Absolute Poker is rigged... no seriously

[Talking Poker]

This is really amazing stuff. That Dan Druff timeline is brilliant. Don't you just love good investigative reporting???

What I find most interesting about this theory (which certainly seems plausible) is that this guy COULD have gotten away with it. He could have created a new account, and SLOWLY (relatively speaking) worked his way up through the ranks. He could have mixed winning and losing sessions, made some bad calls here and there, and never even aroused suspicion. He could have turned himself into an online poker God......... but greed takes over, and people just cna't control themselves.

Then again, maybe he figured he'd be caught sooner or later (or lose his access to account #363), so he decided to try to make as quick of a hit and run as possible.

Either way, this whole #363 thing makes it seem almost certain that something fishy was going on, and shame on Absolute for covering it up (this is givign them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they weren't already aware of this - but they certainly had the means to figure out what was going on when the data was handed to them on a silver platter).

[melioris]

ok, so lets assume you have access to 363 and believe you will for the forseeable future. How do it do it? What levels would you play, what style would you play?

Your first paragraph suggests that the greed might get to you as well. Becoming an online poker God would be the worst thing imaginable, IMO. At what level can you win and expect to get away with it based on the style you are playing?

I think I would start at $400NL HU and work my way up to $1000NL HU and expect to get away with it.
At first thought, NLHU games offer the best opportunity to disguise your cheating and avoid suspicion while maxamizing return. The problem I see with NLHU is that folks might be likely to call down really light at times, so your ability to push folks off of better (albeit crappy hands nonetheless) might be easy to overestimate. But I guess those cases don't really hurt you anyway in the long run. To me the key would be to maxamize my hourly rate while staying relatively anonymous.

I don't really know any of this but I suspect that playing a weird style but perfect on teh river would fly beneath the radar up to $1000NL HU, but above that the players and fanboys might notice.

[Talking Poker]

Well, *I* wouldn't do it.

But if he wanted to fly under the radar, he should have played "normally" - with whatever style he uses - and basically only looked at his opponent's hole cards when he came into tough spots. It would be tough to not look constantly, but that's really the way to do it.... just when you need to decide if you should make that big, marginal call, or if you can push a weak hand and get your opponent to fold because he has air.

And yeah, HU would be the games to focus on. Doing this in a tourney was retarded.

[Kurn]

Sort of reminds me of about 10+ years back when a couple of computer guys at a dog track wrote a program to identify all superfecta combos not played and print a ticket from an unused mutuel machine that was time-stamped before the race ran. I'm missing some details, but they got away with it for quite a while until one of their wives or GFs bragged about it.

Just goes to show that the old adage is correct - 3 people can keep a secret as long as 2 of them are dead.

[2Tone]

NYT coverage


This is an quality blog, BTW. It's from the guys who wrote Freakonomics, an interesting book/look at the stats, society, and trends.

[Talking Poker]

Cool book. It's sitting behind me on my desk as I type this.

Those guys are into poker, so I'm not surprised they picked up on this story. Last I heard, they were putting together some huge pokernomics project. I think I posted about it here a while ago. Yeah, here it is: