, I have also been researching this topic for the last six months and during this time I accidentally discovered that Kit was also working on it, when he contacted me on an unrelated story about live cash game cheating in London. He had been advised to speak to me by the former General Manager of The Victoria Casino, where I worked between 2008-2010, while also managing the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (which I had founded in 2007).

We shared our findings with each other and discovered that we had both uncovered much of the same info, through our separate sleuthing. Kit had made more progress than I had in some areas, such as speaking directly to some of the protagonists in the BFC and its alleged satellite companies. However I discovered things that he had not, things that were publicly available on the internet. I shared my findings with him. 

Before I reveal the evidence I uncovered regarding possible connections between the BFC and online poker sites that are still operating today, let me explain briefly how and why I started investigating it in the first place. 

PokerWired

In January this year, I started a new job as editor of an affiliate site called PokerWired. As part of my duties, I had to write poker room reviews and soon after starting this job, I was asked to write one about Jack Poker, which had opened in 2022. I had never heard of this site before, but in order to write the review, I played on the site for a few weeks to get the feel of the software.

According to the site/table counter displayed on the page, I was surprised to see that this site had as many as 1,500-2,000 players online at any given time. The most noticeable thing about the site at first was the large deposit bonuses they were offering, which included “Instant Cash” that can immediately be used in cash games, without the need to release it via the usual method of hitting rake targets, but can never be withdrawn.

The next most obvious thing was the size of overlays in tournaments. There were huge amounts of cumulative missed guarantees every day, with no apparent overlay management at all. The same guarantees were available day-after-day. A handful of tournaments in the evening session alone were missing guarantees of $5,000 or more per day, rising to $15,000 on Sundays.

I also noticed after some time, some unusual patterns of play in cash games and in tournaments. I was also writing articles about the promotions the site ran, highlighting overlay value in multi-table tournaments (MTTs).

The Nuclear 4s Series Main Event

In March, Jack Poker launched the first online series I had seen since I began my new role. It was called the Nuclear 4s Series and had a $40 buy-in Main Event with a $44,000 guarantee. I thought it would have absolutely no chance of hitting its guarantee. 

It required 1,212 entries to meet the guarantee. The site surely didn’t have nearly enough liquidity to get there, I thought. The highest I had seen the site counter reach at this time was 2,500 players online, with very few regular tournaments mustering more than 200 entrants and almost all missing their guarantees repeatedly.

I bought in early, a few days in advance, and was the first player to register. On the morning of the Main Event, I logged on to see how many other players had joined. I was still the only player registered.

About 30 mins before the MTT was due to start, I logged on again. I was still the only player registered. This was a little weird, but whatever, surely players would start buying in soon. The site counter was at about 1,700 players, if I remember correctly. A huge overlay must be on the way, or so I thought…

Ten minutes before the start, I checked again, and again, still nobody else had registered. Now I was concerned. Maybe nobody else would join, and the tournament would be cancelled due to not meeting its minimum threshold of players? I don’t remember exactly what the threshold was, but it was low—maybe 8 players were required to start. 

With five minutes to go, finally a few other players entered and I was relieved when the event hit the minimum threshold, just three minutes before the start.

I went to get a drink and a snack before taking my seat to play. By the time the tournament started about 30 players had now registered. What happened next was jaw-dropping.

When the game started, the players on my table seemed really aggressive right from the start. There were lots of three-bets and four-bets, sometimes followed by an all-in, usually everyone folding to it. Then some players started calling, and there were 2-way all-ins or 3-way all-ins every few hands. And much of the time, both/all players had heaps of junk or very marginal hands.

After about 10 minutes of play, I looked at the lobby. It was up to over 120 entries, with about 20 exits already. Within 25 minutes, I had busted. I had a premium pair versus some garbage that had open shoved ahead of me, which got there.

I went back to the lobby thinking of re-entering. There were now nearly 300 entries. Wow, that escalated quickly, I thought. I looked at the site counter, but it still showed a very similar number of players online as there had been at the start of the tournament.

I sat and watched the lobby for a while and the number of entries seemed to be going up at a consistent rate, of 10-11 players per minute. 

