Absolute Soulreading/Rigged thread #3

[ZOMG_RIGGED!]

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Wouldn't this get real obvious, real fast?

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It did

[krumeluren]

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There is enough purely statistical evidence from the winrates.

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I respectfully disagree. That doesn´t mean they don't cheat. It just means that the statistical evidence so far suggest that this would happen sooner or later.

I have seen my share of craziness at the tables. Not much surprise me anymore and online poker have produced a couple of billion hands so far. Ofc there is bound to be some extrems here and there in this stream of events.

But i don't say they don't cheat. I cant tell if they do or not. I admit that their play is very suspicious and indicate possible cheating. I just say that you are making too much out of a small piece of data from a very large population with high variance.

[suzzer99]

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Wow, things are about to get interesting.

Only thing that detracts from the integrity of his little article, though, is the self-serving blurb at the end:

"(Note that I say nearly undetectable, because while that poker site probably never would have detected them, I am working with a different online poker site to develop a set of tools for catching cheaters. Even if these guys were careful, we would catch them.)"

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Agreed. If a smart cheater did this (i.e. played normally, only increasing his or her edge by fractional values even by simply folding hands whenever an opponent had a monster), they could never be detected. Unless there is some PT stat I am unaware of "number of times lost to a monster" [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Fell

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Which certainly begs the question - how long has this been going on to some degree, and will you ever feel comfortable play at Absolute? g-p is running hot right now, but the second he has a bad session against some donkey, it'll be in the back of his mind.

[Shizzle12345]

Jesus christ you guys ramble on about this... 3 threads shtload of pages what could have said in 2 pages.

[suzzer99]

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Oh, and if someone was playing 90/60 at my table and killing it, I think I would be smart enough to sit out. Wouldn't this get real obvious, real fast?

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If you sit out everytime someone at your table is playing 90/60 and killing it, you'll never make much at poker.

[Trogdor!]

ok SD of 270 has to be wrong

could somone give the SD for all the PT stats on the first page??

[mersenneary]

I've been following this story from its infancy and am fascinated by it, as so many others are. I came out of the woodwork to give my $0.02 and see if I can add anything that would help the overall effort.

From Absolute:
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However, a longer term review has shown that similar playing strategies have not resulted in the same results as these players achieved in the small sample of hands mentioned in the online discussion.

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I have to believe this is why the dumping occurred (and was likely orchestrated by AP, though we don't need to make this argument), so that they could make this claim.

For what it's worth, I wrote about this controversy to my mother, and this sort of language might be of some use for that reason. I like the summaries written so far (you can see that I stole from one of them), but I also don't like aspects of some of them (namely speculation about it being an inside job, about Seif, and the "bad players were able to beat good players" angle). Even the stuff about chip dumping, if written the wrong way, detracts from the core point that these accounts could see hole cards. Once we establish that, everything else will fall into place in time. If we don't establish that, Absolute wins at muddying the waters and largely gets away with it. We don't need to prove or even suggest Absolute's complicity if it's at all taking away from the strength of the "hole cards could be seen" argument. Anyway, it has factual errors (the ten high hand was a different tournament (?), I'm not sure about the total number of hands, I don't know about my uses of "always" and "inconceivable"), and it needs more statistics instead of just stating that it's impossible, but those things can be ironed out if it does turn out to be of some help:

Some introduction leading into the evidence, then:
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It started with an analysis of the last 27 hands of the final table of a $1000 tournament on Absolute Poker, which was won by account "DOUBLEDRAG". On the four hands DOUBLEDRAG folded without putting money in the pot, his opponents had pocket aces, kings, queens, or jacks, the four best possible starting hands. On the other 23 hands, DOUBLEDRAG played and made perfect "reads", including calling a massive all-in bet with one card to come with just ten high, no draw, and because his opponent miraculously was bluffing with nine high, DOUBLEDRAG won the hand. Most importantly, through Poker Tracker, a widely used software program that records every hand played with an opponent and can be used to detect foul play, we find that over nearly a thousand hands in suspect tournament and cash game sessions, DOUBLEDRAG and dummy accounts soundly linked to him had a near-infinite statistic in what players call "river aggression". This data means that on the last round of betting (after all the cards had been dealt out and determination of the winning and losing hand was no longer subject to chance), the suspicious accounts always raised or folded: they never ever simply called a bet. Moreover, these decisions to raise or fold amazingly always turned out to be correct based on the other player's holdings. Acting in this way, the accounts won hundreds of thousands of dollars from Absolute Poker's other players.
While some players with aggressive playing styles will often raise or fold, it is unheard of to never call, and inconceivable to always be right with every decision on the last round of betting over this large of a sample size. The experts asked themselves, in what circumstances would it make sense to always raise or fold, and never to call? The simple answer is that in this situation, if you know your opponents' cards, then clearly you should raise (if you have the best hand or know your opponent's hand is too weak to call) or fold (if neither is the case). To every respected professional poker player who has analyzed the evidence and weighed in, there is only one explaination: Absolute Poker's security had been comprimised, and the player could see the pocket cards of everybody else, destroying the integrity of the game.


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Then perhaps a paragraph about implications, what now, etc.

As for statistics, how about the chance of him making his four open-folds/folds to a single preflop raise in the last 27 hands on the precise four times AA, KK, QQ, and JJ are out there? In other words, given that AA, KK, QQ, and JJ will be there on four of the 27 hands, what is the chance those will be the four hands he doesn't play by the random dumb luck AP says he is doing it by? This number is a bit flawed given the information the single raise provides him, though I would argue not all that far off: (4/27)(3/26)(2/25)(1/24) = 1 in 17,550, or 0.0057%. In and of itself not enough to prove anything, but as a side or intro to the main argument about psychic river aggression, compelling.

I'll end here and comment more on individual things to make sure this post doesn't go on longer than it already has.

[sputum]

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ok SD of 270 has to be wrong

could somone give the SD for all the PT stats on the first page??

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Seem to remember a thread about how PT calculates SD (Pokey probably [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]) and it being unreliable/strangely calculated. Trying to find it [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]
Here

[adanthar]

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P.S. Surely it would help if someone compiled a database with all the avilalble hands on these players and posted a link to it.

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Adanthar...i know you've done yoeman's work so far (sp?) but maybe you can do this?

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can't do it with NL b/c I don't have many HH's, but if the MTT abso converter works I'll be doing that today

[Redgrape]

Statistical evidence was actually barely enough but the HH's tell the story much better.