gg poker battles rta

GG Poker Battles RTA and Confiscates nearly $1.2M from Cheaters

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The team at GG Poker has released a GG Poker Blog Post that details their battles with stopping cheaters on their network of sites.

For those who aren’t sure what RTA is, it stands for Real-Time Assistance. As we live in a world of AI (Artificial Intelligence), there are now solvers that can come up with perfect poker plays for each board we encounter.

Certain players study these findings so much that they can crush the highest stakes games, then there are players that look to use these solutions in real-time while playing against others.

Fedor Blows The Lid Off

The most recent high-profile case was a Youtuber/Twitch Streamer that started with Call of Duty streams and transitioned into playing poker. The young german started in the micro-stakes cash games and moved up stakes very quickly, going from playing $0.50/$1 to $200/$400 within a year.

GGPoker got a decent amount of heat for this because the player in question, Fedor Kruse, was one of their streamers representing the GGPoker Brand.

How Has GGPoker Reacted To This Controversy?

GGPoker is now making a significant effort to combat this kind of cheating, stating that:

“We have re-dedicated our efforts to combatting RTA and have swiftly adopted enhanced RTA detection methods and improved our internal processes for handling these cheaters. Although there are public concerns that RTA is an imminent threat to the status quo in that it is undetectable, that is patently false. Our Security Team is fully aware of the different ways that RTA is being used, and we want to emphasize that RTA is detectable.”

GGPoker’s security team claims to have found a small group of players using RTA on the network and has taken action against these players.

  • 13 accounts have been banned from the site, with $1,175,305.43 confiscated. These funds were then returned to players.
  • 27 more accounts have been banned with no confiscation of funds.
  • Another 40 accounts have been issued warnings.

GGPoker is now constantly looking at players’ moves for perfect GTO plays and has given players a reporting system to report any suspicious activity.

Big Names Speculation of Involvement

Dominik Nitsche and Chris Oliver are some other well-known names that have been speculated to have been banned. These are some of the biggest high-roller multi-table tournament (MTT) players on the site that have years of profits and crushing results.

Jeff Gross is also rumored to have had his account blocked; he has previously for this type of advantage-taking after being caught checking ranges while playing live on stream, which is against Pokerstars T&Cs.

Matt Berkey and co took to their Solve For Why Podcast to dig into this latest cheating scandal, unearthing the wealth of information from the 2+2 post.

GTO But Not Too GTO

So with all this heat on finding players using real-time assistance, do we now have to be careful not to get so good that we are playing perfectly and end up being suspected of cheating?

The poker world is no stranger to this kind of thing, with ‘Fiilismies’ accusing LLinusLLove, one of the biggest winners in online poker of all time. He selected three hands from playing with this heavily GTO-influenced player and submitted them as suspicious.

So, how do we know if someone is playing almost perfectly from their time studying or using a solver tool to get the same results?

This will be a considerable problem for poker sites, and players not wanting to get cheated. Let’s hope that solid players that are innocent and just playing solver-based lines don’t get caught in the messy crossfire in the future.