Ace Guardian's Head of Security John Andress answered the key questions about the future of the industry
answered the key questions about the future of the industry
On the Paul Greg scandal: This incident is unique in its surgical precision — the hacker broke into high rollers' computers through popular table-layout utilities and spied on specific people's cards for a year and a half. The expert estimates the damage at around $1-2 million, which is negligible compared to crypto scams. Had the hacker wanted to, he could have cleaned out those same high rollers' crypto wallets and made many times more.
On poker rooms' negligence: The affected regulars spent an entire year sending reports to the operators, but those stubbornly turned a blind eye to the problem. Based on the anomalous winrate graphs at high stakes, the security system should have thrown an automatic trigger and blocked the cheater within the first few thousand hands. The inaction of the major sites is professional negligence.
On new methods of fighting cheaters: The traditional approach, where the anti-cheat only scans running processes and mouse clicks on the user's device, is hopelessly outdated. That's exactly why Ace Guardian is betting on behavioral analysis of playing lines. Collusion, bots, and RTA assistants can't be hidden over the long run, because human capabilities have a ceiling, while artificial intelligence instantly gives itself away with inhumanly perfect decisions.
On the main threats to the poker market: Professional players often overestimate the danger of RTA assistants and badly underestimate coordinated bot farms. Bot-runner groups have existed in the industry for over 20 years, they have advanced exploitative AI and siphon colossal amounts of money out of the rooms, and their main target has become mobile club apps. Those platforms were built with zero security from the start, and club owners have no incentive to catch bots, since their income is tied to the volume of rake generated.
On how long online poker has left: When a full-fledged superintelligence arrives in poker, the game will most likely be finished — but by that point plenty of other fields in the world will have shut down too. Today, with proper investment by the rooms into gameplay analysis, the AI problem can be successfully minimized. The main thing the industry lacks right now is transparency from operators, who should be publishing open security metrics, showing winrate distributions, and publicly reporting the amounts of compensation paid out.
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On the Paul Greg scandal: This incident is unique in its surgical precision — the hacker broke into high rollers' computers through popular table-layout utilities and spied on specific people's cards for a year and a half. The expert estimates the damage at around $1-2 million, which is negligible compared to crypto scams. Had the hacker wanted to, he could have cleaned out those same high rollers' crypto wallets and made many times more.
On poker rooms' negligence: The affected regulars spent an entire year sending reports to the operators, but those stubbornly turned a blind eye to the problem. Based on the anomalous winrate graphs at high stakes, the security system should have thrown an automatic trigger and blocked the cheater within the first few thousand hands. The inaction of the major sites is professional negligence.
On new methods of fighting cheaters: The traditional approach, where the anti-cheat only scans running processes and mouse clicks on the user's device, is hopelessly outdated. That's exactly why Ace Guardian is betting on behavioral analysis of playing lines. Collusion, bots, and RTA assistants can't be hidden over the long run, because human capabilities have a ceiling, while artificial intelligence instantly gives itself away with inhumanly perfect decisions.
On the main threats to the poker market: Professional players often overestimate the danger of RTA assistants and badly underestimate coordinated bot farms. Bot-runner groups have existed in the industry for over 20 years, they have advanced exploitative AI and siphon colossal amounts of money out of the rooms, and their main target has become mobile club apps. Those platforms were built with zero security from the start, and club owners have no incentive to catch bots, since their income is tied to the volume of rake generated.
On how long online poker has left: When a full-fledged superintelligence arrives in poker, the game will most likely be finished — but by that point plenty of other fields in the world will have shut down too. Today, with proper investment by the rooms into gameplay analysis, the AI problem can be successfully minimized. The main thing the industry lacks right now is transparency from operators, who should be publishing open security metrics, showing winrate distributions, and publicly reporting the amounts of compensation paid out.
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