Poker Moth

So, I virused my laptop. Kind of embarrassing; the license on my anti-virus software expired, and I was too lazy to renew it. So, inevitably, I got a virus. What’s worse, cultural anthropologists have identified my laptop as an early example of the Steampunk vogue, although that’s just because it’s old and crusty. Or, to put it another way, the CD drive is borked, which meant that after many, many years of searching, I finally found a way to make reinstalling Windows even more irritating than usual.

Sorry, needed to vent. Anyway, the upshot of all this was that when I finally got WIndows up and running again, I had a pretty messy laptop, with tons of installed programs that Windows didn’t recognise. I began to tidy this mess up, and the first folder I went for was Absolute Poker, and whaddya know? There was $70 just lying there, doing nothing! And now, here I am, 12 hours later, with an equally messy Windows Installation but a healthy profit in my Absolute roll.

I’ve been toying with the idea of returning to Absolute ever since the’ dust settled on the superuser scandal, but never got around to it. I probably haven’t played there for two years (which means the value of that $70 has rocketed in the interim!), principally because I hated the software, but it’s become a far more attractive prospect now that it’s reputation has been so publicly tarnished. And, coincidentally, today is the day that the new Absolute/Ultimate Bet network and software is rolled out. Lots of people on the site are complaining about the changes, but to my eyes it looks exactly the same as before – boxy, blue, and ugly.

Happily, the standard of tournament play is rock-bottom awful, at least at the limits that my measly bankroll allows me to play at. Put it this way – it’s bad enough to keep me away from the Badugi tables on Stars, and the standard of play has to be pretty damn poor to keep me away from the Badugi Goldmine. As for the software, if you can look beyond the boxiness, there’ splenty to recommend it. I’m particularly fond of the “Fold and Show” button, which is chronically overused by bad players who seem obsessed with giving away as much free information as possible. (I had a heads up battle with one player who would automatically minbet every street, and when raised, would fold and show their bluffs… I was so busy lauging that I ended up losing to them SAD FACE).

That aside, it’s now a fairly standard modern poker client; nothing’s massively broken, nothing’s particularly impressive. Game selection, OTOH, is massively varied. There’s good variant action, with a lot of busy Stud and Omaha ring games. Sadly, the NLHE is ENORMOUUSLY BROKEN, because of the effing Bad Beat Jackpot – it appears to be impossible to play NLHE ring on a standard table, because everybody’s playing in the larcenous Jackpot games, which get raked to buggery. Sod. That.

Tournament players are better served, with a nice selection of NLHE MTTs, and a blind structure that’s extremely friendly – the standard non-turbo seems to be 1500 chips, with 12 minute blinds, and the first hour goes 5/10, 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 30/60. If anyone knows of a site with a gentler structure, please let me know where it is. STTs are also well spread; it’s not hard to find a NLHE game, and there’s plenty of Omaha games as well, and that’s where I’m currently spending my time.

So! Absolute’s alright. And oddly, today has been the first day in years where I’ve not seen someone claim that the site they’re playing on is rigged.

*edit* I lied – there are non Jackpot NLHE ring games. You just have to look bloody hard to find them. I should also mention the other upside of AP’s quest to lure players back; the ring games are deepstacked, with the max buy-in set at 200 BBs.

How did I miss this? Well, possibly because I get all my poker news from two really, really terrible RSS sources. Welcome to a fortnight ago, courtesy of Pokernews and Pokerworks. And, thinking about it, a family member asked me what the deal was with the Betfair glitch last weekend, and I just looked at him blankly, and forgot about it. (I was pissed).

So, here’s the hot poker news from the beginning of February – Betfair orders poker players to return winnings.

