AP thread 87.1 - waiting on the statement ITT

[Number27]

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As much as I think that the players should get punitive damages above and beyond what they lost to the superusers because of how atrociously this whole thing was handled, I don't agree with everyone who is arguing they should get extra money because the superusers were effectively "freerolling" them. In fact, the opposite is true, if AP refunds everyone who lost any money to the superuser, those users were, in fact, freerolling the superusers.

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Only if the superusers get caught, which never would have happened if the excel file hadn't been leaked.

[apefish]

Jman- while I get the last point you are making, it's probably not a freeroll if there is almost no chance of winning.

[Poseidon65]

I wonder if AP realizes they will need to offer strong incentives to unharmed players if it wants them to continue playing there? Why would anyone play at AP after this disaster when FT and Stars have their doors open?

[Michaelson]

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As much as I think that the players should get punitive damages above and beyond what they lost to the superusers because of how atrociously this whole thing was handled, I don't agree with everyone who is arguing they should get extra money because the superusers were effectively "freerolling" them. In fact, the opposite is true, if AP refunds everyone who lost any money to the superuser, those users were, in fact, freerolling the superusers.

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Only if the superusers get caught, which never would have happened if the excel file hadn't been leaked.

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Freerolling is just a misleading word to attach to this issue, I think. The cheaters were stealing money, they weren't playing a game.

[jman220]

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Jman- while I get the last point you are making, it's probably not a freeroll if there is almost no chance of winning.

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I'll concede that. Was anyone that we know of up against the supers? (Would have to be people who only played a handful of hands and got lucky).

[NLfool]

I also find it very odd that the BBJ was hit twice in the last week. I don't know if it was used to to overshadow some of the news but this seems very fishy. And as coltranedog said if there ever was a site to cheat a BBJ AP would be it but I just assume every site skims more than the stated share as it's not possible for a regular user to track.

[Naismith]

Wow, I can't believe anyone would think it'd be okay to only refund the entry fee of anyone Potripper knocked out of the tournament. Every single person in that tournament should be refunded their money since they were unknowingly entering a tournament they could not win.

[thepokerpundit]

(Crossposted just in case the other thread gets deleted. Sorry ... my first post ... lurker for years!)

What an incredible saga ... but is there a way for AP to regain the trust of the poker playing community?

In my view, there are some serious thought lapses among some in the community (flame me if you want, but it's just my opinion)... to wit:

1) Nobody is going to jail. This private company operates in a foreign country - and all of its principals live in foreign countries. The reason they do this is to avoid the law, and they do it successfully. Pleas along the lines of "somebody has to go to jail" are pointless.

2) The principals in the company are playing the site. And, we'll never know which principals are doing so. Because this company is operating outside US law, it's free to have any policy it wants to regarding whether its employees, who clearly have access to inside information and software, can play the site. In all US-based BM casinos, regulations prohibit employees from playing at the casino. This is standard operating procedure. It's also standard operating procedure at ALL online sites that employees, some of whom have access to so-called "superuser" accounts at some sites, are allowed to play on the site.

Every online poker site has superuser accounts. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. You can't run a poker site WITHOUT some supervisory accounts. They are a security risk, easily exploited by trusted users. Evidence so far unearthed indicates that at some sites these are abused by the owners/operators of the sites to boost personal profits, skim from shareholders, etc. Hell, for all we know ... this is how they pay their employees.

3) You'll never know if you're being cheated by one of these employees. The ONLY way that any of this came to light is because of either a stupid policy, or a mistake, or a deliberate leak of the master database file for the Potripper tournament.

This fact is UNPRECEDENTED in the history of online poker. The master database of the tournament results is the HOLY GRAIL of poker. Properly analyzed, even you could become the world's best poker player - as you analyze how the top players play their game.

I can guarantee you that you'll never see another one. I would venture to say that every online card room is RIGHT NOW reassessing who has access to this data and how it might leak.

4) Every tournament in which these accounts played must be strictly scrutinized - and the only way to do that is for the community to have access to the master database files for each and every tournament played by Potripper and the other implicated accounts.