Rather than re-enter, I just sat and watched for a while. My jaw was wide open; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. For the next hour, the entries kept coming at the same rate, 10-11 per minute, with no deviation in the rate of entry. I frequently checked the site counter, and it always remained in the same ballpark, not moving much at all, even going down a little.

With about 30 minutes to go until late registration closed, the tournament now had over 1000 entries. While watching it, I thought to myself, these must surely be bots, is the site putting them in, to reduce the size of the overlay? But surely this would stop soon and end up with maybe a 15-20% overlay, like most of their regular MTTs. 

But no, they got to the guarantee with less than 20 minutes of late registration left, but still the players kept piling in at the same rate, all the way until late registration closed, by which time there had been in excess of 1,400 entries.

Joining the Dots to the Bots

Suspecting that Jack Poker was infested with bots, possibly deployed by the site itself, I started reading a thread on TwoPlusTwo about bots and the alleged Botfarm Corporation, which led me to a 92-page long thread on the Russian poker forum GypsyTeam. It was a long tale explaining the history of this operation over many years.

On the 91st page, I came across a post that naturally shocked me, as it would for most first-time readers. This post can be read in full here.

It also included a more recent development within the BFC, which Kit did not report on, but which is perhaps the most significant part of the story. The post named Jack Poker as the BFC’s directly owned operation.

When I spoke to Kit (in May) he was unaware of this recent post and the further development of the story. At this point he had not yet conducted the interview with the BFC employees, which he describes in the article. This information did not make it into his final edit.

I wish I didn’t, but I now have a responsibility to further this story. It’s crucial that this info is released so that players can make their own minds up regarding where they choose to play online poker, or whether they should even carry on playing at all?

The key part of the post on page 91 is this:

“Ecosystem is a partnership with the game organizers. The business line shared with them the profits from winning robots and tried to minimize the negative impact on the user experience of amateurs.

Eco SaaS was a business model within the Ecosystem business line, which was divided into two independent business lines in April 2022: Eco SaaS and JackPoker.

Jack Poker is its own poker room, where the team independently manages all processes, attracts traffic, and provides user support.”

This is a pretty direct statement that in no uncertain terms, the post is clearly saying that Jack Poker is the BFC, or at least a subsidiary of it. 

The poster claimed to have extracted this info from a page on Deeplay’s internal website. But it’s still just a post on a forum, it proves nothing. It had originally been posted in July 2023 and yet nobody outside of this GypsyTeam thread and a related Telegram group was really talking about it. 

Even the “Confessions of the Bot Farmers” style article by Kit proves little as its word-against-word and could easily be dismissed by the poker community as sensationalism. Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy that Kit has published this piece, and I do believe that a lot of people will now take this more seriously as a result, but I was disappointed that it stopped short of detailing the current situation.

Web Research 

After spending a good week or so trawling threads on TwoPlusTwo and GypsyTeam, I had a good overview of the whole story. I had used various methods to start joining the dots to the bots, mostly using the WayBackMachine to view websites rumoured to be connected to the BFC, which had been deleted. It was already a very convincing story that looked like way more than simply a wild conspiracy theory, which it was being critiqued as being, by some posters on poker forums.

I decided to leave the forums and see if I could find any more substantial evidence on the wider web that might link Jack Poker to the BFC.

Surprisingly, it was very easy to find. I discovered some crucial information almost immediately, simply by googling “deeplay jack poker,” literally within 2 minutes of beginning this stage of the research.

On page two of the results, I found what was apparently an open staging server for Jack Poker’s website and testing environment. This link has now been removed from Google search, and although the URL still exists, access to it has now been closed. However, the WayBackMachine still has a copy of it, which can be viewed here.

Players access Jack Poker not via jackpoker dot com, as you would presume. That website is an affiliate site with links to Jack Poker’s actual online poker site. Jack Poker itself uses only mirror URLs, such as  jack-playcard dot com.

Deeplay Website Mission Statement

On the front page of Deeplay’s website, it states the company’s goals: 

“We develop robot animators for intelligent card games: poker, bridge, mahjong, preference.

Animators create activity on the game platform, attracting users.

The goal of deeplay is to create a comfortable environment for players. Robots apply different strategies and characters to maintain a balance of power. Amateurs are less likely to lose to experienced users, enjoy the process and stay in the game longer.”

