Why the Absolute Poker scandal is good for online poker
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
The Poker Moth 