Unlike other casino games, peer-to-peer poker is, by definition, players against other players. The role of the casino is to organise and fairly conduct the game, for which they take a rake or fee, but players do not play against the house.
It’s now close to six months since A Further Investigation into the Existence of the Botfarm Corporation was published. The story is far from over. Players continue to be pitted against bots on a daily basis, sometimes deployed by site operators themselves, not just third-party bad actors.
Regardless of who’s deploying bots, the presence of them on many poker sites isn’t really disputed much anymore. But what is being done about it? Even though sites cannot be 100% sure they are bot-free, players should still expect poker rooms to do what they can to keep their platforms as human as possible.
Issue of Trust
Player confidence in the safety of playing online poker erodes a little every time there is a cheating, super-user or bot scandal. The wider issue isn’t about bots; it’s about trust.
The organisers of poker games are expected to play fair, look after players’ interests, and fight off the bad guys with a shitty stick, if that’s what it takes. When they abandon that principle and start sharking the players themselves, that throws trust out of the window.
Defrauding customers by passing off bots as real players in what is touted as a peer-to-peer environment, is a huge breach of the trust that customers place in poker operators.
Operators are supposed to be gamekeepers not poachers. Yet what we are witnessing now seems to be a case of gamekeepers turned poachers.
Global Poker Award for Best Written Content
It was an honour just to make the top four of the written content category at the recent Global Poker Awards. Winning was not something I expected, but I’m happy that the months of work I put into it has been recognised by enough people in the poker community.
I hope this helps to amplify the story further and reach a wider audience. But will it? Will the main poker media outlets continue to do their best to ignore it? Most articles rounding up the Global Poker Awards make no mention of it, acknowledging it only in the full list of winners.
I hope I’m wrong about this, as it’s an issue that should be discussed openly, as part of the wider overall discussion of transparency in the poker industry.
The longer the mainstream poker press continues to ignore this issue, the worse it could be in the long run from a trust issue. Players should be warned that they are not playing on a level playing field.
If poker media companies knew about this long ago (and there’s evidence to suggest some did) but decided to keep it on the hush, are they complicit?
There is now some more news about this story to amplify, as another site was launched in late 2024, that appears to be linked to Jack Poker.
Introducing Xingyun (Lucky) Poker…
This new Jack Poker look-alike site is called Xingyun Poker or Lucky Poker. It is known by both names, and it appears to be targeting both Asian and non-Asian customers. It launched in late 2024, but the exact start date is unknown. It uses the URL xingyunpoker dot com, with the room itself hosted at the url xingyunpuke dot com*.
The site is identical in design to Jack Poker. Its cash game tables use the same naming convention as on Jack Poker, but it does not have the same “liquidity” and has a different tournament schedule.
Most of the screen names (90%+) are in Chinese language symbols. The images below show the same-named PLO cash game table on both Jack Poker and Xingyun Poker at the same time on the same day (December 18th, 2024, 14.56 CET).
Soon after I first encountered it, the Xingyun/Lucky Poker site counter indicated just under 600 players online (on December 17th) and a week later (Christmas Eve), it was at just under 900 players online (concurrently).
One of the hardest tasks for new online poker rooms is to attract that initial core liquidity that makes a poker site viable. It’s a key reason why so many new sites fail within their first year or two.
Xingyun/Lucky Poker, however, had recently opened but soon had liquidity to rival many long established brands, with nearly 1,000 players supposedly online at any given time. For a site to launch and so quickly have a solid user base of close to four figures at peak times, is something quite remarkable.
* Xingyun is a transliteration of a Chinese word that means lucky, while puke means poker.
The Launch Series
There was even a tournament series running on Xingyun/Lucky Poker in December, soon after the site opened for business. This Launch Series had $333,000 in guarantees and three events per day. It was described as the first series the site has ever done.
Most of the tournaments in the series seemed to meet their guarantees or maybe miss by just a bit. There were even some pretty hefty buy-ins, which had lots of entries.
135 entries for a $150 buy-in tournament soon after launch—that’s an incredible start for a new brand!
Perhaps whoever is behind Xingyun Poker could explain their amazing success, how they went from not existing, to having a thriving and viable ecosystem capable of hosting a six-figure guaranteed series, just after launching?
