Resolution of the Stars investigation.

[mosquito]

[ QUOTE ]
My opinion, briefly:

1) Lee's fronting up, and his response, show class.
2) But that's all.

He assures us that their organisation is now able to handle this issue properly. If we'd asked him the same thing a week ago, he would have said the same thing.

There is no review process that we have access to (Lee's description of their review process was entirely internal). There is no one we can email if we have troubles, etc.

In short, all he's said is, "we messed up, we apologise, and we will try not to do it again."

When they do do it again (which will certainly happen sooner or later, as people make mistakes), what does the victim do?

I'm just glad I'm a 2+2 member.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's all true, yet there comes a point where we have to accept our gains and realize that getting more will take time. Acknowledge that Stars acted responsibly once 2+2 got involved, take the apologies at face value unless there comes a reason not to.

I have followed the issue without involvement until now. IMHO the only people that came out badly were a couple of immature 2+2'ers, and Granny.

[Guthrie]

[ QUOTE ]
"um, bot?"

[/ QUOTE ]
Wasn't this the name of a song by some kids from Oklahoma a few years back?

[mbpoker]

[ QUOTE ]
When they do do it again (which will certainly happen sooner or later, as people make mistakes), what does the victim do?


[/ QUOTE ]

I think it's quite clear.

Step 1. You first ask the issue to go to Jeff. When Jeff tells you you are surely a bot, you remind him about Teddy's mom.

Step 2. If Jeff has amnesia and doesn't relent, you request the issue to go to Lee. And you start your dialog with Lee by mentioning Teddy's mom.

Step 3. If that still doesn't work, you request to escalate to the higher management, and threaten to start a new thread on 2+2 otherwise.

Of course you can start a new thread on 2+2 at any time with a title: "Stars caught another bot, and that's me - Sandra!".

At one point or another you will be home free.

[Sandra Bullett]

[ QUOTE ]
I think it's quite clear.

Step 1. You first ask the issue to go to Jeff. When Jeff tells you you are surely a bot, you remind him about Teddy's mom.

Step 2. If Jeff has amnesia and doesn't relent, you request the issue to go to Lee. And you start your dialog with Lee by mentioning Teddy's mom.

Step 3. If that still doesn't work, you request to escalate to the higher management, and threaten to start a new thread on 2+2 otherwise.

Of course you can start a new thread on 2+2 at any time with a title: "Stars caught another bot, and that's me - Sandra!".

At one point or another you will be home free.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly right - those are, indeed, the obvious steps (no sarcasm intended).

Luckily, and happily, I'm a 2+2'er and know all the above. A non-2+2'er will not. Is Star's going to have a "Dispute Mediation/Review" (or a "Falsely accused of being a bot, click here") link on their site for such people? I doubt it.

My point being that the lessons learnt from this incident have not been acted upon in any visible way, nor encapsulated in any formal process. As people forget, the lesson will disappear.

Certainly Stars could have acted far worse (as some sites would have). But given the importance of our bankrolls and earning streams to us, we naturally hope that they will act as good as possible. I think they fell a bit short of that (although, with class).

[MicroBob]

I mostly agree with Sandra.


I appreciate the appearance by Lee and the apologies from both of them.
But was this the first time this had happened? I'm curious how many other players had false-positives before this one came along. Possibly none I suppose.

I would just like to know how they can think that some player was on for 43 straight hours when they really weren't.
This seems to me to be EXTREMELY simple to check. So why did they think otherwise?


Remember towards the beginning of all this when we thought that perhaps it was someone hijacking her account? Part of the reason we thought that was because there HAS to have been someone actually on the account for 43 straight hours.

it's so ludicrously easy to see when someone is at a table or not. So certainly THAT part isn't something they could have fouled-up on, right? (thus it must have been someone else on her account or something).


So why did this error happen in the first place?
And what are they doing about this stuff besides just saying, "We assure you that we're really really good at this type of stuff."?


I'm not sure they're going to respond to any of those other issues though.

But I still like Stars a lot. And I do believe that Jeff and Lee are both sincere in their apologies and that Stars support really is as cognizant of all this as Lee says they are.
I also believe they are still probably the best support out there ANd that they truly are striving to always improve.

