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."

Silly gamblers

[Ethanol-fueled]

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

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'.

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.

Re:Silly gamblers

[Ethanol-fueled]

True, true. ...the whole thing is shady from the get-go. Online gambling is already in a large grey area of international law. Shit, if somebody absolutely had to gamble, then couldn't they do so at an analog casino(which would be a much more difficult to cheat)?

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

[stirfry714]

Yup, it should be legal, licensed, and regulated. Exactly right.

And they should allow cardrooms in all states, just like California does. Basically, if you aren't playing against the house (playing only against other players), it should be a legal game to spread. That's generally how it works in California (overgeneralizing here, but you get my point). No slots, no blackjack, roulette, etc, but poker and other card games where you play other players only.

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.

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

[UncleTogie]

Good Idea. They could use a portion of the (probably sizeable) proceeds for gambling rehabilitation. If only the US gov't would do same with Marijuana sales ;)

I know lots of stoners that wouldn't care for the marijuana rehabilitation part...

...but yeah, I darn near guarantee they could tax the sales of it at triple the rate of cigarettes and still have lines out the door and around the block. Same age limits as alcohol, with "dry" regions allowable with medical exceptions. HUGE tax windfall, and if they're smart, it could save the dying walrus that is Social Security. Goo goo g'joob.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not arguing the obvious hazards of inhaling ANY type of particulate matter. I'd just like to quote Winston Churchill who, when queried as to his booze consumption, said "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

Just like gambling, food, sex, water, [wikipedia.org] and work, almost anything can be harmful when misused and abused.

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.

For those who don't want to read through that...

[FiniteElementalist]

...here is a snippet one of the really damning hand histories (the cheat is POTRIPPER):

POKERME420 - Posts small blind $150
JINXY_MONKEY - Posts big blind $300
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to AUTOSMOKE [7c 4h]
Dealt to OBV_DONK [Js 5h]
Dealt to POTR0AST [6h 4c]
Dealt to POTRIPPER [Ks Qd]
Dealt to POKERME420 [10d Qs]
Dealt to JINXY_MONKEY [Ah As]
Dealt to CLOVER777 [Kh Jd]
Dealt to SCARFACE_79 [7s 3h]
SCARFACE_79 - Folds
CLOVER777 - Calls $300
OBV_DONK - Folds
AUTOSMOKE - Folds
POTR0AST - Folds
POTRIPPER - Folds
POKERME420 - Raises $450 to $600
JINXY_MONKEY - Raises $1500 to $1800
CLOVER777 - Folds
POKERME420 - Calls $1200
*** FLOP *** [10h 10c 9s]
POKERME420 - Checks
JINXY_MONKEY - Bets $1800
POKERME420 - Calls $1800
*** TURN *** [10h 10c 9s] [5c] ...

He folds KQo unraised preflop ahead of AA when there was a grand total of ONE HAND in the whole collection he folded preflop where an opponent didn't have JJ or better. A few hands prior he raised 62o under the gun.

I guess if you are going to cheat, you are going to need to not be so obvious as to never fold _except_ when your opponents have something.

Re:cheating has to happen

[aero6dof]

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?

Because each of you two individually suck at poker, but observably improve when you're at the same table?

Re:Silly gamblers

[John Betonschaar]

It's relatively trivial to have a bot that can try different techniques depending on who it's playing against, and learn what works and doesn't.

No it isn't. You think it's easy, but the fact that no-one has ever before created a poker-playing bot that does better than even mediocre human players disproves this.

Creating a bot that defeats weak players is trivial, ie: players that have no sense of the odds they will hit something and make decisions that you can prove to be wrong based on the mathematics of the cards. A computer could calculate perfect odds and only play on them. However, such a bot would lose agains even a mediocre player that uses deception in his hands, plays bluffs, and watches the computers betting patterns. It's not hard to spot mathematical play.

Creating a bot that plays like a poker pro would require a combination of programmed intelligence, mathematics, player statistics, and second-order logic. There is no 'algorithm' that plays good poker yet, that I know of. It's not trivial.

Re:cheating has to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the business.

What you are talking about is collusion 101 and I would guess most poker networks would easily spot this if it happened more than once.

The company I work for has developed some very cool software (written by people far more intelligent than me) that will spot behaviors like the one you described (which is the simplest version) to a lot more refined schemes.

The problem with cheating in online poker is that almost everyone keeps extremely detailed logs on every transaction. I could take a played hand and with not much trouble knowing where every cent of the pot went. So basically, once you have one way in on the scheme you will find everyone else involved in it very quickly.

So no; it's not very easy to cheat. A lot of people try tho'. And get kicked out.

Re:Silly gamblers

[Turkot]

This AbsolutePoker.com approached my company about 6 months ago. They were inquiring if I could supply security monitoring for their online gambling. Their focus was strictly the client, client blocking and not their servers. After examining their state of affairs and our specialties, I declined. Obviously this was the correct choice. I assume by this report they wanted to ensure they were the only ones that could cheat. With attitudes like that, why am I not surprised to find them getting their 15 minutes of fame on slash dot. :)

Re:Silly gamblers

[drawfour]

Exactly. Poker is not pure luck. You can sometimes bluff people out of a pot even though you have the worst hand, and you can also sucker people into thinking they have the best hand when you do. You can also lay down a losing hand. You're not stuck with playing a hand through to the end, and at any time you can decide to stay in or to get out (well, as long as it's your turn). There are many factors, which rely on a player making a choice. This is what makes it a game of skill.

A game of chance is when you have have nothing you can do to change the outcome. Slots, craps, roulette, those are games of chance.

And another game of chance is betting on games of skill -- since you're not involved in the outcome of the game, it's pure betting. However, betting on football, baseball, basketball, horse racing, etc... is all legal.

It seems quite hypocritical to call poker "gambling" or a "game of chance" and to make it illegal when there are very legal games of chance that are huge markets.

The US government should get their heads out of their asses, make online poker legal, and tax the revenue. Just like if I go to a poker tournament at a B&M casino and win $10,000 in a poker tournament and have it reported as earnings and taxed, the winnings (and losses) should be tracked and reported. It's a HUGE tax revenue for the government, since online poker is a billion dollar industry. They could also tax the earnings of any online poker establishments based in the US, since they would be a business, providing more money. I don't know about you, but I'd rather play online poker at a site based in the US. Because that way, I have a recourse in court if they do something wrong. Right now, any money I have locked away at a site in the Carribean -- it's quite hard to sue them to get my money back if they want to keep it.