The Launch Series Deja Vu
And one month later, they ran the same series again, with the same name, the Launch Series, once again touting it as the “first-ever MTT series” the site has run, but this time with an even bigger series guarantee, now up to $450,000.
That’s unique, to run back-to-back “launch series.” Surely the hundreds of players who are apparently flocking to the site on a daily basis would have noticed and found it odd? Surely, whoever runs the site would have remembered that they’d already just run one? Are these real customers or are they perhaps liquidity bots designed to make the site look busy, in order to attract real depositing players?
Who’s Advertising Xingyun Poker?
So far, the only sites that seem to be advertising this Xingyun/Lucky Poker room are those owned by New World Gaming Ltd (Ire). This is the company that operated PokerWired, which I worked for from January to September 2024. PokerWired itself was closed down soon after ‘A Further Investigation Into the Existence of the Botfarm Corporation’ was published, with content switched to a new site, cryptopokerpros dot com.
Cryptopokerpros has advertising links to Xingyun/Lucky Poker, but carries no fixed content about it. However, a promo code page of Xingyun/Lucky Poker is published on another New World Gaming Ltd owned site, freetips dot com.
Other New World Gaming owned sites such as poker dot codes and bonusbets dot com also carry ads for Xingyun/Lucky Poker.
In addition, there is also a micro-site owned by New World Gaming Ltd, with the url xingyun dot poker, which solely promotes Xingyun/Lucky Poker. According to Whois, this url was registered on December 10th, 2024.
It is the same micro-site that had previously been used to promote Jack Poker, with repurposed content. Some of the images on it hadn’t been fully switched to the new brand when it went live (see image below).
This micro-site is available in 54 different languages.
Who Owns Xingyun/Lucky Poker?
While the site itself looks almost identical in design and colour scheme to Jack Poker, it’s not a skin feeding into the network liquidity of Jack Poker. The two sites have different tournament schedules, and although their cash game tables have the same names as the equivalent ones on Jack Poker, they aren’t sharing liquidity; they seem to have a separate “player base” on each site.
While Jack Poker does have a license and lists the name of the company that operates it on its site, Xingyun/Lucky Poker doesn’t give away any details about its licensing or ownership. There is no reference to a company name, address, or gaming license on the site’s terms and conditions or in its footer, which simply says “All Rights Reserved. 2024,” begging the question, “by who?”
They both use E5A poker server software, although Jack Poker seems to have a more recent version than Xingyun/Lucky Poker, as shown in the screenshots below:
Who Owns Jack Poker?
The question about who actually owns Jack Poker remains unanswered. One of the few follow-up pieces that was written about A Further Investigation Into the Botfarm Corporation was on Poker dot Org’s by Hayley Hintze. She approached Jack Poker for comment about their ownership. In the statement they issued as a reply, they said:
“We want to make absolutely clear that JackPoker is and never has been owned by Deeplay. Jack Entertainment is a wholly owned private entity with no corporate shareholding.”
At the time they responded to poker dot org, the info on Jack-Poker’s website footer and terms and conditions listed its owner and operating company as Jack Entertainment NV, registered in Curacao. Curacao also provided the site’s gaming license and the payment provider was listed as Angry Evil Games Kft.
However, as of early 2025, the information on Jack Poker’s footer now lists Jack La International Limitado as its owner and operator, registered in Costa Rica. The license is now provided by the Government of the Island of Anjouan, and the payment provider info is listed as FII Crealab Ltd.
However, these company names don’t reveal who the beneficial owner of Jack Poker actually is? Has Jack Poker actually changed ownership, or has the private (and still anonymous) proprietor simply switched the holding from one company to another?
Jack Entertainment NV, also holds an Anjouan license, but for another gaming site, called 24680 dot com, which offers sports betting and casino games. So Jack Poker’s previous owner is still operating, albeit another gaming brand.
Regardless of which company name is being used, the true identity of the real owner of Jack Poker is not publicly known. I’m sure Jack Poker could easily detail their full ownership history and name the beneficial individuals with controlling interest, if they so wished.
If they did so, it would be very reassuring to their customers to know they aren’t engaging with an anonymous brand. Any info or answers they have about Xingyun/Lucky Poker would also be much appreciated.
