AP, rigged, etc. #8981.4 - the plot thickens

[okietalker]

"But either way, knowing that Mr. Tom still has his own Riviera servers sitting alongside the AP game servers, and within the IP range assigned to AP by the Mohawks...that tells me that this guy is definately still involved on some level, and anyone who tells me otherwise is trying to blow smoke up my ass. "

Well said.

[GaryTheGoat]

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The two passengers on the private jet were Scott Tom and his pregnant wife. His wife was rushed to the hospital to make sure everything was alright with the baby.

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Is this Scott's first wife/child? What's her name? Any previous wifes and/or children?

Any other weak spots besides father? Mother, siblings, other family members?

gg

[Zorglub]

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I'm suggesting that using the term "superuser account" may not be sufficiently precise, and using that term may give AP some wiggle room, if it turms out the hole card reading was accomplished through other means.

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dude, give it up. you are wrong. you don't have a clue.

like the one guy before me said, it's the cornerstone of programming. the accounting software that i use has it.

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If you read the pokerstars email you will see that this is not always the case simply because it would be too risky for a pokersite to do that:

"In the early days of software development, the concept of having a program that could view hole cards live in order to help testing was discussed. It
was explicitly decided against that idea, specifically to avoid any potential problems like the one that is being discussed in the forums. That decision stands, and no such software has ever been developed in PokerStars
software to view hole cards live in real time.

PokerStars does record all of the hole cards in all real money hands. This is an important tool to help us investigate fraud and collusion. However
this information is not accessible to anyone until after the conclusion of the hand; it is not transmitted to our database until all action is completed and the pot has been awarded."

[Michael Davis]

Just for the sake of piling on, Absolute ripped off PokerStars' sounds sometime between August and October of 2005. I know because I was shown this. Scott Tom was laughing.

-Michael

[ericicecream]

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reasons one might abandon a successful embezzling plan...

1) no plan to be around the source of the money for much longer.
2) a large amount needed to purchase something or to prove one has access to lots of cash.
3) they are completely retarded.


take your pick. fwiw I don't think #3 excludes the others.

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4) Get very drunk or high on coke and tell buddy or chick "wanna see something cool! Watch how stupid these people are, they have no idea!"

[El_Hombre_Grande]

And keeping up with my wildly speculative theories....

I speculate that there is simply no way that certain individuals "didn't notice" that he suddenly came up with 100K to invest out of thin air and paid cash for a house while making only 50k a year. And it may be that mid range grinding isn't something that would interest the likes of Mr Tom or dudes that have married into ungodly money. Not balla enough. But our friend from the North has shown a penchant for pretty petty internet scams in the past and I haven't seen any lineage on him going back to the King of France. In fact, it looks like he defaulted on a minor student loan. For someone like that, 15 hrs a week at a 3/6 NL table with Superpowers might not sound so bad.
And maybe he wasn't always a glassy eyed coke fiend belittling his opponents in chat, taking outragous risks. Maybe he degenerated into Potripper over time.

And maybe they used 500 different accounts to win 15,000 or so each over 1000 days.

If the reports of popcorn gate and the lease back thing are true, I don't think you can use the "too small of a scheme" anymore.

[Weevil99]

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In the case of the first two possiblities, there is no need to make any changes to the server code. The data is being transmitted. All it takes is a special version of the client that actually displays the hole card data.

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No. If all hole cards were transmitted to all clients, it would be almost trivial to grab the raw data and decrypt it on the client's end. If this were the case, we'd see AbsoluteCheat.exe posted in every warez nook and cranny of the internet. And we'd all know about it.

This is a special client. The server might be cooperating with it (possible, but not likely), or the special client might simply pluck the hole card data from wherever it is stored on the server.

(First ever post, here. Sorry if the formatting or quoting or something turns out wrong.)

[oliverm]

The response from Poker Stars got me thinking.
They don't write the hand to the log server until the hand is completed.
In the screen shots of the xls file from AP, every action was date and time stamped.
Which means that the log server had to have applied these date/time stamps as they received the action from the game server.
Someone with real time access to the log server should be able to see hole cards as they are dealt.
So...
1) view the game from a second pc with another account (363)
2) rig it up to get the current hand number from the local hand log.
3) query the log server for everyone's hole cards of the current hand.
4) profit

NB: on step 1) could explain why AP only recently disabled the ability to get hand histories from observed games???

[Capitola]

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That leaves the following possibilities:

1. Custom client that can see hole cards, but is also verified by the AP server for use, despite not being the standard client.
2. Standard client may recieve all hole cards when a certain user account logs in that the server verifies to have sufficient privileges to send all hole cards.
3. Server is comprimised directly and hole cards are grepped real-time from logs or other means outside of client.


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Nice analysis. I know nothing about this stuff, but it seems to me the most likely scenario is #1, possibly with the limitation that the custom client cannot connect from outside the AP firewall and cannot be used to play.

So AJ sits at home (or at someone else's home) and logs in with the normal client. He sits down to play using one of the many accounts he has created for himself. He then uses remote terminal software to connect to his desktop at the office which is running the custom client. He opens up the game on the custom client observes it in a window right next to the normal client where he is playing. I wonder if he ever bothers to try to guess what the other players are holding before he glances over to find out? I guess not if he's folding to big pocket pairs pre-flop.

It seems pretty straightforward to me. So where is the alleged sophisticated scheme using 3rd party software? Are they counting Windows Remote Desktop or GoToMyPC? Or was that just another red herring?

[whangarei]

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They don't write the hand to the log server until the hand is completed.
...
Someone with real time access to the log server should be able to see hole cards as they are dealt.
So...

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You're logic is flawed.