"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.

Comments

But /. says it can't be

[frovingslosh]

What amazes me is that so many people believe that there just can't be cheating in on-line poker, a game where you have to trust the operators to not be in the game and looking at all of the cards. When I even mentioned that this could be happening a few times years ago on Slashdot I got modded down and flamed because it just "couldn't happen" and the nice people who ran the games would be perfectly content to take their cut and would never think of cheating. And people also ignored the fact that multiple players who know each other (or one player who plays several hands, even with different Internet connections) can share data about their cards with each other, giving them a small edge against other players who think that all players have the same information available to them. I have since learned from a friend who does play on-line that he and his wife often play in the same hands even from the same IP address and this certainly does go on and is not prevented from the "on-line casinos" that run the games.