Is Bovada Poker Rigged? Evidence of Cheating Released

A detailed report has appeared online which alleges serious security breaches at Bovada Poker, and claims that millions may have been siphoned from the site by some form of ‘super-user’ accounts coupled with the use of bots. This raises the question: is Bovada poker rigged?

The fantastical claims have been made by an anonymous team whose members “span industries including gaming, advertising, data mining, open source software development, security, and database solutions,” according to the report from dataminepoker.

They claim that:

Factors which they also allege they were able to exploit themselves on Bovada in trials afterwards, stating:

Online poker has always had more than its fair share of ‘paranoia’ among its players, usually based on the ‘luck’ factor which can see players run bad, suffer multiple bad beats, lose to ‘ridiculous’ plays by their opponents and then use the online community forums as a ‘sounding-off board’ for their tale of ‘rigged’ online poker-rooms.

Indeed, the DataMinePoker team describe such ‘paranoia’ as one of their starting points, saying:

However, such ‘paranoia’ is not always mis-placed. The Ultimate Bet scandal of 2007 became the biggest in poker’s history when it was discovered that a ‘super-user’ account was being used, enabling the user to play in ‘God-mode’ with the ability to view other players hole cards, and winning millions of dollars from unsuspecting victims.

More recently, PokerStars investigated an alleged ‘bot ring’ emanating from Eastern Europe which was apparently exploiting their low-to-mid stakes PLO games, with many players being recompensed by the industry leader following their probe.

Whether or not these most recent allegations involving Bovada have any truth to them, the scale of the report – which DataMinePoker claim is only an initial public report, with secondary, more detailed, reports to come – is impressive.

Although extremely detailed, with mathematical models, hand-history reading scripts and coding (which are beyond this writer’s ken , but will doubtless be subject to intense scrutiny by many online aficionados of the game and its perceived unfairness) the core results of the report allege that:

• There is a massive problem where users are being edge-cased in big hands that they tend to lose a large pot over.
• Our team can easily confirm that Bovada Poker is a haven for collusion activity.
• It was determined that there are zero counter measures against bots and no front end way to try and detect bots/injectable systems.

Report states that:

A third possibility does not seem to have found any real substance during their ‘research’, the team stating:

The report also states that one of the difficulties they faced in compiling the report was the fact that Bovada is a private poker room, and they also point out:

That's something which they claim led them to initial suspicions that the poker room “may have potential security risks not checked by adequate control boards,” a belief which they allege their report confirms as having led to serious cheating issues and which – somewhat confusingly it may seem to many, “show that Bovada Poker is operating an unfair poker room (even while passing modern gambling software verification tests).”

They also claim their team is creating security on other online sites including alongside Bovada including:

• America’s Card Room
• BetOnline
• Sports Betting.ag
• Black Chip
• Carbon

Following these separate public reports, a large centralized report with access to all open source software tools, collection data, and image/video evidence will be released at once.

Whether this report turns out to contain any real issues of substance or not, the timing is not particularly good for the online gaming industry in general, coming in the wake of investigations into, and restrictions on, DFS and at a time when the big poker sites are doggedly clawing their way back into the US markets state-by-state.

It should be noted however that Bovada is, according to their own website, operated by Salmon River Technologies Ltd ("Salmon River Technologies Ltd", pursuant to a gaming license issued by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, located in the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake, Canada).

PokerTube will bring you responses from Bovada and any other interested parties as soon as they become available.