A stream of adverts offering Real Time Assistance on poker Discord groups has led to Jaime Staples calling the people behind the cheating software “straight scum”.
It seems some bots have infiltrated all poker discords, and is now DMing everyone about some new RTA tool “developed by professionals.”
Anyway we can see who these ´professionals’ are through their payment portals?
Don’t be fooled by RTA. Straight scum and will get caught.
— Jaime Staples (@jaimestaples) January 12, 2022
The popular partypoker pro and streamer Jaime Staples warned fellow poker players and fans that using Real Time Assistance (RTA) brings with it some serious consequences.
“Sites have ways to detect this stuff and people can and do get banned”
Jaime Staples wrote on his Twitter:
“Sites have ways to detect this stuff and people can and do get banned. Just imo players have to stand up for what we think is right here!”
Programs such as Monker, PioSolver, Simple Postflop and GTO+ have become standard tools for the serious professional player. It allows them to work out GTO-optimal strategies for all kinds of scenarios, and can be an excellent training tool if used correctly.
However, online poker sites do not allow them to be used in real-time – hence the Real Time Assistance tag – and the reason is that they give too much of an advantage against those who don’t use them while playing.
As Upswing Poker described one scenario… “These GTO strategies are not reproducible by us humans — they’re just too complicated to memorize and execute.”
As poker players know all too well, though, banning things doesn’t mean that everyone will comply.
The Fedor Kruse RTA Scandal
Last year we revealed how German pro Fedor “iLoveCookiiez” Kruse was outed by his own flatmates for running a GTO-setup poker “dream machine” – with pre-solved spots allegedly available at his fingertips.
Kruse was said to have “thousands and thousands of sims of all possible cash game spots pre-solved in a well organize set of folders, to be able to just open the sim and follow the solver advice in every single spot.”
That might explain how the former Call of Duty player managed to climb the ranks from micro-stakes, through mid-stakes and on to highstakes $200/$400 NLHE online games in a little over a year.
Fellow players described him as a “spot/shitreg at NL200” and were amazed when he turned up at much higher stakes.
The scandal saw Kruse banned by GGPoker and having $250,000 confiscated, the operator dishing out bans and warnings to dozens of other accounts for similar offences.
Kruse spoke to VIP Grinders about the accusations, stating at one point:
“I just wanted to make clear that my ex-roommates are not unguilty and are cheating as well.”
New RTA kid on the block?
Back to the here and now, and there were claims on twitter that the recent Discord attacks by the GTO-pushing bots were pushing ZeroSolver.
— joe (@Joetee80) January 12, 2022
Described in the advertisements as, “The most powerful RTA tool on the market,” the ZeroSolver website calls the app, “The most efficient NLHE solver.”
A 2plus2 thread discussing the problems of outing the latest RTA software shared a screenshot of the purported reasoning behind the big push by ZeroSolver…
That, of course, reads like a sorry excuse for breaking the rules and regulations that most sites and the majority of players go by, and to many the promised gold at the end of the RTA rainbow is unlikely to appear anyway.
Long-time forumite ChicagoRy’s view: “If this stuff was truly super valuable, they’d just use it to stake players…if you’re ever going to find a magic bullet, it won’t be through someone spamming it on the most popular outlets online
“This is likely just taking some solutions on GTO software and displaying them in real time for a significant fee. And while that CAN be valuable, it likely isn’t too valuable and certainly not an “auto winner” like it implies.”
On Twitter, the reaction was similar…
Yeah, very sketchy mass message. Could be a scam to prey on unsuspecting people, but overall I hope to see theses things crushed
— Gordo (@GordoExperiment) January 12, 2022
Fuck GTO?
The usefulness of such software, whether it is for training, study or used “illegally” as RTA, is very limited, and for the vast majority of poker players it shouldn’t be a huge concern at all.
As online crusher, Nathan “BlackRain” Williams, stated: “Poker solvers, and by extension GTO poker theory, is simply a bad idea for 90% of poker players. And this is because a GTO poker strategy simply isn’t the optimal way to beat a bunch of low stakes poker players who are thinking on a very low level.”
Charlie Carrel is one of the relatively highstakes pros who claims not to be a fan of GTO. In fact, he produced a YouTube video discussing the relative merits of GTO vs Exploitative Poker with the imaginative title “Fuck GTO”…
Naturally, the discussion and problems surrounding RTA are still valid for that top 10% or so of players who take the game very seriously, and we’ll continue to bring you the latest on both the use and misuse of technological advancements in the game!
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