Online Cheaters?
Perhaps I am more paranoid or sceptical than the average person but I feel as though I have a couple people pegged online as people that either work for the website or somehow know the cards. I will not play at tables that these people are at. My basic evidence is people that consistently ONLY play cards that are winners, it doesnt matter what cards they play or how the river flops, they win. Example, I raise preflop early position with a solid hand Cheater cold calls two bets with Q4off and hits two Q's on the turn and river after a rag flop and no four. I bet the whole way to the river as I had an overpair KK and loose to this brutal hand. I can understand this happening everyonce and awhile but I played with this person for 3 1/2 hours and it was ridiculous how many times this happened. I called the one person on it and they must have made about 5 comments afterwards about how funny it was that i was accusing them, I didnt think it was funny. Usually people are defensive and try to over-convince someone when they are guilty. Anyway, I have two people that I have suspiscions about...not 5 or 10 or 100, i'm not crazy. Does anyone else ever think about this or does anyone else particularily not play with certain players because of their suspiscions? Thank you.
stp
stp
Comments
You'd think if he did he'd be playing higher limits
stp
What percentage of the flops was this player seeing?
I'm pretty doubtful that this exact form of cheating (i.e. hidden card knowledge given out to players) takes place at the large, well-established sites. The large sites take in so much rake/fees that I would think keeping their games clean would be a top priority. Hackers may be a concern in this respect however, but again, the large, well-established sites also have a strong incentive to make their sites secure.
This indicates to me that this is not likely a large, well-established online site.
I'd obviously not play with anyone who I knew (with a good degree of certainty) was cheating, nor in a game that allowed it. However, I'd have to be pretty darn sure about it. You seem to be describing a player who you witnessed chasing a few extreme longshot draws and getting there a large percentage of the time over a 3.5 hour time span. I've seen this many times before at all kinds of legitimate games. Isn't it possible that this is simply a very big fish? And if that is actually the case, avoiding this player is a *serious* leak in your game selection. It's natural to be upset when your good hands are cracked by such nonsense, but IMO, you need to be careful to avoid snap judgements about why a player is playing this way, especially jumping to one of the (IMO) least probable conclusions.
If I ever came across a site where I found even a single player who I was very confident was cheating, I wouldn't just simply avoid that player. I'd never play at that site again.
I witnessed a guy playing Port Perry 5-10 call 2 bets pre-flop on the button with J4o, and call one bet on the flop on a board of AT6 rainbow. This guy was not cheating, and he made exactly the same unreasonable plays you just described. I've seen this sort of thing lots of times. Some players are just this bad, it's as simple as that.
ScottyZ
I could very well be wrong here and just witnessed the luckiest fish in the world and maybe I am passing up a good opportunity to win some money. Either way, that player is in my head and I think it is wise for me to not play with them, for now.
If you ran a poker website would you hire players that always knew the hole cards and the flop prior to each hand? I know there are people out there that would consider it. I would "consider" it. We are talking about people that are running casinos. They are in it to make money.
stp
If I were going to cheat like that, I might try to make it a little less obvious. You don't need much of an edge to do it, but playing Q-4 os, for raises, and calling the flop when you completely miss is pushing it. That's pretty bad playing, but there are people out there that bad at those limits. And once you hit a Q on the turn, anything calls after that wouldn't be surprising from players like that.
If I were going to cheat like that, I might try to make it a little less obvious. You don't need much of an edge to do it, but playing Q-4 os, for raises, and calling the flop when you completely miss is pushing it. That's pretty bad playing, but there are people out there that bad at those limits. And once you hit a Q on the turn, anything calls after that wouldn't be surprising from players like that.
stp
You can get a pretty good idea of this without Poker Tracker.. just record this by hand. I have found that even a sample as small as 20 or 30 hands will give you a pretty good estimate of pre-flop hands played percentage. ["If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table..."] I agree with Tie's point that the description "medium tight" does jive with him playing hands like Q4.
I don't think this is proof that he was cheating. A regular person might also do the same thing.
I don't understand why you would play one more hand at this site if you are genuinely convinced that the site allows this kind of cheating. If what you're thinking is in fact the case, wouldn't you suspect that there would be *more than one* person on that site cheating?
Cash out, and move to a site you trust. At the very least, move out of a site you *don't* trust. In terms of this kind of cheating specifically, it can't possibly be remedied by avoiding one specific player. Either
1. The house is corrupt, and would most likely use multiple player ID's to execute this specific cheat.
or
2. The site has been somehow hacked by this particular player, and therefore the entire site is open to this kind of cheat by any other player with the same level of hacking ability and/or tools.
In each case, you remain vulnerable to the form of cheating you believe is going on, even if you avoid this player in particular. Once again, the ability for someone to see opponents' hole cards, or the unseen board cards, is a *site* specific cheat, not a player specific cheat.
An excellent decision, I think.
ScottyZ
No.
Why not? You already answered this question:
Legitimate poker sites make a s***load of money from the rake & tournament fees, and the more players the better (to the limit of their computing power, bandwidth, etc). Attracting poker players in numbers to your poker site is the number one priority. If poker players find out that a site facilitates cheating in some way (including improper policing and/or prevention of cheating), or worse yet, cheats themselves, they'll have a harder time attracting poker players to their site than they would have trying to get a date by wearing a T-shirt that says "Kiss me, I've got SARS."
