Bot Farm Corporation, Deeplay, Neo Poker Lab – Who are these?
Everything you are about to read might be completely made up. Or maybe not.
In the cold belly of Siberia, back in 2010, I was just one more student studying to become a programmer. The snow covered all, shroud-like, the air cut into your skin, and Omsk. It was a town where you felt nothing but cold most of the year. We didn’t learn to code because of some lofty Silicon Valley dream; we learned it for that high-paying job at some company out in the burbs. I was one of those bored, brilliant kids who found comfort under the glow of my computer screen.
That’s how it all started – innocently enough.
I was hooked with the “21” movie, where five kids from MIT brought down casinos with a scam of the century. But in blackjack, you’re up against the house, and as they say, you can’t beat the house. But poker. poker’s different. You’re playing against other players just like you, which tips the odds more in your favor. I remember those late nights-just staying up, experimenting with algorithms and playing poker. Little did I know then, we were standing on the brink of much more than what we could have ever imagined-we were about to change the world of online poker forever. It was a quiet night when what would finally materialize as Bot Farm Corporation-or BF Corp, to the world-was born. The online poker boom had just begun, and for us, there were no boundaries; countries and continents did not matter. Virtual tables reeked of easy prey-amateurs who fancied themselves the next Moneymaker. But unlike them, we weren’t playing a game of chance.
We were calculating. And when you see poker as a problem in math that should be solved, not as a game that should be played, things start to shift. We cracked the math, built our first bots, and just like that we were in business.
But it wasn’t about the quick money. We knew that if we started to win too quickly, that was suspicion right there. So, it became an obsession to find just the right balance.
Our bots became increasingly complex as we analyzed endless poker data, coding in bluffing behavior and dependencies on opponent stats. This was back before AI and neural networks were even tools at our disposal. Before long, they weren’t just bots; they were players. Calculated, ruthless players who never slept, never tired, and never tilted. Bots that won.
There were only three of us initially: friends, coders, gamblers. We sat in my dorm room in Omsk, surrounded by empty energy drink cans and cigarette butts, watching our bots clean up tables on sites such as PartyPoker and PokerStars. First trickles, then streams of money started to arrive. In this situation, by this time, we had long crossed a line.
BF Corp was born when it finally became crystal clear that our little experiment was way too big for just us. We recruited, we trained, and from the shadows, we built an empire. But when you’re making tens of thousands of dollars overnight, you start attracting attention. Poker rooms got smarter. They upped their security, tracked down bots, and we had to stay ahead of them every single day. A battle. And then came the idea. Neo Poker Lab. That website was intended for investors, predominantly U.S.-based. We were offering them an opportunity to buy into our business and rent bots to pad the traffic numbers of their poker clubs. It was an alternative project-a fork-to break into markets we could not get into. Neo Poker Lab was ultimately shelved. The internet had already begun to ring with stories about us, people making inquiries for themselves, trust being lost, other means had to be found to grow the business-through affiliates. Enter Deeplay. If BF Corp was an empire, Deeplay was a cartel. When you control enough bots and you run enough tables, you start to realize something: you don’t just have the power to win. You have the power to control. Control who plays. Control who wins. Control the entire economy of online poker.
We don’t build Deeplay to cheat; we build it to balance. Give the poker ecosystem a little stability. Make it. fair, you can believe that, if you can. See, before the bots, poker rooms were chaos: Tables sat empty, pros cleaned up amateurs in a couple of minutes, and the money bled out of the system. We added liquidity bots. Deeplay’s AI could breathe life into dead tables, keeping games going that would otherwise die.
Of course, we took our rake, but that was a necessary evil to keep the poker world turning.
But when you play God, you finally wonder what it is to be the devil.
The problem wasn’t the bots; it was the people. When you run a bot farm as big as ours, you start to attract all kinds of attention.
Shady investors, underground poker clubs and other developers wanting a piece of the action. The whole thing grew too big, too fast. We went from three nerds in a dorm room to a global network with more than 100 operators, each running his own teams, bots, and games. But the problem with building an empire is that it makes you a target.
One evening, I got a call. There was a voice on the other end of the line, a voice that was unknown, claiming to know who we were. My memory of my own heartbeat churning louder than anything else, I reached quickly to shut down my laptop, wiped my drives, and destroyed every bit of data on my iPhone. We knew it was coming. We had been running this for a many years; we knew how long we could hide in the dark before somebody shone a light on us. I wish I could tell you that we were a bit like Robin Hood, evening the score, evening the books in the world of poker. The truth of the matter is, we were kids in way over our head. We became outlaws. And with any outlaw story, the component that comes with it is burning bright, then burning all the way out. They never caught us-at least, not all of us. Some went underground, some left for safer countries, changed names, and some, well, some just vanished. But the bots are still out there. They always will be. The code we wrote, the AI we trained-it’s all out there, running tables, playing hands, learning, and evolving. So, who are we? Bot Farm Corporation. Neo Poker Lab. Deeplay. Or PokerBotAI? Maybe you heard about us. Most likely you played against one of our bots.
Based on How to Beat Online Poker: Russian Group Won Big With AI (bloomberg.com)
More information on how to buy poker bots, how poker bots work: Knowledge Hub: Featured Articles on Poker Bot (pokerbotai.com)
