Slashdot Mirror
"Back Door" Cheating Scandal Rocks Online Poker
AcidAUS sends us the story of an online poker cheating ring that netted an estimated $10M for its perpetrators over almost 4 years. The article spotlights the role of an Australian player who first performed the statistical analyses that demonstrated that cheating had to be going on. "In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analyzed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate. His findings led to an internal investigation by the parent company that owns both sites. It found rogue employees had defrauded players over three years via a security hole that allowed the cheats to see other player's secret (or hole) cards." The (Mohawk) Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which licenses the two poker companies, has released its preliminary report. MSNBC reporting from a couple of weeks back gives deep background on the scandal.
I still don't understand why people do this. Are they really THAT desperate to place a bet, any bet? Might as well become a day-trader and play the stock market for your fix. It would be a lot more regulated than most online poker.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Whee.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
From what I gather from the articles, they didn't actually write any code that tapped into the server... it was just getting information from the client app that was residing in memory but was not displayed to the screen.
This is just an enormous case study suggesting why strict client/server separation is essential, and that clients only get the information on a "need to know" basis.
Isn't this a fairly standard design practice? How did this happen?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
If you played at any of the levels where the pros inhabited you'd have been identified and banned quickly.
Most of the online pro's are using tracking software and doing analysis which would have picked up on you three. Though I hardly doubt they'd have needed it, the math involved in poker is only part of being a winning player.
2+2, where most of the collaboration is done, is the /. of the poker world. A lot of Statistical anomalies are discussed and investigated there.
Show of hands if anyone knows about the DERB thread?
Thank god the moral police have arrived.
That's called collusion and although it's used from time to time, the regulars pick up on it fast and the software recognizes it even faster. What people aren't understanding about online poker is that it's not the same as "placing a bet", it's a game based on mathematical probability. Online poker players have databases full of information on themselves and their opponent. Every single decision made is either positive expected value or negative, and after a while the better players learn to recognize what situations will yield a positive result. This story has been around for a few years and the real interesting part about it is the fact that it was an online community of poker players who ended up exposing it. This scandal has been developing for quite a while now and if anybody feels like getting the whole story go to the community where it all happened. There's real interesting reading there and I'm surprised it has gone unnoticed on Slashdot as long as it has.
Don't buy individual stocks
The economy is not a zero sum game
Yes it is, but as long as in the long term production is higher in the future than it is now, your (sufficiently diversified) investment will grant returns.
Actually the morality police is what brought us here. If online gaming was regulated to be fair and run by legit casinos who had a legal liability to create a fair and secure playing field this would be unlikely to happen and if it did there would be legal recourse. Since the morality police can't bring themselves to do that people play without the safety of regulation and a legal system and when companies harm their players through negligence our outright fraud the players are just screwed.
seem to be from people that know absolutely nothing about poker and ultimately nothing about how the sites make their money, so let's clear up a few things.
1. It would never be in the best interests of the company to try to allow this to happen to anyone, as the cost would be too high. If players had a hint that they were being cheated they would never play there. That $10MM figure is nothing compared to what the sites generate from rake alone. The only people who could benefit would be hired contractors who wrote the code and got paid some small amount of money to do so. To them, it would be worth the risk to try to cheat somehow, and they obviously did.
2. To the few people who seem to think that they were getting information that was already on their systems from memory that was encrypted or something, well, that's false. The "special" accounts were sent information that other players do not get sent. You only get your hole cards, and it's not until a showdown where anyone but you and a random server out there know what anyone has.
I guess that's it, aside from the extreme unlikelihood that anyone would try to cheat in this manner at a small (say 30-60 or less) game. The risk/benefit doesn't add up at those stakes.
A few random points: high stakes poker can be shady at times, and collusion in the smaller games can be defended against to some extent (by either not playing, or using the style of collusion against the colluders. At times games can appear to be collusive due to excessive raising, but the majority of the time that's just strategy.