In short, they released a software update which was broken in a rather serious way; in six-handed STTs, in the event of several players going all-in and the tournament being won on that hand, the software was unable to determine who got what prize money. So it paid everybody. Quite how anyone realised this is open to debate; the most plausible situation being that everybody pushed their chips in when three handed in a 6-max STT, the chipleader won the pot taking first place prize money, but the other two players each received second place cash. (Only two people are supposed to get paid in 6-max STTs). Once the third place finisher realised this, he somehow managed to communicate the news to the other players on the site, and they embarked on a spree of 6-maxes with every player moving all-in on the very first hand. Apparently, in that spot, everybody got paid! And once a group of six players had got together to milk the glitch, they worked their way up the limits, until they were merrily grinding their way through thousands of pounds of free money per hour.

I’d be extremely sceptical of this story if it weren’t for the timing; all this apparently took place between 3am and 6am on a weeknight, and at that time, Betfair is dead enough (especially at the higher buy-ins) to allow six people to continuously play against each other without interlopers getting in the way and messing things up. An interloper would mess it up quite badly, though, as would a split pot. (What are the odds of a split in a six-way random all-in? 10%? I genuinely have no idea…). Nonetheless, I guess it is possible that things could have happened that way, although I’m still not ruling out the possibility that this is a viral marketing scam. It all sounds so unlikely…

Alright, not rigged, no, but I did just take one right between the eyes from the poker gods, and for a few seconds I felt a tiny bit tin-foil hattish. It was only a two-outer, but it was more about the timing; heads-up for the money in a $5.50 MTT, stacks almost even, and me with a great read on my opponent. I’d just got myself level with her, and was feeling pretty smug about myself and my chances, when this happened -

***** Betfair Poker Hand History for Game 307843262 *****
NL Texas Hold’em $5 Buy-in + $0.50 Entry Fee, Level:14 Blinds(1,500/3,000-150 ante) – Friday, February 01, 00:54:31 GMT 2008
$500 GTD Regular $5+$0.50 NLH #124874
Table 1 9-max (Real Money)
Seat 2 is the button
Total number of active players : 2
Seat 2: manos33 ( 91,106.50 )
Seat 7: dermoth ( 86,893.50 )
Tourney Level:14 Blinds(1,500/3,000-150 ante)
manos33 posts ante [150]
dermoth posts ante [150]
manos33 posts small blind [1,500]
dermoth posts big blind [3,000]
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to dermoth [ 2c, 2d ]
manos33 raises to [6,000]
dermoth calls [3,000]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Qc, 2s, 5s ]
dermoth checks
manos33 bets [8,000]
dermoth calls [8,000]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 3d ]
dermoth checks
manos33 goes all-in
manos33 bets [76,956.50]
dermoth calls [72,743.50]
dermoth goes all-in
Returning uncalled bet [4,213] to manos33
** Showdown **
manos33 shows [ 3h, 3c ]
dermoth shows [ 2c, 2d ]
** Dealing River ** [ Th ]
** Hand Conclusion **
manos33 wins 173,787 from main pot with three of a kind, Threes
************ Game 307843262 ends ************
I was so incensed, I opened Betfair Poker Buddy to get the hand history. As if the beat wasn’t painful enough.

I was behind to start, of course, and maybe I should have raised it preflop, but in that spot, with my perceived skill edge, I’m keeping the pot small until I can see the flop and hopefully work out where I stand. I still like the smooth call on the flop, and I’m happy to pay off A4 or a flopped set on the turn. I am not happy to pay off a turned set, obv.

Still, it’s not all doom; I picked up $100 for second, which nudged January’s results from “fairly poor” towards “almost acceptable”. Bills paid, and the Betfair results from the end of the month have given my asthmatic bankroll a little more breathing room. And the signs indicate February will be better; I’m crushing these Betfair tourneys at the minute,  and now have enough in my BF account to allow some $11 excursions.

(Aside – I’m a bit weird with my bankroll; I treat money in separate accounts as separate bankrolls, which is really, really stupid, but I can’t seem to kick the habit. This is exacerbated with Betfair, which I view as a betting site, not a poker site, so it’s even harder for me to manage that part of my bankroll sensibly. Still, I’ve quadrupled my Betfair account in the space of four days,, so I’m not complaining too much. But as usual, 95% of my bankroll is lying dormant at other sites (well, Stars is still being used occasionally) while I struggle along with the pittance I have in the site du jour. It’s so incredibly stupid, but will I change? Probably not).

