Official Absolute scandal thread

More like no-one says anything about pokersites being rigged anymore, because they know that they'll be shot down by some smartarse that apparently knows different.

Someone finding a way to see holecards is one thing. It's a security issue and is entirely possible given sufficient incompetance.



Saying the cards are rigged is another thing entirely.

If 98% (and I'm being generous here) of all rigged posts weren't stupid baseless crap which could basically be summarized by "WAAAH ME TOOK BAD BEETZ" this may not be the case.

Unfortunately, it is.

Also, as previously mentioned, it's not really 'rigged' per se - I just wanted to use the word to get people like you posting silly things like that.

I really hate seeing this come out about any sort of online poker site. Its bad for the fish pool in general, all we needed is some genuine riggdness and not just hear-say.

Whats to stop former employees from any of the sites installing little backdoor "hacks" once they leave employment. Id be very interested in seeing what measures are in place to prevent such things happening.

OK, but...

1) A number of high level internet pros (including Mark Schneider, winner of Aussie Millions) have gathered enough Poker Tracker information to convince themselves that at least 1, probably 4 and possibly 5 accounts playing High Level NL on Absolute are playing whilst able to see opponents hole cards.

2) A "card reader" hack would only be able to penatrate individual opponents, but it is (seemingly) obvious that the rogue accounts are being operated from someone within Absolute Poker.

3) the rogue accounts only came to light because the suspected accounts played sufficiently badly and were sufficiently greedy to get caught out.

I would suggest, that if it is proven that someone from within a pokersite has been playing with a hacked-"super" account (and these accounts must surely exist - pokersites are able to review suspect plays with access to all holecards, so why would they not be able to see everyone's hand in realtime), then surely it is highly unlikely that this is the only occassion that this has ever happened? I would also suggest that if it is possible for pokersites to see everyone's hands, then it's not a huge leap forward to suggest that pokersite insiders are also able to choose or alter the turn/river cards? The "lag" delays that somethimes occur before you get sucked out...? The standard argument against these accusations is "pokersites make too much money too..etc". But how much money DO pokersites make (not talking about Pokerstars who it's obvious would be raking it in, but some of the smaller sites where tables take ages to fill, or even don't fill)? And how much do individual employees make?

I've been saying that pokersites don't run straight for 18-24 months. I've seen repeated patterns over a number of different sites, patterns that I have a hard job dismissing as variance. I've been a gambler for 25 years, I know all about odds and variance, and I know when the odds of something happening are too large to occur legitimately.

Some of these episodes have been over a very small period, as small as 10 hands - the people that are the victim of these rogue accounts generally wont play many more hands than this, they'll either run out of money, or suspect something is up and leave. It's only the onset of Pokertracker and datamining which has enabled a large enough sample of hands (though a lot of the posters on this thread would also baulk at a hand sample as small as 100 hands if the accusations came from less reputable sources).

I have no doubt that there is a large amount of hand tweaking going on in online poker, whether from individuals or from entire sites, and i've suspected this for a while (see previous posts ad nauseum). Hopefully this will be proved, and maybe there will be more revalations to follow?

rofls @ sig

Yep. Worth stressing that (although I've seen no actual evidence to back this up), that all the accounts are being linked to one person, though.

Yep and yep.

I'd suggest it's rather a huge leap, actually. This is one isolated incident on one site. All poker site's software runs in different ways. In order for their security to be so horribly breached and for them to seemingly not have had a clue until 2p2 cooked up a fuss about it, both the Absolute Poker programmers and their 'security team' would have to have exhibited a quite remarkable display of incompetence which is not likely to be matched by other sites.

Plus the RNG is not in question in this matter. In some of the potripper/greycat/whoever HHs he is clearly seeing making a call with the best hand on the flop/turn and getting 'sucked out' on. If it is only a 'small step' to rigging the RNG, why hasn't it happened in this case? You can hardly use a line like "the cheater(s) were trying to be careful", because their play certainly doesn't match with such a hypothesis.