That's pretty rude. Not to the casinos (I could care less about them), but to the poor, hardworking "cocktail girls". I do more-or-less the same thing when I'm in Vegas, but I make a point to tip the waitrons well. This means: they'll happily keep bringing the drinks; they'll carefully not notice how few nickels you're putting in the slots (as long as you keep up a minimal pretense); and you're still getting drinks at bargain-basement prices.
"Do what you wanna--do what you will;
Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill--
and when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
to help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip."
-- Frank Zappa, "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"
If organized teams have ripped off Casinos in Vegas (the MIT blackjack team comes to mind) then surely online casinos get hit all the time and don't know.
You are missing the point. In poker games where players are not competing directly against the house but against other players and the house just charges a small percentage of the overall pot as a fee to play their game, they aren't actually stealing money from the house but the other players seated at the table. So, while the sites want to assure you that there are not any "back doors" they actually don't lose money directly from them, only indirectly if they end up losing aggregate business as a result of people not gambling due to mistrust.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Have you ever played poker? With the right people, poker is fun. A movie costs 10$ and lasts 1.5 hours, and may or may not be fun. I can play a 5$ poker game with friends that lasts twice that long, is more entertaining than most movies and that allows for actual interaction between people, rather than staring at a screen. I could blow 50$ or more at the bar, or I could play poker all night for 20$ and not wake up smelling of smoke and beer.
Playing poker because you think it will make you rich is probably retarded, playing at a casino is certainly reckless if you aren't an elite player, but playing poker doesn't in and of itself indicate naivety or stupidity. It's just a different form of entertainment and is reasonably priced as long as you're reasonable about it.
Yes, except those legal casinos with their legal liability are the same ones who will tell you "you are no longer welcome here", if you start winning too much, or card counting, or employing some other system to bend the odds in your favour.
Online casinos can't scrutinize the players in the same way, and can barely tell the difference between a real player and a bot.
I'm not saying what they did was in any way correct, but please don't compare them with the "fair, unbiased people of Las Vegas" - they both want to bleed you dry as quickly as possible.
This is false. It can take awhile to catch it (as is seen in the AP/UB story),...
So is it safe to play now? That's the question that needs answering. Or is there another scam going that hasn't been caught yet. You don't know.
but statistical analysis will always show if weird things are happening.
Eventually. But what good is that?
People who play seriously online use tools like Poker Tracker, Hold'em Manager, Poker Office, etc to keep track of their own play, wins/losses and whatnot.
Someone noticed something odd about the win rate of a few players. They mentioned it to someone else; who looked and found the same thing. It kept going until the evidence was so great that it couldn't be a statistical anomaly.
And 4 years later they got caught.
"A few players" should have retired their accounts, and spun up new ones every now and then.
Or after 3 years, should have just plain retired and taken their millions to another country. How sure are you this didn't happen too with other teams? Or isn't happening right now?
The real difficulty is in getting sites to admit when something shady has been going on. AP and UB denied that anything had happened for ages. Until the bad press started showing up and it became too much for them to ignore.
So not only does it take YEARS to unmask systematic cheating, but the online houses aren't cooperating to solve the issue faster. That doesn't exactly install confidence...
As I originally said, there is no way to reliably ensure cheating isn't taking place. Sure if it is taking place, one day, we'll know about it, maybe. But the smart criminals will have moved on before then... and meanwhile the new criminals will still be under the statistical radar.
That's only true when you're playing games that compete against the house.
"Counting cards" occurs in Blackjack. In Blackjack, if you win, the house loses.
That's not the case in Poker - in Poker the house wins whether you win or lose. They really don't give a darn.
Online poker for real money shouldn't exist because its virtually impossible to ensure systematic cheating isn't taking place.
So what? Then people don't have to play it. Why limit what consenting adults want to do in their free time?
Hell, let's just ban the internet, since it's "virtually impossible" to keep it from being used to steal music and distribute kiddy porn.
Keep in mind this is poker being played here. Are there casinos where poker is played against the house? Because if it's just the visitors playing each other as is usual for the game, the house's only real concern is precisely that the games stay as perfectly "on the level" as possible.