So, February is going to be all about Betfair, it seems. If the $11 games are half as fishy as the $5s, it should be fun…

News bit first – the Kahnawake Gaming Commish have published their judgment on the Absolute cheating scandal. You can read the whole thing here (.pdf).

The allegation against Absolute, (which the KGC have now confirmed as fact, fining AP $500,000 plus costs), is that a high-ranking employee of the poker site used software to allow him to see the hole cards of his opponents. Pretty shocking, huh?

I first head about this scandal in a typical chatbox argument with some idiot who was claiming that Pokerstars diddle their RNG (the random number generator that “deals” the cards) to generate more action. I was responding with my usual routine about how the risks of doing that outweigh the benefits so heavily that no-one would be foolish enough to try it, when someone else at the table pipes up with “what about Absolute, huh? They got caught cheating!”. That shut me up for a while. Well, a couple of minutes, at least.

The first thing to mention here is that what happened at Absolute was not a systemic, site-wide “rigging”; it was the action of one player (with several accounts), and the subsequent external audit of Absolute’s software has found no evidence of anything wrong with their RNG. However, that’s by the by. What’s really important is the manner in which the deception was exposed – the fix was rumbled by the other players on the site, who realised that something was rotten in the state of Denmark very quickly. The proof arrived when a player finished second in a $10+1 NLHE MTT to a player called “Potripper” who he suspected of cheating, and complained to Absolute. Absolute support staff (who were presumably unaware of the actions of the individual employee) sent this player a master hand history file for the disputed tournament, containing all the hole cards for all players, along with details of observers and IP addresses. This coincided with a large amount of general disquiet on poker fora about various unusual occurrences on the site, and before long someone analysed the Potripper file and realised that his phenomenal reading ability seemed to coincide with the presence of a certain observer at the table. An observer with an IP address that was traced back to Absolute. Game over, man.

Here’s the 2+2 thread outlining the scandal’s history, and also the thread containing all the hand histories – if you’ve ever wondered what a poker tournament would look like when one player can see everyone’s cards, there’s your answer. It’s fascinating stuff.

And this is good news for online poker… why? Well, note how this wasn’t exposed by a fellow Absolute employee who was experiencing pangs of guilt, but by the other, honest players. And it didn’t take long – allegations were flying within days of the scam’s inception. Now, it’s fair to say that the cheater wasn’t exactly subtle, and if he’d used his privileged knowledge a little more sparingly (rather than ruthlessly exploiting his edge on every possible hand), he could well have got away with it for much longer… but when a cheater reduces the risk of being caught, he also reduces the returns. And cheaters are greedy, almost by definition; there may possibly be other “superuser” players out there who possess the self-control to milk the tables without drawing attention to themselves, but they’re giving up so much of their edge by doing so that they’re barely more of a concern than poker bots.

But the wider implications of the scandal will certainly ensure that other poker sites are going to be ten times less likely to consider any form of RNG massaging than they were before the AP scandal, and they didn’t exactly have a huge amount of incentive in the first place, as most poker players are quite capable of generating excess action without help from dodgy RNGs. However, in the new, post-AP climate, there’s no fucking way that a site’s going to try it on; they’ve just seen a great example of how the natural paranoia of the average online poker player, coupled with the ever-vigilant stat nerds busily crunching enormous databases of hand histories, are as fearsome as any external audit.

There’ll always be colluding players, and there will always be bots. The thing about colluders and bots is that they’re shit at poker. (True story: I initially got involved with online poker because I was planning to collude with a friend, but I never got round to it; I found winning honestly was so simple that cheating was completely unnecessary). Superusers? They might exist, but they’ll be caught the second they get greedy. Systemic RNG diddling by stock-market listed companies who are independently audited, and make fortunes without cheating? Don’t make me laugh.

Further reading – AbsolutePokerCheats.com