Latest AP press release

[DoTheMath]

[ QUOTE ]
Account #363 could blatantly see the hole cards on behalf of POTRIPPER.


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Actually, we don't really know that. What we seem to know is that Account #363 was railbirding the game while the hole cards were being read. We don't know that the hole cards were viewable through account #363.

One possible explanation, consistent with AP's most recent press relaease, is that the hole cards were being viewed by an AP internal system account reading the database of stored hand information. This database may have had its transaction timing adjusted during the software update so that hole cards were written to the database at the same time as they are transmitted to their holders.

So, if the cheater had access directly to the database, why the observer account? There are several possible reasons, including:

The hole cards were written to the DB when generated, but the community cards were not. That may sound unlikely to a casual observer, but from a database design point of view it makes sense. So, the person using database access to see hole cards in near real time needed a different method to see the community cards. The observer account was the means.

Another explanaton is that the observer account was not being used on an ongoing basis. It was only used at the start of a cheating session, perhaps to find which table the cheating account was on, and that having confirmed the location, nobody bothered to log off the observer.

A third possibility is that the account was just being used by a second person to watch the fun.