Analytics Package
Jack Poker did however, admit to having purchased an “analytics package” from Deeplay, the company alleged to be a front for the Botfarm Corporation. Whatever that entails, it doesn’t inspire confidence, given that Deeplay’s stated mission on its homepage is
“to provide a comfortable environment for gamers. Our robots employ different strategies to maintain in-game balance. So, non-professional players lose less, enjoy game more and keep staying in the game longer.”
Deeplay doesn’t fully disclose what its analytics packages include but its homepage states that they use data processing & analytics, artificial intelligence, and distributed systems in order to:
“Help our clients build product and grow audience with comprehensive analysis. Utilize and enrich data sources to maximize clients’ profits.
We develop and operate AI-powered, geo-distributed, real time applications. Apply our knowledge in machine learning, Big Data and high-performance computing to develop software and provide high availability solutions for our clients.”
What’s a high-availability solution? Sounds like it could be marketing gobbledegook for house bot liquidity, but who knows?
One can only guess at what Jack Poker was engaging Deeplay to analyse, but choosing to use a company for analytics that openly admits to deploying bots in online poker rooms, doesn’t inspire confidence.
Isn’t giving a backdoor key to your database (in order to perform analytics) to the company responsible for mass-scale AI bot-farming, putting your customers at risk of being exploited by that company’s geo-distributed, real-time AI applications? Hmmm…
How Long Will Online Poker Remain Viable?
Last summer I set a Google Alert for poker bots and I would get an alert every 2-3 weeks that something new had been written about them. Now I get daily notifications. Whether it’s house bots, lone individuals using commercial off-the-shelf poker bot programs, or highly organised bot farm operations, the issue of bots in online poker isn’t going to go away.
Some commentators have predicted online poker will be worth zero when AI bots become completely unstoppable and consumer awareness of them increases further. How far off is that reality?
Probably an overstatement, as some form of peer-to-peer poker may survive, but significant shrinkage of the industry is a distinct possibility. Will poker manage to avoid the fate that befell real money online peer-to-peer backgammon, which once was thriving, but is now all but non-existent, due to the game becoming solved?
Some players have suggested webcam tables and other means of proving humanity are the answer, but how many recreational players (who previously were happy to just fire up a game of an evening) will want to go to such lengths?
Those who want a casino game that resembles peer-to-peer poker (but is played against bots instead of human opponents), could be well-catered for. There might well be a market for it, and there are definitely suppliers waiting in the wings to launch such products, but it probably won’t be for many of those whose relationship with poker is due to its peer-to-peer nature.
Online peer-to-peer poker is not yet dead, but it’s on a fragile lifeline. The casket has been ordered, and a priest is on standby for valediction, but I’m still hoping that it will pull through and continue to be a thing for many years to come.
Postscript – Latest Update
This article was initially written in March, but publication was delayed until May. Just a few days before it was due to be published, the adverts for Xingyun Poker were wiped from freetips dot com, poker dot codes and bonus dot bets. Cryptopokerpros dot com also seems to have disappeared.
Pokerwired dot com, which was deactivated shortly after the publication last September, has now been revived.
The reason for the removal of Xingyun/Lucky Poker content is unknown, however it is believed that the people responsible may have suspected that a follow-up article was on the way and therefore scrubbed it.
The adverts on other New World Gaming sites may have been removed, but not all the connections have gone. Reviews and articles written on some sites owned by the group are still active, such as this one (shown below) on poker dot codes.
And this one on RacingInsider, another site owned by New World Gaming.
A promo code table on freetips dot com still shows a connection to Xingyun Poker with a link to a promo code page about the site (see image below). The code being used (888) is the same on both Freetips and the Xingyun dot poker microsite.
Strangely this link to the Xingyun Poker Code page now has a pop up, which claims that Xingyun Poker is closed.
However, it’s not closed, Xingyun/Lucky Poker is still operational and is just finishing off a tournament series calling itself ‘”The Art of the Deal” with $350,000 in guarantees. Another $400,000 guaranteed tournament series begins as soon as this ends. Below is a screenshot from today (May 11th), the site counter at the bottom showing 773 players online at 2.46am.