ScottyZ
stp
Because you risk losing the possibility of making *much* more than that per day by losing potential (or current) customers if you establish yourself as a poker site which permits or engages in cheating. There are many alternative choices for places to play out there, and to build a new online poker site, you are going to have to attract customers by somehow giving them a *better* poker experience than they would have at the current well-established sites. This is not easy to do, and cheating your potential customers out of their money is very much a step in the wrong direction. In fact, you not only stepped in the wrong direction, but you stepped in doggie doo-doo and are now attempting to feed it to your potential customers.
Also remember how poker sites make money: the rake and fees. The ideal situation for the house is to have many different players play many hands, and the house could care less who are winners and who are losers. They are slowly and steadily making money based on (and only on) the number of players playing, how fast they play, and the limits they are playing at. The house's main priority is to attract more customers and keep their current customers happy and playing. Why do you think the large, successful poker sites often *give* money to their customers? This is the exact opposite of stealing money from them (by cheating them, for example).
What you are basically talking about is establishing a short-term scam site instead of a long-term poker site. Instead of running a poker site, you'd be running a site merely designed to fleece people out of their buy-ins. Sure, you might take in a little bit of money from a few suckers, but I doubt a scam site like this would ever take in enough money in the long term to even cover the initial development costs (e.g. marketing, purchasing & setting up hardware and software). If you're going through all the trouble (i.e. cost) of opening a poker site, why shoot yourself in the foot by not even offereing your potential long-term customers a product they would want?
This is a great idea. Like you mentioned, whether or not there really is cheating going on at this site, if you personally feel like there is something going on which is not right, then I think it's sensible to not play there.
I'd suggest playing at the large, well-populated sites. Check out
www.pokerpulse.com
for real time and 24 hour maximum player statistics (i.e. amounts of players at each of the largest poker sites).
I personally play at both PokerStars and PartyPoker right now, and have never had any problems at these sites, nor any reason to think anything is fishy going on.
ScottyZ
This does not mean that player cheating and colusion does not occur but if you send them the details or hand histories of potentail colusion etc they will check it out.
As for knowing the board cards in advance, I am not sure if the computer even knows (i.e. does it actually select those cards in advance or does it "select" the cards at the time it turns them over).
Hang on now. Collusion is a *lot* different than the specific kind of cheating we were talking about before in this thread. For players to collude, they require no form of help from the site itself. Collusion is player specific, not site specific. Well, it is only site specific in the sense of what measures a site takes to prevent and/or deal with (i.e. enforcement) collusion.
Generally, colluders are working against a site, whereas card knowledge players are working with (or hacking into) a site, which is the main reason I find the latter type of cheating to be so much less plausible.
I'm pretty sure that there *is* a lot of collusion going on, even at the major sites. It's too easy to do, and too easy to get away with.
Most shuffling algorithms I've looked at actually do seem to shuffle the entire deck at once. So pre-knowledge of board cards is theoretically available to a either corrupt site or a hacker.
For example, here's a snippet from the description of the PokerStars shuffling algroithm:
Of course, it's open to interpretation whether the entire shuffle is performed at once, or the cards are sent to the "new deck" in real time. But my take that is the entire deck is shuffled at once, and they pull the top card(s) off as needed.
I wonder if they burn cards?
ScottyZ
Yes absolutely sorry for the confusion what I was trying to say is that I know the folks that run Party take any issues of collusion very seriously so I assume that those same folks would be very distraught if they though employees were cheating.
Do you happen to know if Party actively tries to detect collusion with software, or do they basically only check out customer complaints?
The Party website says
which shows me that they can use big words like algorithms, permutations and combinations in meaningless ways, but doesn't seem to give much real information. That's one of those paragraphs which has the flavour of being written in a way so that it will sound so complicated to 99%+ of the people reading it that they will simply ignore it. Or possibly be impressed by it.
ScottyZ
I thought that was pretty cool (if it was true). In general I think they do a pretty good job ... but some responsibility falls on the players. Most of the people I know that play there have "relationships" with me so we are unable to play at the same table. Specifically I have transferred money to/from them or we have played on the same computer. Party makes note of these relationships and will not allow those players to play at the same table.
Granted in big multi-table tournaments they can not necessarily avoid this. In our last big one we had 3 people playing in the same room. Not for "cheating" but just because it was a fun thing to do. We had an agreement that if two people ended up on the same table one person would have to move to the downstairs computer or move the laptop into the hallway so it could be played on the up&up. This didn't come up but I am certain it would not have been a problem.
Have I had someone tell me of their hand before in a cash game when we were at the same table? Unfortunately I have to say yes. Here is how I handled it.
a) I had QQ and I proceeded to re-raise him anyway (that is how I would normally play the hand. He re-raised and I called (along with another player).
b) The flop came Kxx and he bet out and the other player raised, this gave me a good spot to fold my QQ (as I would have normally done).
c) I asked this player not to tell me his hand in the furture and we would play against each other just like any of the other players. This situation did not occur again.
I realize that most people wouldn't handle the situation in this fashion, but I figure that PartyPoker will catch them ultimately. Moreover, my results have been very good online so I am not too worried about them geting all my money.
But that's just me
Would Party be able to detect the fact that all of you were playing from the same physical location? E.g. were all of you using the same IP address?
Even if you are not cheating, it's also somewhat important to give no appearance that you are cheating. This is especially so if Party actually does happen to have some sort of automatic collusion detection protocol that might pick you up.
ScottyZ
Fact is if we couldn't both play then a lot of people would have problems that play in the same physical locale as others. My roommate and I both play but we are 2 floors apart so there is clearly no communication (atleast not that anyone else couldn't have using MSN or whatever).
ScottyZ
Looks like party had answered this question now. Complaints needed.