Now that my report has been submitted and posted, I finally read this thread. I purposely did not read this information so that I could stay unbiased in reaching my conclusions. I never spoke to BetFred or the player directly. Everything was handled through Bryan.
I would like to share my informal opinion, after having read this thread and understood this matter more fully.
In U.S. land based casinos there are often car giveaways. It is not at all unusual for advantage players (APs) to target these promotions by "stuffing the box" with entries. APs I have known like to brag about the cars they've won, it's like earning an Eagle Scout badge. I have heard rumours of this being done online, but I had never before encountered a case of this.
Here is a case where APs won a lot of cars that I wrote about in my blog:
Now that I know that Alex won a car, the matter becomes very clear. He built and tested his robot software on a low-level slot. He needed a slot with some secondary decision making feature to model what he would need for blackjack. By targeting a slot at a minimal bet level, he hoped to go unnoticed. This was simply the development stage for his software.
Your conclusion is a way wide of the mark.
I had a quick look at the 'slot' in question, and it plainly has a non-trivial strategy (if you draw two unrelated symbols which do you keep?), which may have been published somewhere, but could be derived by exhaustive analysis, at another casino, in free play mode, whatever.
His game selection screams advantage play, and has nothing to do with bot testing on 'low-level slots', which could have been done as mentioned in free play mode, or on another Playtech site prior to deployment, but rather, as Betfred already suggested, that he was completing the wagering for a bonus, and he had come to the conclusion that playing correct strategy on this game was the most profitable way to withdraw that bonus. You do not make 50,000 + test spins on an unconnected game in order to go unnoticed!
Clearly he had used bots to complete the wagering for a bonus. That is naughty.
However there is an obvious difference between a player clearing a £100 bonus using a bot and winning a £30k car. He might be willing to risk the £100 bonus (or whatever it was) by bot use, but yet that does not prove he would emperil a £30k car by doing the same, he may well have decided that he would play these games by hand. A bot user might use a bot in one situation, that doesn't mean they always do, even though it would be suggestive that they would do so in future.
It seems to me that Betfred had investigated his account and were aware of the bot usage on the slot poker game. They sent these logs, which are plainly damning, rather than the pontoon logs, which are the pertinent thing in this case. Rather an unfortunate decision, as was the initial email excluding winnings for not playing blackjack.
Just as the player has not answered obvious questions in a straightforward manner, neither has the casino. It would have shut this thread down long ago (or not!) to provide the actual relevant logs rather than play on an unrelated game for unrelated games. Unfortunately this is so often the case....
Personally I would like to see the Pontoon logs and honestly hope that they show in an obvious manner that he did use a bot. If they do not however, or are ambiguous, the case is a much more difficult one.
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