In 'The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker', the award-winning journalist writes about Bot Farm Corporation (or BF Corp.), a Siberian bot farm founded by Russian students that offers botting services to players. It also offered bots to poker sites to artificially inflate their liquidity.
PokerNews spoke with Chellel to dive deeper into the topic and get his thoughts on botting and its impact on the poker industry.
The Elephant in the Room
Chellel spent a year researching the article and says that, before writing it, he was aware of the problem of botting poker but didn't know its extent. Now, having attended live tournaments, played online, and interviewed countless members of the poker industry, he says that people in poker just weren't acknowledging the elephant in the room."I asked almost everyone I met, 'Do you worry when you’re playing online that there are going to be bots?' And they said they knew about it but didn’t worry about it. It felt to me after a while that poker exists in a kind of world that no longer is reality. It's still in the world before this technology came along and hasn’t quite adapted to it yet."
The article has been covered by a wide range of poker media outlets, and Chellel says that its publication led to conversations about bots, which he thinks are "overdue."
"The game has changed, and in the last five years, this technology has become more widespread and much cheaper. I think you just have to be aware that it exists."
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Russia and the Bot Farm Corporation
Much of the article is centered on Russia, with the current geopolitical landscape making it difficult for actual reporting to occur in Russia. Chellel would eventually meet those behind Bot Farm Corporation (or BF Corp.). in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, but he says that Russia is still the "center of gravity" for the practice of online poker botting, in part due to the level of technical skill on display in the country."Russia is the sort of habitat where bot makers can thrive, for the same reason that computer hackers do. There are a lot of highly educated, technically-minded people, and probably not quite as many opportunities for them as they might have if they lived in California, for example.
"So that makes these kind of activities that are sort of lucrative grey markets, shall we say, enable you to use your expertise to make a bit of money quite appealing."
As exemplified in the Bloomberg article, this expertise is being used in the Siberian city of Omsk, on the Russia-Kazakhstan border. There, BF Corp., founded by Russian students, set up shop and slowly expanded. Other groups merged with BF Corp., while professional poker players offered their expertise and external investors provided the necessary backing.
Slowly but surely, it expanded, and the organization is now a fully-fledged corporation with HR teams and recruitment programs cherry-picking math, physics, and economics students from top Russian universities.
Read full article: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2024...g-poker-botting-bots-are-inevitable-47007.htm
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