Tracking Online Cheaters in Poker

prostoalex writes "MSNBC has a special report on discovering online cheats at AbsolutePoker.com. A Costa Rican company belonging to a Canadian tribe at first denied all the accusations of any cheating going on, but after Serge Ravitch made a scrupulous analysis of the games' events, the reputation of AbsolutePoker.com was at stake. A detailed log file provided investigators with necessary details: an employee and partial owner of the site was one of the players involved, and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially."

Comments

collusion

[bcrowell]

This particular story has to do with a security hole in the computer software, but in general, my understanding of the logic of the game is that online poker is potentially the only way to get a guaranteed honest game with strangers. In a meatspace game with strangers, the problem that basically can't be solved is collusion. Player A and player B both walk into the casino, and pretend they don't know each other. In reality, they've arranged certain secret signals in advance, to be used in hands where the pot gets big. One signal might mean "I'm bluffing," and another might mean "I'm not bluffing." Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage. An online poker system, on the other hand, can at least potentially be set up so that A and B can't get themselves into the same game together -- you just have to have a large enough pool of users, and assign them randomly to games. The other reason I'd never play in a casino game is that the house's take is big enough that you're practically guaranteed to lose money in the long run, unless you somehow manage to get into games where your skills are extremely high in comparison to your competitors'.

Re:collusion

[Obfuscant]

And in online there's nothing stopping me from calling my friend and say I got these cards, what do you got?

Isn't calling out on the same phone line your modem is using a bit difficult?

If you try to cheat in a real casino, people would eventually notice.

I'm not sure how. For example, if you and your friend sit at the same table in the casino, and you've worked up a system where he plays very tight (comes in with nothing less than a 10-10 or A-K), he can explain his play as following one of the books (Helmuth, I think). Before he folds he plays with his chips, just like everyone else does, and uses the chips to signal to you what he has. Maybe makes two stacks of the appropriate height. Since the casino does not know what he folded, they cannot coorelate his actions with specific values of cards.

If he doesn't fold, he uses different chips for card protectors depending on what he has.

Of course, you cannot sit and stare at him until he plays with his chips, or ask him to do it again, and he cannot be obvious about counting out how many chips or you might get caught as being just plain suspicious. Otherwise, you'd blend into the normal pattern of play.

cheating has to happen

[Astarica]

The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat. If I simply call a friend who lives in another location and exchange information, how will you catch that? Many of the high stakes table only has 1 table so it's not hard to get on the same table. If you assume the cheaters are actually good players then it is also not necessary that you always play on the same table. Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage.

Tip of the Iceberg

[posdnous]

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

from the article, it mentions that the cheater was so blatant at cheating because they had a personal vendetta to prove to the company about it's flawed security. Basically the cheater told the company that it's systems were vulnerable and they wouldn't listen, so he set out to prove a point to them. Only after basically being so blatant at cheating that people thought he was god, and complained umpteen times to Absolute Poker did they do anything about it.

Basically what this proves is that, there is no way a real cheater will be caught. A real cheater is not going to do things to draw attention to themselves, if they can gain a 100% edge by cheating, they won't press it to it's maximum, they'll only press it slightly so that they only have a 55% edge, time and compounding will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, and NO ONE will be the wiser.