There simply is no other way to have trust. The master database files of all games (tournament or otherwise) must be released as part of the transparency effort. Anything less than that will require that the community trust. And since trust is what got us here in the first place, that seems to me to be a non sequiter.

5) That will not happen. Absolute Poker, its parent company, and sister company Ultimate Bet (home of Phil Helmuth) will just not offer the data up. They could. But they won't. They'll claim that they cannot, because they're prohibited from doing so, but we all know that they are bound by no laws - and so, could release the data to save themselves.

If they did - pouring over IP information would reveal the true extent of the play originating from their own internal workstations.

So, they wont.

6) Online poker is truly threatened by this. There have been many allegations of rigging in one form or another - many of them true. But, they are always laughed off as the bayings of donkeys lamenting their play. Let this be a lesson to the community. Allegations of cheating are to be taken seriously. Are there fish who accuse unjustly? Sure. Is cheating (collusion, card sharing, multi-accounting) occurring? Well, the Poker Stars World Championship of Online Poker doesn't have a world champ because he cheated. I think that answers the question "is there cheating going on."

The answer is it is RAMPANT, and the major sites don't want to do anything about it. For example: At Poker Stars, two accounts playing from the same IP address are allowed to play in the same MTT. There is nothing in the rules at Poker Stars which prevents this. What a stupid, head-in-the-sand policy. It sets the stage for cheating that isn't even thinly veiled and is the reason why the online kids are not getting seats at the adult gaming table in the United States.

Until the online companies start taking allegations of cheating seriously ... until they begin prohibiting their employees from playing their sites ... until they begin limiting IPs to single seats, nobody should take their claims of security seriously.

That's my 2 cents.

Flame on.

[Phil153]

Releasing a master database publicly is a really bad idea from a breach of privacy perspective. It's not going to happen.

[Shaffer]

First, sorry for the long post.

Okay, I just have to de-lurk and post here that this story is truly incredible, and it's truly a statement to the nature of the Internet age that a group of people with no more resources than an Internet message board, a smoking gun Excel file, and a good deal of technical savvy can blow the lid off a story like this as thousands of lurkers can watch it unfold almost in real time. Amazing work.

Back OT, to the topic of restitution, it seems to me that there will be no "fair" way to provide restitution to all players. If I had to guess, I'd say that for tournaments, they'll likely bump everyone up a slot in the money in any tournament where a superuser was involved, meaning in the cases of tournaments won by superusers it will benefit the 2nd place player more than anyone else. This isn't precisely "fair" to, say, the people that POTRIPPER victimized earlier in the tourney that still finish well out of the money even when moved up one slot (who may have gone on to win the tourney had they not been cheated, who knows), but if POTRIPPER's winnings are evenly distributed to all participants, that's hardly fair to the 2nd place player, who, as the tournement actually played out, would have won much more had he not been victimized.

As to cash games, I find it seriously doubtful that AP will dig through the hand histories and find exactly who lost what to POTRIPPER and refund that amount. As pointed out, this doesn't compensate for money lost through "bets saved", and unfortunately there is no way to quantify how much money *would* have been lost by POTRIPPER in each of the hands where "bets saved" were a factor. It's not like we can go back and replay those hands legitimately.

For cash games, I think that estimation of EV lost is probably the only "fair" way to go about recompense. Take the total amount of money that a cheater won, and compensate it to affected cash game players as a percentage of the hands that they played against the cheaters vs. total number of opponent-hands that the cheaters faced off against in affected hands. It's before noon here on Sunday so you're not about to see any equations from me, suffice to say that it should be the most accurate gauge of EV lost due to being at a table with a cheater in a cash game.

Of course this will affect the players that lost at a faster to the cheater than others, which probably has nothing to do with skill (or may in fact have an inverse relation), but unfortunately that's probably going to have to be written off as part of the normal variance of gambling. I don't see a solution to the payout issue that's not going to have that as an issue.