There’s Another Online Poker Cheating Scandal Going Viral

On Wednesday, the account behind TrenirusGTO posted a five-minute video showcasing its own software. The video had the app running alongside a live microstakes cash game on ACR, giving the player the “right” decision on each street. This is what’s commonly known in poker as real-time assistance, a universal bane of the online poker industry. It’s a form of cheating that has grown alongside the rise of solvers, and policing it is only going to get harder.

It’s the poker equivalent of having the answers to the test as you’re taking it. The account was not exposing anything, it was advertising its software, albeit in very odd fashion. Any PR is good PR I guess.

After the video spread among poker players on X, ACR responded with a statement confirming RTA is strictly prohibited, followed by a second one naming the account involved. Username UGLYRETD, created in August, deposited $14.13, played 111 hands and finished with a net loss of $13.12. The account was permanently banned, and ACR said the seven players who lost money to it would be refunded within 24 hours.

A swift response. But this is a site that has frequently been intermingled with these sorts of allegations and incidents.

In early 2024, posters on the Two Plus Two forum alleged that a bot farm running hundreds of accounts had siphoned around $10 million off ACR’s network in just one year. Those allegations have never been publicly resolved, one way or the other.

In January 2025, well-known poker pro Nacho Barbero, an ACR team pro at the time, posted an image that appeared to show a solver open while he was playing an online session. ACR’s response to this was not as measured as the Trenirus one, calling it “Nacho being a goofball” and noting that he is “not a GTO-style player and likely never will be.” The site later apologized for that response, investigated him, and found no wrongdoing. An independent review by British pro Patrick Leonard reached the same conclusion. Barbero has always denied cheating, saying he was coaching students at the time. That wasn’t the end of this saga, however.

Three months later, during a PokerGO stream, Barbero was talking with Isaac Haxton, who asked him how seriously ACR takes stopping cheating. “You can just have GTO Wizard open on your computer while playing?” Haxton asked. “Are they even trying?” Barbero replied: “I don’t think they’re even trying.”

Days later, Barbero was axed by ACR. Funnily enough, he was picked up by WPT Global four months after that.

Then came the most eye-rolling event throughout this eternal PR struggle ACR faces. Stung by the bot accusations, ACR publicly offered $100,000 and a security job to anyone who could build a bot, run it on ACR for 5,000 hands and have it go undetected. Multiple people claimed success inside 12 hours. One posted openly that he had a working bot running and asked what proof they’d like. Thirty-eight hours after announcing the challenge, ACR withdrew it and apologized for the error. Nobody was paid.

All of the above loops back to one inherent factor that is rife in online poker. ACR is based in Costa Rica and is not licensed by any US gaming regulator, while serving American players. You can argue that regulators choke online poker operators and stop the game flourishing, but they are still there protecting players. ACR being an offshore entity means it answers to nobody. When a cheating allegation arrives, it is the judge, the jury and the defendant.

ACR CEO Phil Nagy posted on X reiterating the site’s commitment against RTA and other forms of cheating, adding that ACR is the only online poker site that shows every player’s hole cards at its final tables, so the audience can spot anything untoward. He’s right that they can. But that’s the crux of what makes this all uncomfortable. It feels like online poker’s main enforcement mechanism right now is players spotting things and sharing them on Twitter, or in this case someone thinking cheating was a good form of promotion.

I can guarantee you that in the world of online poker, not every cheater is that dumb or bad at advertising.