Cyberhwk: What?
More to the point: I understand basically what went down with POTRIPPER but I am not a gambler so a lot of the terms you used in your last post don’t make any sense to me. Could you explain the following terms:
SNG, NL, monster raise, nine high, call on the river
Thank you.
Sorry.
SNG = Sit and Go. A small tournament where the tournament starts as soon as you get enough people signed up for it. Normal tournaments have a starting time an usually no limit on the number of entrants. A two table SNG will start as soon as two full tables of people are signed up.
NL = No-Limit. There is no limit to the amount you can bet. In a limit game you’re forced to bet certain amounts. In NL you can bet as much as you have in front of you.
Monster raise - A very big raise. In the hand in question PotRipper’s opponent made a very shrewd bluff. He represented a very good hand but was still called by PotRipper with…
Nine-High - A very very bad hand. A hand in which a player has no pairs, straights, flushes, and no card higher than a nine (97632 for example). Even if PotRipper had PUT his opponent on a bluff, out of a couple hundred possible hands, PotRipper can probably beat less than TEN of them, but made the correct call anyway. This was a very very telling hand and one that helped expose PotRipper. There is NO WAY PotRipper calls that bluff with such a horrible hand unless he knows exactly what his opponent had.
Call on the river - Just called (matching his opponent’s bet) once all five cards are on the board. This was significant because he raised 100% of the time he couldn’t lose, folded 100% of the time he couldn’t win or bluff, and bluffed 100% of the time he was behind but his opponent had a weak hand. Not ONCE did he make the timid “well I’m not sure if I’m ahead so I’ll just call.” Once the outcome was decided, he played 100% flawlessly.
Like I said, they could have flown under the radar for YEARS but they had to get greedy. And even worse, arrogant about it. Quite a case study into human nature anyway.
(I see Cyberhwk already answered, but I typed this so I’m gonna post it anyway.)
SNG - sit-n-go, a tournament that doesn’t have a scheduled start time. It starts as soon as the required number of people sign up. For a single-table SNG, as soon as ten players sign up, it starts.
NL - no-limit, where you can bet all your chips at any time. (Compared to pot-limit, where the maximum bet or raise is the amount that’s already in the pot.)
monster raise - a large bet, which usually indicates a very strong hand. You’ll have to risk a lot of your own chips to call; you only do that if you have a very good hand or know the other player is bluffing.
nine high - a very weak hand. The order of poker hands goes straight-flush, four-of-a-kind,… two-pair, pair, high card. (At the showdown, if nobody even has a pair, the higher card wins.) In hold-em, you have two cards of your own, and five shared cards face up, so you’ll sometimes leave the shared cards out when describing your hand. (If there’s an ace and king on the table, both players will have ace-high. The cards in your hands will be the tiebreaker; my nine-high beats your eight-high.)
call on the river - Hold-em has mutliple rounds of betting in each hand. The down cards are dealt, and everybody bets (or folds). The first three shared cards are dealt (the flop), and another round of betting. The fourth card is called the turn, and another round of betting. Then the last card, the river, is dealt. Another round of betting, and if the wager is called, the cards are turned face up and the best hand wins the pot. For the first three betting rounds, you’re (usually) playing the percentages. If I’m holding two hearts, and there are two hearts on the flop, that’s probably not much of a hand. But I’ve got two chances, the turn and the river, to get a fifth heart and then I’ve got a flush. But after the river, the element of chance is gone. Each player has their final hand. There’s no more chance that another player might get a lucky card to make a winning hand.
In addition to what **Cyberhhk **and **BrandonR **posted, I’d also point out that serious players can usually make more money online because of the opportunity to play so many hands. The brick & mortar games are generally much easier, but I, for example, should expect to get only 25-30 hands dealt per hour at a casino. Online, however, playing four or five tables at a time, without ever having to wait for the dealer to shuffle the cards, I can get 400-500 hands per hour. It’s enough to turn a lucrative hobby into a potential profession.
Wouldn’t such players be easier to win over and thus make it easier to earn money?
Right, I’m saying that there are proportionately fewer weak players in the games now than there were in the past, therefore it’s harder to earn money.
Sorry, sleep deprivation has a detrimental effect on reading comprehension :).
Great article(s). Thanks for hunting them down.
Cyberhwk and Robot Arm- thanks for the clarification.
The 60 minutes piece was basically a rehash of stuff I’d already known, but it does make me wonder why anyone would trust a system where it’s so easy to commit fraud in a nearly undetectable manner? Putting aside the type of cheating we saw here (which probably happens a lot), you could just play with your friends or on different computers. Is there anyway to prevent some thing like that?
I would bet that every day, in every poker room, there are a bunch of guys on cell phones colluding with each other. The only way to detect it would be to look for the same guys on the same tables all of the time, and use some sophisticated analysis to determine and prove the collusion. In other words, not likely.
p.s. Outstanding user name, by the way.
The poker rooms claim to have algorithms that can detect cheating.
The poker rooms also claim it’s not possible to have a superuser account.
Take that as you will.
Of course, actually having said algorithms doesn’t preclude them from being total crap/the websites not using them…