My good friend, who has made a successful second career out of professional poker online and live, alerted me to this incredible story. As you may have noticed, Internet poker experienced a surge in participation as The World Series of Poker on ESPN grew mainstream popularity.
Until recently, all online poker players had complete trust in the poker site they frequented… that there couldn’t possibly be cheating.
Then…. it happened.
A real cheater.
Stealing money from legitimate players.
Lots of money! Like half a million dollars!
How were they able to catch the guy? If you said Data Mining and/or Statistics…. go ahead and pat yourself on the back. Check out Absolute Poker Cheats to get the full version… or read on for the basics.
I’ll start with how they caught the guy.
The graph above shows 5,251 players who have at least 500 hands recorded.
The vertical axis shows Voluntarily Put Money Into Pot Percentage. The horizontal access shows win rate, in the form of big blinds per 100 hands. The red dot in the top right corner is the cheater, who is winning at a rate of 15 standard deviations above the mean.
The graph above charts the same statistics as the first graph (VPIP vs BB/100) but only for players who have played between 500 and 800 hands.
Our best estimate is that the chances of this happening is somewhat similar to an individual winning a million-to-one lottery six consecutive times.
Here’s the story…The Basics:
Recently, one operator, called “Absolute Poker” appears to have been allowing cheating to take place on their site. In short, it appears that certain player accounts are able to view the supposedly hidden cards of other players. In a game of poker it is impossible to beat someone who knows with 100% accuracy what cards you have!
Shortly after a recent software upgrade at Absolute Poker, several accounts with suspicious names and identical maniacal playing styles sat down at the highest-stakes games offered there, where tens of thousands of dollars change hands every hour.
Amazingly, the top online pros all lost money to these players, at an incredibly fast rate. Since these pros understand poker and statistics better than you or I, they used various software tools to analyze how they could have fared better against these maniacs.
They came to the same conclusion: the only possible way these maniacs could have won money is if they could see their opponent’s cards.
If you’re at all interested in the story, I have a complete timeline and account of how the cheater went about setting up false accounts, hacked into the system, and managed to siphon hundreds of thousands of dollars from legitimate poker pros. I’m not posting it here as it’s too long and a little off topic but submit a comment and I’ll hook it up.
UPDATE: I HAVE POSTED THE EXTENDED STORY IN THE COMMENTS…. ENJOY!
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