Online play rigged?
In the past 2 years I’ve done a lot of signing up for poker websites (I used Ultimate Bet and then Full Tilt) and heard a lot of talk about whether or not the games there are “rigged.” I know I’ve certainly had moments where I felt like I was going to take my very computer and walk with it out into a local street and stand beating the thing with my fists until a car put us both out of our misery after taking a real nasty 2 outer hit for $400/$500 a pop. In one one hour session I saw my quads, yes, quads, get sucked up to straight flushes for all the money. Twice in an hour. This seems astronomical, yes? This seems absolutely insane.
The main argument people make against these sites being rigged is that you seem these kind of beats more often because you’re playing so many hands. That doesn’t really gel with me. I’m not seeing THAT many more hands. You could sit for a month at a live casino and not see a bad beat like that happen once, even with 10 tables running. It’s really not something that happens all that often because the math is insanely against it. Now, if we were playing 1,000 hands an hour as opposed to the 70-100 that is average, sure, these beats would happen. Something just seems a little too fishy to me when I run up a large bankroll and then have it decimated by a string of beats I couldn’t write worse.
At the same time though, there’s really no reason for these sites to rig the games. They’re making way too much money for not doing a whole heck of a lot, why would they push their luck committing massive fraud by intentionally setting up hands to maximize rake? It doesn’t make sense either.
My theory is this: because you can’t develop a true random number generator, a perfect random number generator, with a computer, there’s going to be a bit of flux in the backlash of the cards. I don’t know enough about programming to understand why this would be so, but I think perhaps it’s something about the fake mind behind the ways the cards are shuffled. It is not a true, true random. So you can expect some perhaps unbelievable action to happen.
Here’s what it comes down to: if you aren’t willing to take weird beats, to play against a pretty amazing ring of donkeys who will get their chips in bad and suck out even more often than you see in a live game, don’t put your money online. Simple as that.
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POSTED IN: bad beats, full tilt poker, online poker
4 opinions for Online play rigged?
Peter
Oct 17, 2007 at 8:10 am
Nice blog! More people should read it. If you want, you can register your blog http://www.pokerweblogs.com. It is free and and it automatically updates when you do an update, so visitors of our site can see when you updated your blog. The big advantage is that it will attract much more visitors to your blog.
Dan Port
Oct 17, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Apparently, some online play IS rigged. From the Freakonomics blog:
October 17, 2007, 9:36 am
The Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal Blown Wide Open
By Steven D. Levitt
A few weeks back I blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn’t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated.
A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by Absolute Poker have blown the scandal wide open.
You can read the first-hand account in the following thread at 2+2 Poker Forum, but here’s the short version:
Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents’ hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who’d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker “accidentally” did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player’s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put “accidentally” in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whomever “accidentally” sent the file gets their proper hero’s welcome in the end.
Then the poker players went to work analyzing the data — not the hand histories themselves, but other, more subtle information contained in the file. What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about online poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the tournament.
So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual named Scott Tom, who seems to be a part-owner of Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the Web site had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.
If this is all true, I presume that the two cheaters are looking at potential prison time. I would also guess that if Absolute Poker continues to argue that nothing out of the ordinary happened, they will take an enormous hit to their profits. Online poker is a game of trust — players send their money to a site believing that they will be playing a fair game, and trusting that the site will send them their winnings. If there is even a little bit of uncertainty about either one of those factors, there is no good reason for a player to choose that site over the many close substitutes that exist. If I ran Absolute Poker, I would take a lesson from past corporate attempts at cover ups, sacrifice the cheaters, and institute safeguards to prevent this ever happening again.
The real lesson of this all, however, is probably the following: guys who aren’t that smart will figure out ways to cheat. And, with a little luck and the right data, folks who are a lot smarter will catch them doing it.
(Hat tip: Dan Hirschberg and Dean Strachan, who have kept me up to date on this story.)
Jereme
Oct 27, 2007 at 6:49 am
I will address blake and then the “cheating” claim.
Blake,
Your logic is correct. True randomness cannot be created via a computer but it can be close. Complexly close.
It all depends on how well the computer code is. I would not hestitate to believe that certain sites paid quite a chunk of change to ensure the complexity of the random number generation and others skimped.
The worse the code, the easier it is to determine the random number generator and then be able to “know” which hands are going to be hitting on what flops, etc.
This concept has been done before against random number generators that were considered “unbreakable” by both prive and public sector including the FBI.
Do a search on random number seed cryptography on google if you ever get bored or want to research more.
I think you are also right in regards that the poker sites do not gain anything by cheating, however, their negligence of paying for good computer code can result in beats both unbelievable but also frequent.
I have played frequently at over 5 different “big” sites and it is obvious that the random number generations are completely off at some and on par at others.
Bodog is notorious for it’s crazy boards constantly pairing. I have not seen that at other sites with such frequency.
Now on to the “cheating” post.
A little background first. I used to hack computers back in the mid-late nineties. It was a lot easier then because detection was horrible. I have seen some crazy stuff in my time.
From the information presented, I don’t see AP being “in” on the hacking/cheating.
There is no reason why an AP employee would need to be in a poker room to be privy to the hidden hole cards.
The data is housed at the server and being pushed out to the clients. The employee would have access to this data without ever needing to “join” and observe a room. This is why all rooms/games/hands have numerical monikers. For logging, both real time and historical. This information could be passed on via instant messenger, cell phone, etc.
What appears to have happened is that AP suspected cheating to be occuring, and observed the room not to know what hole cards were being played, but how they were being played.
Now what I am guessing is that AP could not “prove” without a doubt that this person was cheating but did not want the negative press about a hacker running a table. They are already tanking against the bigger sites like PokerStars and FullTilt.
Why the data was sent out could be of several reasons and really is moot.
Now how a person could cheat can be accomplished several ways. He could be using a hacked client that is reading data being pushed to the client side software but is transparent to the end user (pokerplayer).
or he could have hacked into the AP servers and done a number of things.
Or he could have obtained the code and cracked the random number generator seed.
Lots of ways to do it.
Online cheating is not the issue at hand. Money is involved and there will be cheating/theft just like in concrete reality at a casino.
What is the issue is the negligence, ignorance and lack of safety measures being implemented against cheating/hacking.
I am done rambling. sorry
ub_cheats
Oct 18, 2008 at 1:37 pm
testing
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