You don't play $3k NL. Are we really to believe that employees of poker sites are rigging $10 donkngos, or whatever it is you play? What on earth would be the point? "WOO I RIGGED THIS RNG GOOD NOW I CAN MAKE MARGINALLY MORE THAN MINIMUM WAGE!"

(a) There are more than 100 hands logged on the various accounts. Try 500 or so in total, I believe.

(b) As I'm now saying for the third time, if the results are sufficiently distant from the expectancy, sample size becomes irrelevant. "My AA lost to KK twice in a row" or "I've lost my last 8 coinflips" don't meet this criteria. "This guy ran at 70/60, winning over 300BBs/100 in NL and 30 BBs/100 in limit while playing with an infinite river aggression over several hundred hands" does, especially when coupled with hand histories which show him making hero calls with T high, and playing 21 out of 26 hands at a donkament FT, when on 4 of the 5 occasions on which he folded another player had AA-JJ (there was no showdown on the 5th occasion). If you got AA dealt to you 20 times in a row, you'd only have a sample size of 20, but you can be pretty sure people who know statistics would be taking your 'rigged' allegations seriously because the likelihood of such an event occuring 20 consecutive times is so astronomically small as to be essentially impossible from a statistical perspective.

*revelations. Checking spelling 24/7.

A bit about the absolute thing in the Freakonomics blog:

How Not to Cheat - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

If that's true why don't you use that for your own benefit? I have read several topics like this in the past not only about Absolute Poker, I heard the same **** about Stars and fulltilt with the same results...

Conspiracy theories... it is always the same with UFO's, goverment and now online poker... duh!

conspiracy theories you may say, but how many conspiracy theories have actual hardcore evidence like the HH's and stats provided in the thread(s)?

Real question: how many conspiracy theories would so many qualified 2p2 high stakes regulars believe wholeheartedly?

I'm convinced, and the clincher is clearly the river aggression factor. It's statistically impossible to always make the correct decision. That, coupled with the fact the ONLY PF folds were when someone at the table had AA, KK or QQ seals the deal.

To put the stats in perspective, his win rate if translated to a 1/2 NL table would be $1,200 an hour. Nobody can do this, let alone someone thats playing every single hand.

The result may well end up the same as previous 'scandals' but I bet you haven't heard this particular **** before. Have you read the threads? Seen the HH's?

true, but i was just stating a general fact =)

but you sure vanquished any argument that poor guy had!

I just can't believe that all this rummor has gone this far. The guy that placed the first thread message, is basically out of his mind or just brain dammaged.

How can be possible that a company that hadles tons of money would take the risk of creating a "Super account" that would jeopardize their very profitable business????

I mean, let's use our common sense and consider the chance that it's very possible that someone would be trying to throw some garbage over the site's name.

I can not believe in rummors, I would like taking a look on some hard evidence like a screenshot of the "super account" running, how does it work. why these players are not being investigated and why the police is not arresting them for fraud!!!

COME ON!!!

BRING SOMETING UP WE CAN USE!!! OR JUST SHUT UP!!!

You didn't actually read the threads, did you.

(Absolute locked five user accounts because of this incident - now why would they do that?)

I too do not believe in rummors.

I do believe in mircles though.

Where you from, you sexy thing!

A FREEROLL... that happens all the time

You don't understand the PT stats, do you?

I'm convinced that cheating is going on here, but there is one thing that just puzzles me. Why would someone be smart enough to be able to cheat on a major pokersite and be such a complete and utter moron while using it? I mean seriously, if you're having multiple account all spelled in CAPSLOCK you're just screaming for attention. Of course if they had half a brain at all they wouldn't play this utterly stupid (90 VP$IP, calling with nothing when the other guy has even less, raising all the rivers, even if you know you're not going to get called etc etc.).

This really seems like someone is just trying to destroy Absolute Poker rather than making money. Anyone has some theories about this? Who would gain more by destroying Absolute Poker (or online poker in general) than making a shitload of money?

All Absolute Poker accounts are spelled in CAPSLOCK.

Sorry, didn't know that, since I never played there. But the other points still stand.

I was praying that someone would reply with that.


FP you complete me.

