Jungleman Podcast: Can WPT Global Save Poker?

Does Alex Scott Care About Poker Integrity?

In 2024, only lazy people don’t talk about poker integrity or the integrity of the game. But what does it even mean?

Well, it has a slightly different definition depending on who you ask.

For example, the Alcohol and Gambling Commission of Ontario (Canada) defines “game integrity” as the fair and honest conduct of any games that must be independently verifiable.

The poker community Run It Once, founded by Phil Galfond, sees it as ultimate fairness without any types of cheating, rule breaking or usage of third-party software that could grant harmful advantage.

The Inter-operator Poker Integrity Council also considers poker integrity as a state of the game without malicious behavior of any party. The latter includes collusion, botting, using of RTA, ghosting and other types of dishonest activities during poker games.

Alex Scott agrees with all the definitions above, while also expanding on them a bit:

“For me, game integrity is one of the most interesting areas of online poker. It’s something that I’ve worked on pretty much my whole career. My first job out of University was with PokerStars and I started in the customer support team there. I, as part of the role, was looking into collusion cases and later got trained on the bot detection tools as well.

I’ve worked on game Integrity for a really long time and I’ve seen it evolve. So, I would kind of characterize it as an arms race because the online poker site has a really strong incentive to police the games, make the games safe. Not a full proof incentive but a strong incentive particularly for things like collusion.”

Alex expanded on this further, narrowing down on poker collusion since this was an important issue for poker operators when he was first starting out:

“We did a lot of work to prevent it, to deter people from trying to collude in the first place. We built a whole bunch of tools and really invested in people and training and everything to make collusion go away.

This is one of the things that people don’t realize. Today you can’t get away with colluding at any kind of scale. You can’t cause significant damage on a reputable online poker site by colluding now — it’s just too easy to catch.”

The Arms race with colluders was won by rooms once they start to use Big Data:

“Once we got Big Data and we found the right way to “interrogate” it, it became instantly obvious who was colluding and who wasn’t. It’s kind of like a solved problem now. I challenge anybody to get away with colluding at scale on PokerStars or WPT Global.”

But if colluding is an old rumor now, other poker problems are still at place and they are threatening the integrity of the game every day:

“We’ve changed our focus, we now concerned about different things. Actually, the thing that’s been concerning people like me in poker for the last of 5 to 10 years maybe is what we first called “push this button” bots. So, obviously, we’ve had the concept of bots around for a long time.”

The bots or other RTA tools can be identified by rooms, of course, but they require much more work than identifying colluding for example:

“Bots have the same concept as RTA — the decision is being made for you but there’s a human at the controls. Our early bot detection efforts relied on being able to distinguish between a human at the controls and a machine at the controls. We did a lot of stuff to distinguish the two — some technical stuff and other stuff — but as soon as you put a human at the controls all of that goes out of the window. You can’t rely on that anymore.

So, it has become a more difficult challenge now. Luckily, in the early days RTA was really bad — like, the very first RTA was really weak, tight and would give you terrible advice that would cause you to lose.

So, why would you use it, right? And generally people who did use it, they experimented with it and very quickly found it was terrible and didn’t continue using it. So, it wasn’t a threat and didn’t really cause any damage.

But today RTA with advances in GTO, solver technology and stuff like that… I mean even a couple of years ago it wasn’t really feasible to run a lot of GTO simulations in real time quickly enough to be able to tell the player what to do.

That technology wasn’t powerful enough to be able to respond quickly enough to give you the decision in time to take the action at the table. But now that is possible both locally and using pre-solved databases online.”

However, WPT Global isn’t fighting this threat alone. As Alex stated, he and his team are cooperating with some poker solver developers who willingly stand against bots and RTA.

What Does WPT Global to Increase Recreational Player Satisfaction?

Poker can’t live without recreational players who come to the tables just to have fun.

But how can the game remain lighthearted if there are players only looking to prey on you?

This can result in nothing else but a bad experience that alienates potential players, prompting them to find other recreational outlets. This is one of the things that Alex Scott and WPT Global want to prevent:

“It’s very common for new players to have a bad experience. And when they do — they don’t come back. They’re gone. They now are taking their entertainment dollars and they’re spending on something completely different that’s not poker.

We are competing for somebody’s disposable income and we’re competing with everything else that they might do — Netflix or video games or any other form of gambling or whatever. We’re literally competing against every other form of entertainment.”

Poker professionals could be an example of a positive poker experience for recreational players but then again, they could also intimidate them, especially when there are more than a few pros at the poker table. It sucks the fun from poker, making it unenjoyable and non-sustainable in comparison to other industries and games.

That’s why Alex Scott and WPT Global try hard to organize games as perfectly as possible to help poker be attractive for new blood. He describes it with a very simple example:

“Poker is different from many other casino games in the sense that you can change the value of the people around you. You have a direct impact on the players around you. You can scare them away or you can make them feel welcome, you can give them a good time.

When you organize your perfect private game you’re actually looking for people that bring some fun to the game and bring social skills. And then you also touched on not too much skill disparity in the game.

If you’ve got a couple of really terrible players and then a couple of really great players then the money is going to flow very quickly from the terrible players to the great players and the game won’t last very long. So you need some way of measuring that skill disparity between the players.

That’s what we do using AI — we have a system called FairGame that very quickly ascertains the skill level of players playing in our cash games using a machine learning model, which is a form of AI. We measure the skill level of every player and then we essentially categorize you in one of six categories. We can simplify it to be “casual players” and “pros” broadly speaking.”

As Alex added, the idea is to ensure the right balance of casual players and pros at each table. This balance is vital because if you have no pros at all — then tables don’t start as easily and they don’t survive as long:

“The principle of FairGame is that we reserve a certain number of the seats at the table for casual players and then the remaining can be occupied by pro players. It’s about establishing this perfect balance.

We believe that for most of our games that balance of six recreationals and two pros means that the game it lasts as long as possible and is as sustainable as possible. But it also ensures the best experience for everybody at that table.”

Will WPT Global Become the “Bethesda Game Studios Of Poker”?

As a developer of The Elder Scrolls, Starfield, modern Fallout and DOOM, Bethesda Games Studios is concerned with supporting and expanding its modding community. WPT Global wants to do the same in terms of poker.

As Alex Scott explains:

“I like the idea of players being able to build their own custom game and play it online. It was an idea I had years and years and years ago. I kind of observed that when we added a new game format like 5 Card Omaha, for example.

Generally that was incremental, it just added revenue — it didn’t take away from the games that were already there and it was kind of a guaranteed long-term source of revenue.

You add a new game format — it attracts new players, it gets more of existing players — it’s just a very easy sell in terms of a new type of feature. So I had the idea that we’d have a builder where you’d be able to drag things around to build a game.

You create this game and it becomes a sharable game that you can share with the community, other players who are interested in playing these kinds of interesting weird mixed games. They can search through this library of games that have been created by the community and they can use them for their own games, their own private games.

It might be one of my favorite ways of playing poker — when you’re playing a home game or you’re playing a private game and you’re just making stuff up, some weird games with wild cards. To be able to bring that experience of making stuff up on the spot, bringing that online — it’s difficult to do in a way that would be simple to use. But I think if you got it right, it would be a really interesting game concept”.