Cheating in Online Poker

With the recent revelation of the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet superuser scandals, it’s become clear that cheating in online poker is and should be a serious player concern. 

It’s hard to imagine that anyone hasn’t yet heard something of these cases.  For those, however, who haven’t, here’s a quick case-study recap followed by the security measures that players must now take and the lessons we’ve all learned. 

Online Poker Cheats: The Absolute Poker Scandal

It all started in August of 2007.  An Absolute Poker player named POTRIPPER won a $1000 buy-in tournament despite making an insane number of aggressive and dubious plays.  His opponent felt something was amiss after his loss and asked Absolute Poker to look into it.  The AP team said there was no evidence of cheating, and sent the player a tournament hand history as a consolation.

Initially, the player gave the hand history only a cursory glance, assuming that Absolute Poker’s assurances were fair and correct.  But when his fellow players also started to suspicion that something was wrong, the player began showing the hand history around.

That’s when the players realized something shocking; the hand history showed everyone’s hole cards (not just the player’s), which is a gross breach of confidentiality.    Even more shocking was the fact that the hand history proved POTRIPPER saw everyone’s hole cards throughout the tournament.

POTRIPPER’s cheating couldn’t have been more obvious.  The hand history revealed two interesting points: he folded only when someone after him had a much better hand; and he always remained in rounds holding garbage hands because he could either value bet or bluff opponents knowing they would fold their weak hands (which he could see).

Video evidence alongside the work of inquisitive poker forum members caused the story to break wide open.  Numerous cheating accounts were traced to Scott Tom, co-founder of Absolute Poker.  The POTRIPPER account belonged to Tom’s best friend and the former Absolute Poker Vice President of Operations, AJ Green.

Now for the important question: how did they do it?

Online Poker Cheats: Enter the Superuser

Throughout POTRIPPER’s tournament play (except for the first two hands when he folded pre-flop) there was an observer (#363) that followed him from table to table.  It was discovered that #363 was a superuser, a type of account that uses back-end access to Absolute Poker’s casino software in order to view the hole cards of every player at the table.

POTRIPPER and #363 were both traced back to the Absolute Poker headquarters in Costa Rica.  POTRIPPER was revealed to be AJ Green and #363 Scott Tom.  It is uncertain who actually did what, but it is clear that POTRIPPER had access to all players’ hole card information, giving him not just an advantage, but a guaranteed victory.

The scandal shut down superuser activity on Absolute Poker.  Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last we heard of superusers.

Online Poker Cheats: The Ultimate Bet Scandal

Just six months after the Absolute Poker scandal, a player at Ultimate Bet reaped outrageous profits thanks to a snippet of software code that allowed him to see his opponents’ hole cards. Coincidence?  Not likely.

Ultimate Bet is owned and operated by Tokwiro Enterprises, a company that owns and operates only one other online poker room.  Anyone want to place a bet on which poker room that might be?  Of course, it’s Absolute Poker.  Ultimate Bet claims that the cheating was committed by software engineers employed by the site’s previous owners, Excapsa Software. 

Were it an isolated event, this explanation might have sufficed.  But with the Absolute Poker scandal still looming, it was dubious.

In the lead-up to both of these poker scandals, both Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet denied all charges and did an extremely poor job of policing themselves, forcing players to do all the legwork of tracking down cheaters.  Only after irrefutable proof of malfeasance was presented did either site start apologizing.

Now Tokwiro is merging Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet in order to form a new poker room called CEREUS.  The company claims that this will yield a larger play pool with the the combined benefits and strengths of both individual poker rooms. 

More than a few players and industry vets, however, are crying foul.  They claim that Tokwiro is attempting to bury its past rather than correct its mistakes.  

Online Poker Cheats: How to Spot a Superuser

It’s clear that a few shady poker rooms have spoiled the reputations of those that are trustworthy.  While most online poker rooms employ third-party agencies to conduct frequent security checks, there are still those rogue sites that either do nothing at all or have trouble policing themselves for superusers.  Players would be wise to learn the secrets of spotting superusers for themselves, particularly high stakes players.

The biggest giveaway for superusers is that they raise on tons of hands pre-flop, and still manage to win most of them.  Below is a scatter plot made by twoplustwo.com forum member, Nat Arem.  It shows the relationship between percentage of hands played (y-axis) and big bets won for every 100 hands. 

The tiny red dot in the upper right-hand corner shows one of the cheating accounts from Absolute Poker, which is over 15 standards of deviation above the rest of the pack.

 

The plot is comprised of nearly 6,000 player actions.  The cheating account leads all of them in both looseness and profit.  The player represented by the red dot played about 92% of hands; he made about 480 big bets for every 100 hands.  With limits of $50/$100 and an average 80 hands per hour, the player claimed upwards of $38,400 per hour.  Unbelievable.

Cheating players never fall for bluffs and they frequently make value bets on the river with such all-star hands as ten-high.  If you see a player making these kinds of suspicious plays, use a PokerTracker to see how much they’re “winning.”  

This, along with player vigilance, is what brought down the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet cheaters.