How Online Poker Sites Catch Bots and Real-Time Assistance Cheats

A blackjack pit and an online poker room have the same problem, turned inside out. The casino worries about a player who knows too much about the cards. The poker site worries about a player who knows too much about the decisions: an account that isn't a person at all, or a person with a solver whispering in their ear.

The money involved is no longer anecdotal. WPT Global, one of the few rooms that publishes its enforcement figures, reported confiscating $427,481 from banned accounts between January and October 2025, and says all of it went back to the players those accounts had beaten. The number is self-reported and unaudited, but it's a useful anchor. It works out to roughly $43,000 a month from one network, counting only the cheats who were caught.

Almost none of them were caught by a person watching a screen. They were caught by the traces they left, and bots and assisted humans leave very different ones.

Two Cheats, Two Fingerprints

A bot is software playing the hand: it reads the table, makes the decision and clicks the button. Real-time assistance, or RTA, is a human doing the clicking while software supplies the answer, usually a solver or a solver-derived tool open on a second screen.

The distinction matters because the two are betrayed by opposite things. A bot has machine mechanics and may play good or mediocre poker. An RTA user has human mechanics and machine decisions. Sites hunt for the first by watching how an account acts, and for the second by measuring how often it is right.

It also helps to be clear about where the line sits, because it isn't "using poker software." Studying solver output, drilling push-fold ranges and reviewing hands afterwards is how serious players improve, and that off-table work is the backbone of most modern poker strategy. The line is having that help open while a hand is live. In 2025 WPT Global banned a Twitch streamer after a preflop range chart was visible on their stream during play. It was a static chart, not even a solver, and most major sites now treat it the same way.

	Bots	Real-Time Assistance
What's automated	The clicks and the decisions	The decisions only
Main giveaway	Inhuman mechanics: metronome timing, repeated mouse paths, no fatigue, marathon sessions, virtual-machine or shared-device signatures	Inhuman accuracy: decisions that match solver output too closely over a large sample, and long, uniform pauses before precise bet sizes
Hardest version to catch	Bots that randomise their timing and run on real hardware	Players who only consult the tool in big pots
What usually settles it	Device, network and session data	Statistical review, then human investigators, sometimes a video call

Catching the Machine: Mechanics, Not Poker

Bots are rarely exposed by their strategy. They are exposed by their behaviour. PokerStars has said its integrity team monitors player decisions and actions down to mouse clicks on the table, and that this kind of tracking is what exposed fully automated bots in the past. A human's response times are messy: quick on easy folds, slower on rivers, slower still at 3 a.m. Software that acts in a tight, even band of timings, or plays for eighteen hours without a single misclick, stands out in the data long before anyone looks at a hand.

The better bots randomise their timing, so the investigation moves up a level, from the account to the network. Bot farms run many accounts at once, and those accounts tend to share hardware fingerprints, virtual machines, payment routes and a habit of sitting at the same tables. Players spot them too. In mid-2025 a regular on the Two Plus Two forums published a list of more than 130 suspected bot accounts on WPT Global, compiled over four months of play, and many were later banned.

Why there are more bots to catch now comes down to cost. In 2019, Carnegie Mellon and Facebook AI's Pluribus beat elite professionals at six-handed no-limit hold'em. According to the research paper published in Science, the strategy at its core cost about $144 to compute at cloud prices. Carnegie Mellon's announcement noted that it then played using just 28 processor cores, against the 1,400 its predecessor, Libratus, needed two years earlier. Superhuman poker stopped requiring a supercomputer, and the bot became a product anyone could buy.

Catching the Human with the Solver: Accuracy as Evidence

RTA is harder, because the clicks belong to a real person. So integrity teams stop looking at the hands and start looking at the decisions. Each one is compared against solver output. Strong human players deviate constantly, through tilt, fatigue, pattern habits or simple misjudgment. An assisted player deviates rarely, and above all stays accurate in the spots where humans are worst.

Mixed strategies are the clearest example. Solvers often say to bet a hand some of the time and check it the rest. Darren Elias, one of the pros who played Pluribus, put the human problem plainly: executing that randomness consistently is something "most people just can't". A player who keeps hitting the solver's exact frequencies in spots like that, over tens of thousands of hands, is producing a statistical signature that has no innocent explanation. Timing reinforces it: a long, even tank followed by an oddly precise sizing, again and again.

