Poker Bot Scandal Rips PokerStars to the Core

Their slogan is "Find the Poker Star in you" but this week things have taken a much more disturbing turn on the World's largest poker site - It's more like "Find the Bot at your table." This is exactly what Poker Table Ratings the largest online collector of information about online poker hands played at the big sites found playing as high as the $200 buy in tables and winning big, big money.

By not having invested in the necessary resources to have already detected these bots or possibly having already detected them and chosen to take no action, Stars has failed once again.
AKingdom (Adept 2+2 Poster)

So what's next? How many undetected bots are out there? What are the experts in the industry saying? Is it safe to continue to play?

First let's look at the evidence. You can view the whole Poker Table Ratings Security Alert but basically it's summarised as follows:

As you can see, these 10 players are clustered in the lower left of the chart. They are virtually identical. The biggest distance within the bot group is Daergy at 2.39. The next closest player has a distance of 32.94.
PokerTableRatings

That's right, they raised and called almost the EXACT same percentages preflop, had almost identical winrates and playing styles postflop. What's even more scary for the future of online poker is they were WINNING, and big money at that. The same PTR article points out:

they have played at least 8,320,121 hands at the $.25/$.50, $.5/$1 and $1/$2 NL levels, generated $186,572 in rake, and made $57,839 in profit (not including VIP benefits).

The simple fact is that PokerStars have a site that's too big for their security to fully monitor (even if they would believe or plan otherwise this case clearly demonstrates there are gaps). Short buy in tables allow a place where simpler strategies and bots can survive profitably. PokerStars again encourages this. Smaller sites with less opportunity for Bots to mass table and rathole their profits (leave if they get a double up so as to continue playing short) might just be the way to go for now.