"How PokerStars Catches People Trying To Cheat": Online Poker Giant Joins Game Integrity Conversation "How PokerStars Catches People Trying To Cheat": Online Poker Giant Joins Game Integrity Conversation
Key Takeaways
  • A new Game Integrity landing page communicates how it is keeping its player pool safe from bots and cheaters.
  • “We believe in a level playing field and vigorously police our poker games using a variety of cutting-edge techniques.”
  • Last year, Morgan Stanley downgraded igaming operators because “superhuman artificial intelligence will disrupt online poker.”

A new Game Integrity landing page has appeared on PokerStars’ website to communicate how it is keeping its player pool safe from bots and cheaters.

Two videos have also been published detailing how PokerStars is catching people trying to cheat at their tables and their efforts to detect and ban bots.

“We believe in a level playing field and vigorously police our poker games using a variety of cutting-edge techniques to make sure that’s what you get,” the new Game Integrity page states.

The lander on Game Integrity comes as a possible response to Morgan Stanley’s move to reduce price targets on The Stars Group, GVC and Playtech in September 2019—parent companies of online poker rooms PokerStars, partypoker and iPoker, respectively—citing a risk that “superhuman artificial intelligence will disrupt online poker.”

“AI. These two little letters seem to cause a big stir wherever they go,” one of the new PokerStars videos states, in what could be seen as a direct rebuttal to the Morgan Stanley “disrupt” claim.

“In online poker, artificial intelligence is portrayed as this new, disruptive force in the game, but that’s not exactly breaking news: People have been trying to make bots that think for themselves since poker moved online at the turn of the century,” the video went on to say.

“More importantly, we’ve been successfully identifying and dealing with them for almost two decades,” it added.