Backlinks Uncover More

My next port of call was to check the backlinks to the deeplay.io website, which I did using ahrefs free tools. One of the backlinks I found to deeplay’s website was to a subdomain finder, a site where people can request scans of websites and see all the URLs of subdomains, by performing a subdomain scan. It took me to a page where five separate scans had been done on the deeplay website. The scans dated from November 2023 to January 2024. I don’t know who requested these scans but they were there and are still publicly available to view.

I checked all the scans, saved copies of them and had a closer look. There were hundreds of pages, some of which had the names of poker sites I recognised in their URLs. The jack poker staging server page that I had previously found was also in here, using the prefix jpws on its urls, along with several other pages related to jack poker. The only accessible page I found in these subdomains was the one that had been listed on Google search, which I had already found. 

Poker Sites with subdomain pages on Deeplay’s Domain

There were also a few pages, with URLs that began recognizably with the names of poker sites, followed by bot-set.stage. The names of the sites I recognized as poker rooms/apps included:

• Pokersaint
• Clubgg
• Jack Poker
• Wepoker
• hhclub
• ppp poker
• Infinity poker
• Poker Bros

Each of these sites had only one subdomain page, except Jack Poker, for which there were several.

I was floored, I had stumbled right into this, but all-in-all, it had taken me less than an hour from starting to investigate, to find all this. I also found what might also be further evidence of Deeplay and Jack Poker being one and the same thing: a job advert for a position at Jack Poker posted by someone with a deeplay.io email address. This can be viewed here.

BFC Deny Links to Jack Poker

Is this cast-iron evidence? No, it’s not, and in fact, Chellel wasn’t comfortable publishing any reference to any sites. He told me that the BFC employees he had met had denied that they were linked to Jack Poker, claiming that they had once in the past sold them an analytics package, but that was all. 

Was this the explanation they would use if questioned about the presence of Jack Poker on their subdomain? Now, I’m no web engineer, so maybe all these pages are required for such an analytics package? These multiple pages on the Deeplay.io domain do seem to corroborate much of the info on page 91 of the GypsyTeam thread.

I should add that the only site I have fully researched in this matter is Jack Poker. Other than these subdomain pages, I have no other evidence that might link Deeplay further to the rest of the sites listed above.

New Subdomain Scan of Deeplay

I initially found subdomain scans from January 2024, plus December and November 2023. However, I checked again recently and found a new scan, done on July 30th. After discovering this new scan, I compared it with January scans. There were now additional pages relating to jack poker, some even using the full name jackpoker, instead of JPWS. 

There was also a new page relating to Full House Crypto, which is a skin of Jack Poker. Some of the other poker sites listed above that previously only had one page each associated with them, now had several each.

This seemed to me to undermine what Kit had been told by the BFC about their involvement with Jack Poker, suggesting an ongoing relationship, regardless of the exact nature of it. 

Soon after discovering this further scan, less than a week ago, I contacted Kit again to tell him that I was concerned the BFC had lied to him about their ongoing relationship with Jack Poker and that he needed to include it in the story after all. He replied that it was too late. It had gone to print and would be published in just a few days, on Friday, September 20th.

Time to Hit the Road, Jack

I resigned from PokerWired soon after I found the new subdomain links. 

When I first found this information about Jack Poker back in April, I asked my boss to remove it from PokerWired and all of my content about it. Reluctantly, he did so, but he continued promoting it on many of his other sites. 

At the same time that I found the new deeplay scan (last week), I also discovered that my boss had opened a new site, without my knowledge, purely to market Jack Poker (jp dot codes). I quit a few days later.

PokerWired Owned the Jackpoker dot com URL

There is a further part to this story that also needs to be included. 

The jackpoker dot com URL itself was owned not by Jack Poker, but by my boss at PokerWired! He said he had seen that it was still available when he first became an affiliate of theirs, had bought it (with Jack Poker’s consent) and was simply promoting Jack Poker on it, as an affiliate, with links that went straight to the actual (mirror) sites of Jack Poker.

