BoDog Cheaters........

I was recently playing on BoDog and a gentleman at the table said" Watch out two of these players at the table have the cheating program!" I was wondering if there is anyone that has heard of this so called program? If it exsists How to recognize if someone is using it? If they are how do you report such a thing?

Any help is greatly appreciated....It is my money on the line.


HH

^^^This. Your question has been asked an answered in another thread on this site. Click on that link above and if you still have questions after reading through it feel free to post.

BTW - welcome to the forum! This is a great forum to learn how to improve your game and get advice, etc; Stay for awhile and give it a try!

There are dozens of threads about OPs general question at this forum, look up the sticky "Is Poker Rigged...." to start, do some research.

I don't recall seeing the Dog mentioned in any of them.

Yes cheating exists everywhere. I have a cheating program which I sell for US199, u can PM me if u want to buy.

Sounds like this person telling you this was pretty clueless. Probably a poor player who played badly and lost, or just unlucky, and wants to blame it on something other than poor skill or variance.

There is no such "cheating program" despite the scams claiming to sell you one. The only way to really cheat is to know hole cards and/or cards to come, and this is virtually impossible to know or predict cards for any modern site. After the UB/AP backdoor scandal (which was a cheat based on insider knowledge and had nothing to do with client software) it brought a lot of negative attention to site security and potential exploits. You can rest assured all sites who intend to stay in business made sure there weren't any more holes.

Thank you both for the sound advice and the links to previous posts; as you can see I am new to the site and it is still a bit daunting to traverse through what has been said before.

I believe the gentleman was a bit on tilt, when the conversation arose, but better safe than sorry.

If I do err in my posting places or material; I would be gracious to any push in the right direction.

Thanks again,

HH 30

As it turns out, I wrote an article in which I discuss these cheating programs and the claims that they make. More importantly, I share some common sense thoughts on the subject. You are welcome to read the whole article, through the URL I provided, but here's what I can summarize, in a few words.

Online poker cheating programs DO exist. But they ARE NOT as advertised. Basically, they do not function in a way that most people expect them to.

So, most people have heard of cheating programs that would allow you to see some of your opponents' cards. Distributors of such programs claim that the program needs to be used for a while in order for it to "learn the algorithms... blah, blah." That is all baloney. No such programs exist. But, if you purchase and install this program, you may allow someone else to actually see YOUR cards. That's teh whole point of this program.

This is explained in detail in my article, so please read the entire article if you want to know more. But let em tell you another scenario.

You receive an email that says you've been added to some mailing list, for this or that, and if you wish to be removed from that mailing list, please click the link at the bottom of this email. Now, you click the link and you are in fact removed form that mailing list, and you never hear back from them. And you forget about that email and that you've ever clicked on that "remove" link.

I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. Yes, the moment you clicked on that link you also installed a small spyware program on your hard drive. That small program will send your hole card information to some 3rd party. That 3rd party poker also has an account at the same online poker room that you play at. When they see that a table is filled with players that have been duped into clicking on that "remove" link, they join in. At that point they can see everyone else's pocket cards (provided that everyone else clicked on that link).

So, the lesson to be learned here is that you should be careful about making "friendships" and exchanging any information with "friends" that you meet through online poker rooms. The online poker sharks are not going to be using an avatar that has fangs and claws. Most likely they will be posing as a hot chick and flirt with everyone. Eventually they may get people's email addresses. At that point these folks receive these anonymous "promotional" emails with then "remove" link. Later, a "new player" signs up on the same poker room, and that's how it all goes down...

So, cheating software really does exist. But no one is stupid enough to sell it for a couple of hundred bucks, when there's all that money to be made without sharing the technology with anyone.

Installing such an application under the premise of using it as a cheat could certainly allow your hole card data (any any other personal data) to be gathered and transmitted, as with any other malware that gathers and transmits your personal information surreptitiously. And in fact, if enough people could be tricked into installing this software, it could actually work as a cheat by broadcasting everyone's hole cards to everyone else running the cheat. Which of course means the only hole cards you'd see are those of other cheats, and vice versa.

So while I don't disagree with the point of your post (I haven't read your article), the example of clicking an e-mail removal link and having the software silently installed is a bit overhyped. While not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, it just cannot happen on a wide enough scale, if practically at all, to be worthwhile. With virtually any modern browser and OS, particularly those that are regularly updated (ala Windows Update, for example, which I hope most folks keep enabled), simply clicking a link will almost never result in an invisible software installation. The user would see a prompt to download/install and would have to confirm it. Most browser exploits that come from malware links are of the Javascript variety, that use hidden script or browser plugins/addons to grab passwords and other person info that is typed into the browser. But it doesn't install software that works outside of a browser.

Almost all such malware that does install itself, makes its way onto user's PC's by tricking them into confirming the download/install, for example in this case by making them think they're installing a poker cheat. Or the most common method, by telling them that a virus has been detected, and if they'll just click here, it can be cleaned "for free." Either way, the user is complicit in the act beyond just clicking a removal link in an e-mail.

And yes, before someone points it out, there have been browser or OS exploits, usually due to buffer under/overflow vulnerabilities, that allowed links to malicious websites to take some degree of control over the user's PC. But they're generally very rare, highly publicized, and quickly patched. The number of systems vulnerable to such an exploit, especially one targeted at a particular niche of users (e.g. poker players), would be so small as to be almost not worth the effort of setting up such a marketing effort. There would be so few poker players caught up in this that the usefulness of having their hole cards transmitted would be pretty close to nil. It's not like banking information or site passwords, which is universal to the point that you could always manage to hit enough people to make it worthwhile.

In summary, it is entirely possible and believable that such "cheat" programs would themselves be malware designed to reveal a player's hole cards (and possibly all sorts of other personal data). But it would be highly unlikely to propagate to any useful degree by way of a "remove me" e-mail link.

I just love all the comments on cheating, it was a bad beat or i played bad so on and so on. The fact is no one knows anything about the subject until one day, there is a scandal that will expose everything. A few have allready has happened. Iam not saying anything about the subject, it is just like everything else in the world, most people say it can't happen and 99% of the time it does happen, so be careful when someone says in response to ur blog it doesn't happen or can't happen, that person is not wise.

Paranoia, soul destroyer.