In poker, as in life, integrity is the most valuable hand you play. We, at party, wholeheartedly believe in this, which led to the creation of our dedicated Game Integrity team in late 2018. Treating people with respect and maintaining integrity in all aspects of life are core principles that guide our actions. We believe that success should be achieved through honesty and hard work, not through cheating. This philosophy extends to our passion for poker, a game that unfortunately sometimes attracts those who seek unfair advantages. The concept of integrity, specifically in poker, is crucial, as it underscores the importance of honesty, fairness, and respect in the game. Our sole mission in Game Integrity is to provide the safest place to play for our players by focusing on maintaining a fair poker network for all brands that are a part of it.Our shared love for poker and our commitment to ethical behavior motivate us every single day to be persistent and vigilant at ensuring fairness and trust in the game.
The foundation of the team is expert, former professional poker players who are passionate about protecting the game they love. They are supported by highly skilled data scientists and programmers who possess the skills to develop and maintain the highly sophisticated tools used to catch cheaters.
The team handles all Game Integrity related matters such as bot detection, collusion detection, money/chip dumping, prohibited third party tool control, multi-accounting, account sharing, ghosting, buttoning, queueing and ratholing. Consequently, the team has a variety of detection methods that they use to continuously monitor the games to catch players who are cheating. These tools are regularly updated to keep pace with emerging trends and the requirements of the poker environment. The tools are used to proactively detect cheaters and to review accounts when reported by players for suspicious activity.
As much as Game Integrity relies on in–house detection methods and team checks, there is another important component in maintaining the integrity of the game and detecting the cheaters – through players’ reports. We highly value reports from players, as their insights are crucial to us as well. The players have a dedicated page on our websites for these matters – the Safer Poker page. It is part of party’s initiative to make the network “the safest place to play poker online. It gives all players the possibility to report suspicious behavior anonymously or not. Game Integrity takes every report seriously and invites the players to provide the details of any player they suspect to be in breach of the rules. They can also send an email at gameintegrity@partypoker.com or fill in the form from the Safer Poker page anonymously, if they wish.
Encouraging players to report suspicious activities fosters a sense of community responsibility as well. At the same time, the community and its trust in the team are of the upmost importance, which is why Game Integrity follows a transparent process for handling all player reports. Once received, all reports with no exceptions are being thoroughly investigated by the team and resolutions are being sent to the reporting players as soon as there are such. Providing players with the outcome of their reports not only reassures them that their input is valued but also educates them on what constitutes cheating and what doesn’t. While privacy laws prevent us from revealing our detection methods and all details from our investigations, we strive to share as much information as possible with our players to build confidence and trust and be as transparent with our players as we can. We reserve the right to take appropriate action on any offender found to be in breach of our terms and conditions. This could include warnings, prohibiting a player from taking part in the same game as another specific player, permanent closure of a customer’s account, and seizure of funds (that will ultimately be redistributed to legitimate players who were affected by the account that was deemed to be in breach of our rules).
Maintaining the integrity of the poker games requires constant vigilance and 24/7 commitment. The Game Integrity team believes that having a team available at all hours means that any reports or detected anomalies can be addressed immediately and this resulted in the team’s 24/7 coverage. The team is making sure that the monitoring is constant, and the game is under scrutiny. We are the ones to receive the reports from the players first and the ones that will always make sure investigations are being conducted. We strongly believe that this unwavering dedication and commitment not only safeguards the game we all love, but also upholds the community’s trust in our platform.
Iva Mitkova
Game Integrity Operations Manager
Want to know more? Our Head of Integrity Juha Pasanen sat down with poker pro Jaime Staples to answer our community’s questions – catch the full podcast on YouTube here