I intend to continue playing on Stars. And since I can come to these forums if something weird happens there then I am somewhat reassured. Although I really don't think that anything bad like that is going to happen in the first place.


In the meanwhile, Party had 20 bots on their SNG's at once and, to my knowledge, didn't acknowledge it or inform us of what's happening or anything like that.


Teddy - A couple of interesting threads that I wanted my Dad to see I just copied and pasted some of the more interesting posts. That way he wouldn't have to wade through all the nonsense. You could do this for your mom. Copy/paste some of the better posts from the thread because she's obviously quite curious in what others are saying about her situation.
Also consider throwing in a couple of the posts from the guys who seem strangely interested in her from this situation.


I also think that you and your Mom were deserving of some sort of compensation for this whole situation. You did not mention that you got anything nor did Lee or Jeff's e-mails. That's kind of disappointing too.

[William]

[ QUOTE ]
I also think that you and your Mom were deserving of some sort of compensation for this whole situation. You did not mention that you got anything nor did Lee or Jeff's e-mails. That's kind of disappointing too.

[/ QUOTE ]


She got 2 years younger in the process. That sounds like a good compensation. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[PDX_David]

You keep going back to this over and over and he addressed it in the other thread. Here is the quote:

1) A lot of people are honing in on her age as conclusive evidence that multitabling is impossible. (First off, she is 55, not 57; I had been incorrect...embarassing that I didn't even know how old my mother was.) 55 (or 57 for that matter)

I sure hope you can let that go now.

Teddy, I appreciate your persistance (or however that is spealled) in this matter. You kept a level head and although some of your emails were a little mushy on the PokerStars side. In the end your way was effective. I may try that tact next time I find myself wronged.

[Azalin]

Good to hear that everything is resolved Teddy.

[SleepingDragon]

Lee:

I also want to thank you for your response on this thread. Coming here to face the music does say something important. Major kudos to you for that.

Jeff's response may well be sincere. My earlier lampoon was not meant to imply otherwise. In Jeff's case there isn't a way for many of us to know whether he's sincere or not at this point since an apology was pretty much unavoidable. And therefore to my mind he's fair game for some ridicule, because it was after all ridiculous.

Lee, please do become pro-active in reviewing and instigating bot prevention and detection. There are many possible techniques ranging from mostly untechnical to very technical. Perhaps you've already brainstormed and thought of the following, but just in case, here are a couple of thoughts from two parts of the spectrum. If these haven't at least been thought of and discarded for good reason internally then I'd suggest that you need to be asking why and making things happen to drive out and examine ideas like these:

1. Non-technical. Put a bounty on bot-finding. E.g. of a possible approach: Users may report for investigation a suspected "bot", one time only. If your investigation proves the user right you pay a bounty of $X (you pick) and their report quota for future investigations gets bumped to two. If your investigation determines they're wrong, you don't investigate any further report of bots from them. You don't make this very public at large but you do announce it at 2+2. Hopeful result: you get a lot of very smart players watching out for you while minimizing false alarms.

2. Technical. Have your client program refuse to run via Microsoft Terminal Services, and refuse to run under known Virtual Machines. Perhaps this is already being done. If you question your staff about this and it hasn't been done, you should dig deeper to understand why - it would be a very simple step in your client software, would be a big blow to at least a fair number of bot attempts (based on the bit of reading I've done in the WinHoldem forums since I got interested in all this), and I think would have at most a miniscule impact on your legitimate customer base.

If these things have already been considered, great. If not, I think that's a quick yardstick for you to recognize that you should dig a lot deeper. It wouldn't be hard to come up with ten more ideas and with work I'd expect to come up with more. The above two would just be a quick check that the right kind of work is being done.

[flub]

Which would everyone rather have, Poker Stars catching too many cheaters, or not enough? I'd say too many, which is why I can't understand why people other then teddy and his mom care about this thread. They weren't even gonna confiscate her money right?

I'd be fine if they caught 10 non-cheaters for every real cheater. If you don't really cheat Poker Stars is hardly the only game in town.