Although he was very sceptical of the notion that Jack Poker was a bad actor, he did agree to sell the URL back to them, when I revealed my findings to him in April. However, almost six months later, this process has not yet fully been completed and in fact, the jp dot codes website, which was only created at the end of August, has the same content as on the jackpoker dot com URL.

Despite assuring me that he was winding it down, Jack Poker continued to be promoted on many of my boss’s other sites, including several new sites that have only been created in the last 2-3 months. The affiliate websites he operates promote over 500 online bookmakers, poker sites, online casinos, and sports betting sites and I believe his due diligence is somewhat lacking. 

When questioned about due diligence, he referred to using “trust signals” in order to make decisions about which brands to promote. For example, things such as an affiliate manager of an online site that he already works with, moving to a new operation, as was the case with Jack Poker. 

I’m still unsure of the level of his involvement with Jack Poker. He assures me he’s just a publisher.  When I later questioned the legitimacy of some additional new poker sites he wanted me to promote on PokerWired, his response was effectively to ask me to stop questioning things, saying that he can’t keep justifying his decisions to work with specific operators.

Next Steps for the Poker Community

I believe that the more this spreads, the more it will destroy real poker. A bot site poker “solution” only benefits operators, nothing trickles into the real poker economy. If the real player poker economy is starved of its lifeblood, it won’t survive for long. I’ve dedicated 20 years of my working career to this game, I’m not going to let it die without giving it a chance to fight back.

How much of online poker is already fake bot liquidity? 10%? 20%? 30%? More? How long will it be before it has completely taken over, if it is allowed to proliferate? 

Sites seeking to pervert what online poker should be are doing it purely for profit. Bots are not the only way to address the problems of online poker. If bots really are the only way for online poker to survive, perhaps it should just die.

I’ve held onto the ball for a while, I’ve done keepie-uppies with it for nearly 6 months, waiting for Kit Chellel to publish, before revealing what I have in this post.

I’ve also consulted with PokerPro CEO Jason Glatzer during the past half-year for his support and guidance, as both a friend and a respected member of the poker industry. He was just as alarmed as I was, after I showed him some of the research I have done.

Now I’m kicking it up the park and hoping that the wider poker community will step up, put their boots on and keep the ball in the air.

By revealing this information, the poker community has an opportunity to take action, to demand greater transparency from operators, and to hold affiliates or live event operators who promote such sites to account, for getting into bed with such bad actors, wittingly or unwittingly.

Sites that have actively or unwittingly engaged with the BFC must explain their actions. 

Have they knowingly colluded with the BFC to hoodwink their customers? Or were they hoodwinked themselves? Or were they infiltrated without their knowledge?

Whatever the answers are, the industry’s inaction to address this up until now is a mistake.

If I could find the information so easily, others must have found it too and it was always going to come out eventually.

The major gaming companies that I have worked for during my career have had a strong focus on compliance and due diligence. Did some more reputable poker sites perhaps find out this info themselves and choose to ignore it, for fear of consumer confidence dropping across the entire industry?

The final post on the 92 page GypsyTeam (prior to the Bloomberg article being published) puts it very succinctly:

“The problem is that if you drown a competitor with a bot scandal, the whole industry loses its reputation, including you.”

When I first discovered this, I was sure other people had to be investigating it too and that surely it would be made public very soon. I never imagined it would take six months and end up being a story I would have to break.

Not all poker sites are necessarily implicated in this and not all affiliates are negligent in their duties. There are many sites that have a strong focus on integrity and are committed to trying to keep their sites free of bots. Some, such as WPT Global, are seeking alternative methods to solve poker ecology problems, for example by segregating players by skill level, not by using bots. These approaches need to be supported and encouraged.

There are many affiliate sites that also take this seriously and don’t simply make up fairy tales about the safety of some of the sites they promote. Good actors need to step up and rid themselves of associations with online poker sites that have been compromised by association with the BFC. 

If you are a poker affiliate site owner reading this and you realise that you are promoting such brands, surely you should now be ending your affiliate relationships with such sites, in order to protect your own future and the long-term integrity of the industry?

Are you with me, or are you OK with sites putting bots into their own games without telling their customers? I certainly hope it’s not RIP to real-player online poker, but the doctor’s prognosis is not looking good.