Casino surveillance has used the same logic for decades. Pit staff don't count every card. As Vegas Aces' guide to detecting card counters explains, they watch for bet size and playing decisions moving together, and insurance taken only at big bets is the giveaway. A poker integrity team looks for the same kind of correlation, between a player's decisions and what a solver would have done.

A counter is caught when the bets track the count. An RTA user is caught when the decisions track the solver.

The study-tool companies have joined in. In September 2023 GTO Wizard, the most widely used solver-based training site, launched a Fair Play Check programme with partner poker networks, WPT Global among them. Early in 2025 GGPoker announced 31 account bans that followed its work with the company. When the tool's own records can be checked against the site's, "I was only studying" becomes a much harder defence.

The Newest Trick: Judging Decisions Against the Real Cards

On October 15, 2026, GGPoker announced a detection method aimed at a different kind of cheat. Its new abnormally-high-win-rate check reviews every decision in a hand and judges it against the cards the opponent actually held, not against a range. A solver can't see hole cards, so an RTA user is right about as often as theory allows. A player who folds the second-best hand and calls down the bluffs far more often than any honest style could is getting information from somewhere: a ghost on a stream, a compromised machine, a leak.

It's the problem online poker first ran into in 2007, when an insider at Absolute Poker used a "superuser" account that could see opponents' hole cards. It wasn't the software that caught him. Players did, by working through hand histories in which he made one impossible fold and call after another. The Kahnawake Gaming Commission later fined the site $500,000. GGPoker now runs that analysis automatically, on every hand.

The same announcement banned third-party programs from running alongside the GGPoker client, including PokerTracker 4, Hand2Note and Holdem Manager 3, the tracking HUDs a generation of online players learned on. GGPoker said it was tightening its policy after a security incident in which it traced funds to a crypto wallet and reported it to the exchange and to law enforcement. Its reasoning is that each of those tools handles game data in ways the operator cannot see or control. Other sites still allow trackers, so check the permitted-software list wherever you play.

The Part No Algorithm Does

Software raises the flag, but people make the decision. PokerStars describes a process in which an automated trigger opens a case, one agent investigates and a second reviews the recommendation. The suspect account is suspended while the player is asked for more information, sometimes including a phone or video call in which they record a typical session. WPT Global says its team has around 50 people monitoring alerts around the clock, and that closing an account or confiscating funds needs sign-off from at least two of them.

Both rooms say machines find almost everything. PokerStars puts its in-house detection rate above 95%, and WPT Global has said its automated systems catch more than 99% of issues proactively. The human layer is there because the statistics produce false positives. The streamer WPT Global banned in 2025 had their PokerStars account flagged at around the same time, and PokerStars cleared it after investigating. Good players look a little like solvers. That's why the review exists.

Where the Money Goes

Confiscated balances are usually returned to the players the cheaters beat, and the published figures double as a rough scoreboard:

• GGPoker, 2020: 40 accounts banned for RTA, $1,175,305 confiscated from 13 of them, and 4,329 players reimbursed, about $272 each on average.
• PokerStars, 2019: $1.87 million returned to customers affected by cheating.
• partypoker, 2024: 291 accounts banned and more than $70,000 returned.
• WPT Global, 2025: $166,885 seized from January to May, rising to $427,481 by October, all redistributed.

Read those numbers carefully. They measure the cheats who were caught, not the ones who weren't, and they aren't independently audited. Still, a room that publishes ban lists and refund totals is telling you it expects to be checked, and that's worth something when you're choosing where to play.

What it Means for the Honest Player

• Study as much as you like, away from the table. Solvers, charts and hand reviews are fine. Having any of them open during play is not, even a static preflop chart.
• Know your site's software rules. A tracker that is allowed on one network can now get you flagged on another.
• Report with evidence. Hand numbers and specific patterns get acted on far faster than a hunch. Several rooms pay for good reports. WPT Global runs a Rewarding Integrity in Poker programme.
• Check your cashier history. Refunds from confiscated accounts arrive quietly as credits, and plenty of players never notice them.

The cheats have the same tools as everyone else. What they still lack is a way to look human for a million hands.