ACR Poker launched Skip-It MTTs on March 20, 2026: a tournament format that uses AI-controlled bots to eliminate 80% of the field in under five minutes before human players take over. No real-money poker site has ever deployed artificial intelligence to play hands on behalf of players inside a tournament.
The format is built on technology from i3Soft, a B2B gaming company founded by former PokerStars and Full Tilt executives. It works in three phases: an AI “Race” phase, a manual control phase, and a Sunday finale where all survivors start in the money.
Buy-ins during the beta sit at $1.05, $5.25, and $10.50, with a $26.25 direct Day 2 entry. The format runs on ACR and its Winning Poker Network sister sites including BlackChip Poker, True Poker, and Ya Poker.
Coverage has been thin: one dedicated article exists and no press release was issued, which is a departure from ACR’s usual playbook. The timing is notable: Skip-It MTTs dropped mid-way through ACR’s $50 million guaranteed OSS XL series, the site’s largest tournament festival ever.
How Skip-It MTTs Work
The format compresses a multi-day tournament into roughly five hours of total play across the week. Multiple daily starting flights feed into a single Sunday finale. Here is how each phase breaks down.
Phase 1: The Race (Under 5 Minutes)
Players do not touch a card. Instead, each player is represented by one or more AI “Racers” who play tournament hands autonomously using the same underlying skill level. Differences between Racers are cosmetic only: randomly generated playing styles that vary in aggressiveness but produce identical win rates over time.
- Multiple Racers per player: you can back more than one Racer in the same tournament. If two or more survive, their chip stacks merge into a single combined stack for Phase 2.
- Elimination rate: 80% of the field is gone within five minutes. Only the top 20% of stacks advance.
- Spectator mode: players can watch highlights of big hands their Racers play and track chip progress in real time.
Phase 2: The Control (~1 Hour)
Surviving players take manual control and play standard No Limit Hold’em, grinding the field from 20% down to 10%. Players can let the AI keep playing on their behalf, but ACR explicitly discourages this. The AI is deliberately designed to play below human standards in this phase, giving real players a clear skill edge.
Once 10% of the field remains, play pauses and stacks carry forward to Day 2.
Day 2: Sundays (~4 Hours)
All surviving players from the week’s starting flights converge into a single field. Every Day 2 player starts in the money, which eliminates the bubble entirely. Players who entered multiple Day 1 flights during the week have their stacks combined, creating an incentive to play as many flights as possible.
Current Buy-In Levels (Beta)
| Format | Buy-In | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 Flight (Micro) | $1.05 | Multiple flights daily |
| Day 1 Flight (Low) | $5.25 | Multiple flights daily |
| Day 1 Flight (Mid) | $10.50 | Multiple flights daily |
| Direct Day 2 Entry | $26.25 | Sundays only, chip disadvantage |
More flights are available on days closer to Sunday, which rewards players who plan their week around the format. ACR has not announced plans for higher stakes, but the beta label suggests expansion is coming.
Who Built the Technology
The AI engine behind Skip-It MTTs was developed by i3Soft, a B2B gaming technology company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2021. The founding team reads like a poker industry reunion.
- John Caldwell (co-founder): former Director of Pro and Celebrity Marketing at PokerStars and former Editor-in-Chief of a major poker news outlet.
- Bob Williams (co-founder): former programming executive at Full Tilt Poker with a long career at Parlay Games, Inc.
- Scott White (early team): Chairman and CEO of Parlay Games, a Canadian developer of online gaming software.
The company raised a $500,000 pre-seed round in May 2022 and had approximately 40 employees by mid-2022. Their ACR product portfolio already includes Poker Races (the AI Racer SNG predecessor, launched January 2025), Bounty Hunter, Crash Joker, and Plinko Poker.
Skip-It MTTs scale the Poker Races concept from a single sit-and-go into a full multi-day tournament structure.
i3Soft originally developed this technology for a standalone Web3 poker platform called “Pokeraces,” which partnered with Polygon Studios for NFT-based Racer authentication. That standalone product was scrapped in favour of the current B2B licensing model, with ACR as the primary client.
