I play a lot of play money poker at a site who shall remain nameless except for the initials PP.
Lots of rumors have been circulating lately that there has become available a program that allows players to “scan” the cards of fellow players. I can see how this would be a big asset knowing what cards other players are holding in relation to calling a bet or determine who might be bluffing ETC.
Supposedly the tell that someone is using a scanner is that there will be a trail of dots left on the table after distribution the pot pointing to the offending party.
Is this possible? If it is, and migrates to the real money tables, It would surely be the end of online poker.
Any reasonable implementation of poker would send public information to all players and send private information only to the player who knows it. Thus, unless someone is tapping your internet connection, has distributed a modified client, or has broken into the game server, there is no way they can see your cards in hand.
Pure rubbish. Someone’s smart enough to break into an online poker game to scam thousands of dollars, and leaves an obvious tell in the program? Just a rumor designed to scare people away from playing? I don’t think so.
Thats what I thought too. I meant to add that I have done all kinds of google searches and never found anything there.
I figure it’s just a group of sore losers that are spreading the rumor. However When the mention the tracer lines after the hands, and witnessing them myself, I just thought I would ask.
BTW Gabe I have thought about joining the poker club you guys have, but I would never attemtp to cheat!
What you may be referring to is XXX (I decided not to name it). One version of this software is designed to aid in collusion, where two or more players at a table cooperate (this is cheating). Using this software you can see your partner’s cards as well as your own. Many poker sites look for this software & if they find it on your machine they will lock you out of your account & keep your money. This is true even if you don’t have the “cheating” version.
I’d venture a guess they wouldn’t bother trying to figure out something THAT complicated when they can just use normal game statistics to figure out if collusion occurs.
That’s a very interesting article, but I wasn’t clear how much IM detection is performed:
This description sounds like the client program detects active IM programs and compares programs running on each player’s computers, but it does not sniff the actual IM traffic to determine if the player’s are communicating. Am I reading that right? Seems like they focus on detecting collusion from the game play as groman suggested. This makes the most sense, because there will always be a new way for players to communicate undetected.
I have heard the exact rumor mentioned in the OP, and it was also on PartyPoker.
I was at a table where a player started accusing another player because of all the “white lines going towards his cards” that supposedly showed that he was cheating. I know exactly what those lines are and they’re not from cheating. If someone had the level of sophistication required to pull off that kind of cheat, they would make sure that there weren’t white lines being drawn on the screeen that would give them away.
**The lines are sometimes left over from when the cards and/or chips are being thrown around. ** That’s it, just a minor graphic glitch presumably caused by lag. The rumor is fed due to the fact that there is always somebody who isn’t willing to accept that they just got beat, fair and square.
That said, PP should do something to avoid the lines. The last thing they need is some silly rumor about white lines causing the clueless/paranoid/sore-losers to stop playing on PP. Then there’s no more fishies. That would be bad.
Because it’s a perfect application for IMs. Many short exchanges over cyberspace. IF, however, cheaters suspect that the game admin is onto them, they’d pick up the phone for sure.
You are referring to the dreaded ‘pattern mapper’. It is set to determine the values of cards based on slight irregularities as displayed on their cardbacks. With the right pattern mapper for the right site, you might as well be playing with the cards face up :rolleyes:
Actually, some putz (can I use that word in a non-pit area?) has the ‘ultimate guide to cheating’ or something like that on E-bay and is selling it for $30 or so. Someone bought a copy and pasted it contents on the net for the world to see. He listed three ways of ‘cheating’:
Collusion as mentioned before. The problem is that with two people, you aren’t getting THAT much more info, and generally, most colluders stand out like sore thumbs (they both raise constantly with one fish in between them and suddenly one of them folds on the river so that people don’t see his 7-2o).
‘Pyschological warfare’ . This was a hilarious read and I’m sorry I cannot share the exact document with you. Basically, they tell you that you ‘force’ a choice on your opponent by saying things like ‘do you want to fold here or go ahead and lose the hand?’ This is supposed to make your opponent think he HAS to fold or else he is going to lose, allowing you to bluff away. Why I didn’t think of this sooner…
Get a copy of a program that allows you to see other people’s desktops (similar to Netmeeting). Convince the people at your table to download this software, and then activate it, and THEN have them tell you their login and id for this software. By doing this, you can see their desktop and obviously their cards. Of course it might be a challenge getting strangers to do this, but hey, if you’re a poker pro, it should be easy enough to do! :rolleyes:
Beyond those ‘methods’, I know of no way that one can cheat at poker. Even poker ‘bots’ don’t cheat, they use formula based on the cards they are dealt to play a certain (and usually beatable) style.
In theory, it’s possible if the poker software is designed improperly. If the site uses a common pseudo-random number generator, then each deal to you leaks information about the RNG seed. If the seed is 64 bits, each card would leak a bit less than 4 bits of information. This means that after 16 cards were dealt, it should be theoretically possible to determine the entire state of the RNG and predict what cards are going to be dealt next for every player.
I beleive a number of early poker sites were hacked like this but operators have now become far more aware and have closed this loophole.
