[TheMuppet]

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"That decision stands, and no such software has ever been developed in PokerStars software to view hole cards live in real time."

This is BS. You don't need any special software at all, the client is fully capable of displaying the hole cards, if the server sends it to the client.

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It is special software in the sense that it has to tell the server to send it all of the hole card data. If all you needed to do was log on to the regular client with a special ID to get all the hole card info, well, that would be monumentally stupid. Like Absolutely stupid.

Their claim seems legit if they have never created such a custom client or allowed for that kind of superuser ID.

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There is no need for the client to tell the server anything. All that is need is for the game server to have the capabilities, and for the user to have the privilege.

If you logon with a user that has the privilege. The hole cards are sent (and your are properly not allowed to sit down).

Everything is handled on the game server. Nothing need to be done on the client.

Now I would never ever in a million years build a poker game server that could do that. But, to my dismay and surprise, fellow software developers I have talk to about this, firmly believe that it is essential to have such a feature built in. And they don't see it as a problem at all.

So yeah, it is galaticly stupid to have such a feature. But this doesn't prevent people from actually building systems with such features.

And given the current state of on-line gambling (oversight, regulation etc), coupled with the fact that intelligent well educated software developers would do this. I find it more than plausible this is what has happened.

Oh and last but not least, I have first hand experience with trading systems, that work in exactly this way (and this was a very well regulated system, trading billions worth of commodities every day).