No Poker Site Has Tried This Before
The concept of AI playing real poker hands on behalf of human players in a real-money tournament has no direct precedent. Several formats share the philosophy of compressing early tournament stages, but none delegate actual decision-making to machines.
- GGPoker’s Flip & Go: the closest comparable. Uses forced all-in confrontations to eliminate players in roughly five minutes, with survivors advancing to a standard tournament in the money. Featured in two WSOP bracelet events. The key difference: players are present and make a card-discard decision. No AI is involved.
- ACR’s own Survivor Flips (January 2025): eight players are dealt three cards, discard one, and an automated board determines eliminations without any betting. Again, no AI decision-making.
- Lottery SNGs (Spin & Go, Expresso, BLAST): introduced randomised prize pools to hyper-turbo sit-and-gos, creating casino-like variance while maintaining full player control.
The broader industry trend is clear: operators want formats that reduce the time commitment barrier while keeping enough skill to feel like poker. Our piece on why AI will not kill online poker explored this tension from a different angle.
Skip-It MTTs take it further than any prior format by fully outsourcing the early grind to artificial intelligence. The design also carries a strategic layer that traditional MTTs lack: backing multiple Racers and merging surviving stacks creates a bankroll allocation decision before a single hand is dealt.
Players with bigger budgets can enter more Racers per flight and more flights per week, building larger Day 2 stacks. That is a new axis of planning that does not exist in standard tournament poker.
The Bot Question ACR Cannot Avoid
The most striking context for this launch is ACR’s long-running battle with unauthorised bots. The site has faced repeated scrutiny over game integrity, and now it is deliberately putting AI players into its tournaments.
Independent investigators have documented suspected bot networks on the ACR platform generating six-figure profits over short windows. In early 2025, former ACR ambassador Nacho Barbero was caught with GTO Wizard open during a Venom tournament.
He later told Isaac Haxton on a PokerGO stream that he did not think ACR was trying to stop cheating. He was removed as an ambassador shortly after.
ACR has invested in security measures, as we covered in our breakdown of ACR’s 25-year security evolution. The company also has active ambassadors including 2003 WSOP Main Event champion Chris Moneymaker and high-stakes legend Tom Dwan, who signed with the platform in March 2024.
- All Racers are identical: no pay-to-win dynamics. Every AI player has the same skill level regardless of buy-in or entry method.
- AI deliberately weak in Phase 2: human skill dominates the stages where money is won and lost.
- Every Day 2 player is in the money: the randomness of the AI phase does not determine who goes home empty-handed.
Whether the player base accepts this framing remains to be seen once stakes scale beyond micro buy-ins.
What to Watch Next
Skip-It MTTs launched with zero fanfare during ACR’s busiest period. The $50 million guaranteed OSS XL wraps its Main Events this weekend, and Skip-It barely registered against that backdrop. That is likely intentional: a soft launch to test the product before committing marketing dollars.
- Stake increases: the format currently caps at $10.50. If ACR adds $26.25, $52.50, or higher Day 1 buy-ins, it signals confidence in the product. That is when serious grinders will start paying attention.
- Guaranteed prize pools: no guarantees have been announced for Skip-It Day 2 finals. Adding them would be the clearest sign ACR sees this as a flagship format rather than an experiment.
- Player reception: no meaningful community discussion has surfaced yet. The format is less than 48 hours old and running at stakes that do not attract vocal commentators. The real test comes when the first Sunday finale plays out.
- Competitor response: if the format gains traction, watch whether GGPoker or other operators develop their own AI-assisted tournament structures. i3Soft’s B2B model means the technology could theoretically be licensed to other networks.
For grinders already on the ACR network, Skip-It MTTs offer a low-risk way to test something genuinely new at micro stakes. The standard tournament strategy playbook applies from Phase 2 onward, but the meta around flight selection, Racer allocation, and stack merging is uncharted territory.
This is a format worth watching regardless of whether you plan to play it. ACR just crossed a line no poker operator has crossed before: using AI as a feature, not a threat. Whether the community embraces it, rejects it, or barely notices depends on what happens when the stakes go up.
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