Cheating at AP, updated cliff notes

[Johnny#5]

I would certainly hope that any reputable website would never send out anyone else's hole cards to any other players while playing a hand, encrypted or not. I thought that was one thing poker sites insisted they did to help insure security. I don't know much about programming but it seems that two improbable things would have to occur for that to happen:

1) the team at Absolute that created the hand-dealing algorithm would approve their software having this feature. I would hope no single person would be allowed to design such a critical part of the program without oversight from others and they would stop such an egregious programming flaw from being implemented. However, after reading these threads it seems all bets are off concerning rigorousness from AP. Maybe the person went in and modified the program later without anyone noticing, I guess you can't put anything past AP.

2) If this information was being sent out to all players I would think that somebody with much more computer savvy than me would have noticed that "extra" information was being sent from the Absolute servers and, even if they didn't know what is was or how to handle the encryption, they would have made it public before now. I suppose, though, that if someone did somehow crack the encryption he would probably keep it to himself and utilize it for profit. Maybe someone did that, told his buddies and now there is a legion of cheats out there, who knows?

Does this make sense?

[Cruzincat]

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why is he playing such small buyings? I mean I get you couldnt do this in a bunch of big tournies, but why waste several hours in a .25 cent buyin tourny to win $5? You could just play a couple hands of midstakes and fly just as far under the radar and make a lot more money in way less time

maybe it was just practice or something???

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It is possible that the cheater has no way of depositing.

We already know he cashes out via chip dumping, so it is plausible that he needs to make his way up from $0 - maybe taking part in freerolls, and working his way up for the buyins of higher stakes games.


By depositing, there becomes a real-life trail of documentation as well.

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What makes these players interesting is that they played at stakes that bring a whole lot more potential victims into the picture. Please do not forget us small guys. While these cheaters were building their rolls from scratch with ease, their victims were trying to do the same thing. If they hadn't been cheated, they would have bigger rolls and more potential fish could rise to your level.

[jmremote]

anyone care to start a new thread with links to UNIQUE online articles that cover this scandel?

That be greak...mmk

[traxamillion]

odds of cheating taking place in this 100k GTD on ABSOLUTE right now with this huge overlay?

[NNNNOOOOONAN]

we need to hear from El D and David

[mecbluefugate]

lol at some of the comments on the Levitt blog... to be expected I guess.

its pretty obvious to me this is going to convince every degen in America that all online poker is rigged. whether that means they'll stop playing, I don't know

[JustASpectator]

Been following this situation since the beginning. Awesome work by everyone involved.

Online Poker is a cash cow, built almost exclusively on trust.

Absolute Poker cannot be trusted. They made what had to be a knowingly false statement about no evidence of wrongdoing. Who did the investigation? Scott Tom? AJ Green? Doubtful. Others had to be involved in covering it up.

Absolute Poker can never be trusted again, no matter what they do. They are through. They have to be. Because we've always said that an online poker room would never rig games or cheat players in any way, since it would ruin them if it was ever found out. Well, it happened, we've found out, and if Absolute doesn't go out of business over this, then the whole theory of why poker rooms wouldn't rig their games goes out the window.

[carlgraham]

I don't think I've seen this posted before, but it's been tough wading through thousands of posts, so I apologize if it's new.

There's been a lot of speculation about whether the potripper, greycat, etc. accounts are just the tip of the iceberg - blatant stupidity which was tough to ignore.

It seems that any audit of AP would need to include not only their computer security, but an audit of hand histories:

1. Have a committee of true poker experts (i.e. anyone who doesn't work for AP!) and stats gurus review every hand the specific accounts in question have played, with access to all hole cards of every other player involved. Hell, ask Mark Seif to be one of the experts.

(My concern is that actual evidence of backdoors or wrongdoing could be covered up prior to an audit, so full statistical evidence may be all we have).

2. Run all hands (?), or at least representative samples (picked by outside experts) through PT, HM, or some equivalent, and flag any other users whose stats are dramatically outside of the norm (I'm not a stats guy, so don't understand how many standard deviations that would be, but people smarter than myself could figure that out).

3. Conduct thorough checks on those users whose stats are outside of the norm - review all hands as with Potripper, etc.

4. Investigate the names, addresses, contacts, etc. of all of the suspicious users to see if any have any contact to AP, or any of its prior officers.

5. Finally, any audit must also go through entirely the so-called investigation that AP claims to have conducted. And ask the tough questions - who knew that Potripper was an insider's account? Didn't that cause any suspicion? Etc.

Cheers, Carl.

[Red_Diamond]

Post deleted by Red_Diamond

[0evg0]

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People also said, no poker room would ever rig a game, they simply made too much money there was no need to risk it.

If that theory went out the window... then why shouldn't the other?

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God there are some reallllllly stupid posts lately.