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."

Re:Silly gamblers

[MichaelSmith]

Cards are out. Sports are in. Bet on horse racing, football, and dogfighting - the holy trinity.

All online games are easy to fix but I think people who play online poker are crazy. The whole point of the game is making judgements about the cards people are holding from their behaviour. If you can't see them, or even be sure that they are members of your species, why would you play?

Well, duh! That's why it is called "gambling"

[registrations_suck]

Is anyone surprised? Off-shore gambling sites have no real oversight whatsoever as far as I know (unless Vegas, et.al.). Of COURSE people are going to get ripped off. As much as gambling on the cards, people are gambling on the site itself - and in this case - the guilty parties were gambling that no one would notice. Gambling all the way around. This is just one of many reasons why the U.S. is just out and out foolish to continue banning on-line gaming, when instead, it could bring it to shore, charge gazillions for licenses, tax the proceeds (for both the house and the gamers), and as an added bonus, enact various certification and oversight requirements that would provide some measure of protection while allowing government to do what it does best - grow even larger.

Re:collusion

[Astarica]

The problem is that as you move higher and higher stakes there are increasingly few players so it is easier and easier to get you and your friend on the same table. Assuming you and your friend are at least no worse than the average player of that level, it has to be the case that you'd win if you collude, so the only thing that holds you back is your capital. I believe the statistics say that the knowledge of 2 extra cards is basically insurmountable over the long run in poker. And in online there's nothing stopping me from calling my friend and say I got these cards, what do you got? And there's no way anyone can catch that. If you try to cheat in a real casino, people would eventually notice. But that isn't possible for online.

Re:Silly gamblers

[megaditto]

They play for the same reason that people play slot machine games against a computer programmed to make a profit... addiction

Re:More greedy or stupid? Probably stupid.

[registrations_suck]

Jails are full of stupid people who thought they were actually smarter than everyone else.

Re:Silly gamblers

[Dun Malg]

I think people who play online poker are crazy. The whole point of the game is making judgements about the cards people are holding from their behaviour.

A large part of their behavior is how they bet and how long they take to do it. That's still visible. Believe it or not, most decent poker players have a pretty good "poker face". It's not like you gain much insight at live poker looking for twitching eyelids and nervous ball-scratching.

Re:Silly gamblers

[AuMatar]

In both online and offline poker, the biggest clues to your opponents are *not* facial or body language tells. Those are too easy to fake. The real clues are betting patterns and logic. Those are not only obvious online, they're easier to spot. Bots are actually fairly easy to beat, they can't use second order logic (playing your opponents tendencies, not just your cards)

Re:collusion

[Anonymous Coward]

To gain an advantage, eventually you have to make a move that would otherwise not make sense. Make enough of these moves, and people begin to notice.

Online poker sites keep records of every hand that is played for money. They can go back and check hand histories to look for collusion. Most the time the people doing it are quite amateur, and their play reveals what they are doing. The hand histories of online poker sites theoretically make it much easier to catch collusion online than in B&M poker.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:collusion

[jaffray]

It's much easier to catch colluding cheats online than in a live game.

Online poker sites have vast quantities of forensic evidence - complete hand histories, including the actions and hole cards of all players involved, for every hand ever played. Easy to datamine for suspicious patterns, and sites like PokerStars have people doing that full time. Surveillance video of live games isn't as complete, isn't stored for as long, doesn't include hole card data, and is vastly more difficult to review.

I routinely play for thousands of dollars both live and online. I'm not too concerned about being cheated in either, but I'm more concerned about the live games than the online ones on trusted sites.

Re:Silly gamblers

[RCSInfo]

Here is my reservation with online poker - what if instead of a table of bots, you were playing a single bot holding 4 hands? The bot still doesn't have perfect information, but can now factor in all of the cards from all hands that it sees. For that matter, what keeps a human player from starting a 2nd account and playing two hands at the same table?

Re:Silly gamblers

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

At a real casino the casino is ALWAYS going to be cheating you, online you at least have a chance.

Re:Silly gamblers

[bluekanoodle]

In a real casino, you don't play against the house in poker, you play against the other player. The casino takes a cut of the rake for providing the atmosphere, the table, and the dealer. As in onlone and "analog" play, it is in the casino's best interest to ensure fair play at a poker table. If players don't feel the play is fair, they'll go somewhere else, and if they go somewhere else, the other players will follow the action. As far as table games go, where you are playing against the house, why is it 'cheating" when the casino provides a game that statistically you are bound to lose, and yet you still play? Disclaimer, I work in the Casino indistry, but I also know better to play the games, because the odds aren't in my favor.

You seem to be making some big assumptions...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be making some big assumptions when you talk about how online poker rooms don't have an "advantage". The major assumptions you seem to be making are that the dealing is fair and that the people you're playing against aren't shills or even bots. In an online poker game, it's pretty hard to prove when the dealing is fair. I do remember an article on slashdot from years back where the author statistically examined the deals from an online poker site and concluded that they were dealing from the bottom of the deck but obviously statistics can't be easily used as hard proof, so the online poker room can deal unfairly all they want.

Now, maybe there's some sort of authentication system to make sure that none of the other players are shills or robots, in which case you seem to be claiming that there's no reason to cheat on dealing. I still don't think that's true. Now, you know a lot more about online poker rooms than I do, so maybe there are safeguards against this that you haven't mentioned, but, since you didn't mention them... You said that the room takes a percentage of the pot in each hand, so the obvious ways for them to make more money from the same game are to manipulate events to increase the number of hands played, and to increase the size of every pot. It's been mentioned again and again that the online poker sites have complete hand histories as if this is protection to the player against a crooked site. It seems to me that if you want to socially engineer someone to keep gambling past the point where they would normally stop, etc. having that kind of information to know how to manipulate them would be very useful. Armed with that kind of information, there should be ways to alter peoples hands to, for example, make them more likely to raise the stakes, increasing the size of the pot and therefore the size the "rake". The other thing that could be done by a crooked site is to cycle the winner on each hand, making sure that no-one ever ends up down by too much, that way people are likely to play more hands hoping to win back their money/win more money/do better than break even, whatever. Something like that is a win for the poker site since everyone more or less breaks even, but pays to the site for every hand and when they finally leave, they end up feeling like they were so very close to winnning big.

Frankly, now that I write this down, it doesn't seem that different than what casinos do legally. They're allowed to rig the games as long as the odds end up matching some particular agreed upon number. And, naturally, they skew things to keep people thinking like they're going to win big. The anecdotal person who wins big isn't really someone who "beat the odds" they're part of the casinos advertising. Frankly, the gambling industry in general makes me kind of sick.

Anyway, what I've speculated above is based on fairly poor knowledge of how online poker rooms work. If I'm wrong about how they could cheat the players, please tell me in what way I'm wrong and then I'll have learned something new.

Re:Silly gamblers

[Molochi]

And from what I understand there are tons of college kids that do just that. Get 4 guys with different ips and just voice chat. You'll rape everyone else at the table.