More ACR Bots? Feb 2024 Release & Phil Nagy Tweets
TylerRM released his February Update on 2+2, apparently shining the light on more bots. This time, the reporting period is from the end of January until around the end of February.
In that time, it looks like they’ve shaved almost $300,000 from the ACR player economy.
As usual, TylerRM (Andrey Streltsov) brought graphs and usernames. At this point, he’s sort of the poker community equivalent of Batman; fighting for good, but facing obstacles from the establishment in most cases. This February 2024 report comes fairly hot on the heels of the last one, which we covered in January.
The February 2024 Bot Accounts and Their Alleged Winnings
These are the MTT accounts suspected to be bots:
Here are the projected winnings for the MTT bot accounts, taken from January 10th to near the end of February 2024.
These are the cash game accounts suspected to be bots:
These are the projected winnings for the cash game accounts: taken from January 10th to February 25th, 2024.
You can view the full report from TylerRM here (posted February 27th, 2024): https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=58478403&postcount=620
The Suspected MTT Bots
So, in a little under 50 days, the Winning Poker Network MTT bots managed to collect about $186,000, hitting a massive profit spike somewhere around 12k tournament entries. In the reporting period, there were over 28,000 entries in total, with an average stake of $38.59.
The total ROI when the dust settles? 15.3% – a respectable figure, though not overly impressive.
That being said, the last time TylerRM blew the whistle about ACR bots, their total ROI was 12.9% for all of 2023.
We’d expect their performance to be worsening from all the attention, and hopefully, the proactive efforts from WPN. However, the February report is much smaller, just a month-and-a-half of data, so it’s hard to draw conclusions about the bots’ skills from that alone.
Looking at the all-time data on the WPN bot accounts, it looks like ROI was highest in the years after 2015, slowly getting close to the levels we see today.
But with the sample size, even with a 12% ROI, bot farms still end up walking away as big winners.
The Suspected Cash Game Bots
Between January 10th and February 25th, 2024, the cash game bots pulled in $68,427.57.
Over that sample period, the suspected accounts maintained a 7.58bb/100 approximate win rate. If these bots were real players, their friends would be congratulating them on that number. However, it’s going to be hard for us to feel that way. TylerRM also covered a group of cash game buts in early January 2024, showing a much lower bb/100 win rate.
Still, the bot farm pulled in over $160,000 at tables. That’s a huge number, depsite a much lower win rate of 2.5bb/100 in over 1.2 million hands. In that report, NL1k, NL600, and NL400 were the most profitable games for the bots.
At NL2k and above, the bots had massive losses. It seems that higher-stakes aren’t as easy to penetrate, so perhaps, we all need to make the jump to NL3k.
Phil Nagy Catches Fire for Rare Social Media Post
Despite all of the turmoil around WPN and ACR Poker, Phil Nagy appears to be keeping a cool head.
on my way to Jeju To play poker with a 9 hour lay over in Amsterdam and they have this cool new VR to play. pic.twitter.com/kuEv7c5RhF
— Phillip Nagy (@WPN_CEO) March 3, 2024
It's probably not the humor that players are taking issue with, but the timing. With so many bot accusations and millions of dollars seemingly lost to criminals, this isn't the behavior that the poker community wants to see.
The replies were an even mix of shock, laughter, and outrage. Many people pointed out that this isn't the right message to be sending, especially when the site's reputation needs fixing.
Phillip Nagy is known for blundering a bit on social media.
After Christmas 2023, when the site crashed and players couldn't access funds, he posted an out-of-touch apology in a Santa hat. Just like the previous post we covered today, it was not what players wanted to see.
An important message from our CEO @WPN_CEO. In the midst of these not-so-festive events that some of our players have faced during the holidays, we're here for you #ACRPoker pic.twitter.com/lq07IzZ8ru
— ACR Poker (@ACR_POKER) December 27, 2023
The response was... not positive. Some players felt mocked, but unappreciated at the very least. It's the kind of post you expect to see deleted from the internet after a few days, but surprisingly, that didn't happen.
We'll continue to cover ACR and WPN, plus anything that TylerRM or other whistleblowers like JNandez put out. If you are looking for safer ways to play poker in more trusted rooms, we'd suggest sites with cleaner track records.
When we think about solid reputations, partypoker comes to mind, but you'd also be smart to look into KKPoker. Organizing clubs (or creating your own poker club) might be a way for you to play with those you know, rather than exposure to full player pools.
