http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/30/1222651059903.html

Please let go of the rope guys, stop giving these thieves your ‘hard-earned’ and take up golf or something.

In some poker rooms sawed strange thing…

{Prologe

Ive started to play at one small poker room BWIN.
I deposited 10$, wanted to practice after tones of books. Sitted on 0.05/0.1c started …
After few hours ive done 50$ (i got big luck), so i get back 30$ and started to play, after 10 days by 3-4 hours i had 230~. So i climeb by limints … In a 25~ days i had 1300$ and i played on 0.25/0.5. It was normal play i saw statistics by the hands played … etc, so all was normal. So it was absolutely stable play big pots, sometime bad beats .. etc.

}

After it was terrible …

I lost so much… it was olmost unreal

in 10 hours (4 tables) i losted ommost all strong hands with crazy bad beats. Playing preflop all in hands/lost AA 4/1 , KK 5/1 , QQ 3/0 ……

It was feeling that poker system trying to kill me.

So it could be that some poker rooms cheating against players on higher limits.

If you are comfortable making decisions a little more quickly, play turbo. It does give humans less time to confer through MSN and such.

And be wary of players who run their entire time out before they check/bet/fold, and if more than two are dragging their feet consistently at any table, you should probably go elsewhere.

Also look for mistels in your chat box.

Especially one like this: “JJ”

When no one answer from anyone else at the table and there is no reason for someone to have typed it, for example, no one just folded to a bluff.

If you have or just had pocket jacks in your mucked hand, run screaming. In fact, run screaming the word, “Larceny!” And if it happens again at the table, or if it happens at another table with the same person or people, report it to the site.

You might also get a snippet in the text box from out of nowhere and completely unrelated to any chat or action on the table such as: “I’ll put him all in on this one.”

This will be met with silence from the other players, because it’s in the wrong chat box.

Or someone will quickly make a distracting comment about something else.

Watch out for tables and sites where all table chatter is met with jeers and put downs by others at the table. Bot creators might be protecting their creations by intimidating new players into not chatting. Unless your chat could possibly give away a hand during play, the worst that should happen is people should ignore you or make marginal replies, such as ‘ty’ to a chattier than usual: “Good hand, and well played, too,” from you.

Watch out for bots and collusion at play money tables. Those aren’t harmless annoyances, they’re cheaters practicing for the real thing. You will meet them again when you’re splashing around at the penny poker tables, so do figure out how to beat anyone you suspect is a bot, but if you suspect collusion, just quit the table and if you keep seeing or suspecting it, quit the site, because that’s one thing you can’t beat.

The other thing you can’t beat, of course, is someone being able to see your pockets through malware. Perhaps I’m naive, but a less sophisticated screen scraper might just pull your topmost window, correct? If so, maybe you should keep an open window up over your cards until the last minute. I do that sometimes, I’m not sure it helps, but I like to watch a movie in windowed mode over my hand or maybe have a search engine checking for new poker tricks to try.

One concern I have is the ability to manipulate a poker sites shuffle or deal algorithms, which would probably have to be an inside job (certainly that isn’t impossible, given the rumors about some of these sites).

How likely is it that determined outsiders could mess with the shuffle, too? I’m trying to keep track of my starting hand values in play money vs real money games and play vs real money tournaments to see if I’m getting more rags during real money play.

Of course, a poker site might create more exciting hands for play money than for real money, too, but if they do, I haven’t heard of it. That would lure some new fish in to paying up at first, but it would so frustrate and bewilder them once they started seeing their more realistic pockets and flops, I imagine it wouldn’t be a good idea long term.

I run Linux as well as Windows, but the only poker site I ran across that would run off Linux straight up is Absolute Poker, and there’s an insider cheating scandal attached to that name, so I won’t be playing there. And besides that, if a decent player ever got targeted by cheaters who got tired of that player coming in and taking chips from their bots, using Linux wouldn’t protect that player, unless that player also knew a lot more about Linux than most users do. Not against a deliberate, targeted attack, am I correct?

Unfortunately, I’m in that category of ignorant, still novice Linux user, and my understanding is, if your Linux skills don’t extend beyond the gui, don’t count on your system being any more secure than it was with XP on it.

And PS: if you start screwing around with Linux settings and you don’t know what you’re doing, I happen to know you will open a gaping hole in your security and your netbios will shortly be hailing you from Russia. I only caught my blunder and the resulting hijack because I was messing with Etherape.

Etherape for anyone running off Linux might catch some underhanded goings on. Maybe someone with more experience could say whether PeerGuardian or similar could help Microsoft users on that front? I keep an eye on my firewall for interesting bursts of data wandering out while my computer is only supposed to be talking to the poker site I’m playing on, but I can never be sure that dual connection it sometimes has to the poker site is legit, or fishy.

As for giving your poker system a good scrubbing, don’t go half measures if you’re really worried. Wipe and reload, and use a good wipe disk to do it with. DoD or better three wipe from a CD. Office Max sells a good, reusable one with several different wipes. Some malware might still survive in corrupted, unwipeable portions of your hard drive, but not likely.

Hm…I wonder how hard it would be to find a reputable site I could play on using a Knoppix CD?

This is already well known. They are called “captchas”. There are ways to beat captchas; believe it or not some programs are smart enough to respond to them. Or… the programmer can sit in front of the computer and answer the captchas for the bot. Or… for running multiple copies of the bot they can hire teenagers or others who will do it for only a little money (assuming the bot is a winner of course).

chango>”Or even better have the hole or community cards themselves change a little every so often in some way that only humans would be able to read them.”

That’s not the way the programs work. The bot doesn’t recognize patterns on the screen, it recognizes the data that comes into the client program which tells it what card to draw. If this data were to change then everyone who plays at that site would have to download a new client program to continue playing. That’s not something you can do on the fly.

Defeating bots is a really difficult problem and there is no easy solution. Any scheme that one human can think up, another human can beat…

This would not be too much trouble for a human and welcome by many. Since it is for their own protection!

Or even better have the hole or community cards themselves change a little every so often in some way that only humans would be able to read them.

I dont see why this has not been done as it is an obvious easy solution or at least can slow down the problem of bots.

Hopefully someone reads this that can pass it on to someone high up in the online poker world, or spark some other idea at least.

I have been a low stakes holdem pro for around five years both live and online. And around 2005 the online cash games started getting so suspicious that I went strictly live. I have 1000s of hours playing and I have never seen human beings play like players were playing online. I know people play different online than live (since they are not as shy etc) but for #%@!s sake this was ridiculous and still is!

I play strictly PLO cash and STTs now online and do very well. I wont even bother with a holdem cash game anymore though.