Pokerstars often gets many well-deserved props for their in-house security procedures, but every so often they completely crap the bed. This is one of those times.

Players discovered a massive low stakes PLO botting network on Stars, where nearly 30 bots ran through over 18 million hands, and cheated players out of $4.3 million dollars.

Among the interesting details to come out:

- It was a botting network which both utilized automated play strategy and colluded by sharing hole cards at the same table. With 3 bots at the same table at PLO, the bots could have knowledge of as many as 12 hole cards at once in the same hand -- which is a huge advantage in PLO.

- The bots were discovered to have amazingly similar playstyles, a hallmark of automated play.

- The bots ran WAY above expectation, fueling the strong collusion suspicion.

- The bots won $2.8 million. Pokerstars raked an addition $1.3 million on these hands!

- The bots were connected to accounts which were all of Russian origin.

Pokerstars has confirmed that this occurred, and has started refunding players. However, as these were low stakes (and in some cases microstakes), players were only reporting individual refunds of about $10-$100. It is not clear how all of the $2.8 million is going to be distributed.

It also appears that Pokerstars is keeping the $1.3 million in rake, which I believe is very wrong. While I don't believe that Pokerstars owes players anything beyond the recovered cheating funds, they shouldn't make a profit on "cheat hands" -- especially when they failed to catch a massive bot network which played long enough to log 18 million hands.

Pokerstars PR man Michael Josem said that Pokerstars typically catches 95% of the cheating on the site without player reports.

Haley Hintze did a good writeup on the situation if you want to know more: http://www.flushdraw.net/news/misc/p...-plo-bot-ring/