"Love is in the air, de de dum"
etc

One isolated incident, because they got found out. Most people with an account like that would have been more subtle, agree?

My "wierd" game wasn't a $10 SnG, the story.......

18 months (ish) ago, playing at Titan. I tend to stay away from ring games, but i'd been on a big roll at Titan (home of the fish) turning $100 to just short of $1,000 in a few weeks playing 1/2 & 2/4 Limit. Logged on to find my usual game (and my most generous donator) but neither were there. There were no tables going higher than 0.1/0.2 (the traffic those days was very low), BUT, for the first time that week there was a $5/$10 game going. That immediately struck me as odd, the site was v.new, very freeroll biased, I was surprised that this table was playing (though there were only 3 players).

I wouldn't usually entertain playing at that level (I haven't since) BUT, I had been on a roll, had sufficient funds (opponents had 2-300 each) and after observing 5 minutes of play, saw that they were no different from the rest of the Titan fish.

I sat down, within 10 seconds 1 player left (?!).

First 10 hands, nothing much, won a few lost a few.

Next 10 hands, I hit top pair 3 times. Based on the previous hands i had seen (20-30 by then) this was big news, other hands were being called to the end by all sorts of hands.

I lost all 3 hands (far north of $100 from memory). All 3 hands 1 of my opponents had a pocket pair. All 3 hands, when I hit top pair, they made a set. 3 hands in the space of 10 deals.

$100-$200 isn't a great deal, but you would have to have been playing at Titan then, to see just how low the traffic was. That was a significant amount in those terms.

Disclaimer - above happened ages ago, it was how i remembered it, but I cant vouch for the accuracy, but my immediate thoughs were that I had been hustled by Titan shills - the odd appearance of an unused table (with NO other players playing right down to v.low levels) - The immediate sit out - and the seemingly remote likelihood of an opponent flopping 3 sets within 10 hands with another opponent flopping top set on all 3 (i haven't seen a run like this since, and these 10 hands were the highest level I have ever played). It now seems like others have played against site shills, and i believe that I did.

i WAS abducted by aliens last year......

hows that for evidence??

At first I was like who cares, this doesn't apply to 99% of us. How many here have sat at a 30/60 table or even a 5/10 table? They played the highest stakes where there are a select few who play. If they had played 1/2 or even 2/4 NL there are enough players there they could escape detection becuase you won't see them at your table to often. They still could have made good money. These guys were morons for running their good thing to the ground. They got greedy and thus got caught.

Why the normal 10c/25c to $1/$2 players really should care.

Now a couple days later I realize that if it happens once it can happen again but better. Next time someone will be smart enough to only play around at the 1/2 NL levels and just keep a low enough win rate to deflect detection. He/she can have a cash cow by playing mixed levels by going up and down one blind structure and multiple tables at once. Payoff someone once in awhile.

Quote:
Accounts under suspicion were STEAMROLLER , DOUBLEDRAG , and GRAYCAT .
Quote:
Robwhufc on Pokerstars
erniebilko on Titan
robhammer on Ultimate Bet
DOUBLEDRAG on Absolute


Does this info pointed out by goldog not require any further comment or explanation??! Or am I missing some kind of private joke? Could it be that the repeated poster claiming that online poker is rigged is actually doing the rigging? (and is therefore correct!). I'm confused.

^^

I had found this file and after googling it, I was concerned about it. It could explain what's going on there, if it is a malicious form of the file. I wrote this blog at another forum, but thought it might be applicable here as well.

Absolute Poker or Absolute cheat?

OK so I was looking at all the files in my programs and came across one in Absolute poker in the main program file called "bugslayerutil.dll" . After searching for the file on google, I found several references to this file as being a backdoor or trojan horse. This file was created by Absolute Poker and every time the program updates it adds this file back after I have deleted it. Absolute Poker runs and loads fine without this file, so what could the purpose be for this file? This is exactly the kind of file that could be used for cheating purposes. Look at yours if you have it and do the research online and get back to me about what you think.

Now there are legitamite forms of this utility, but it does make you wonder after all of the accusations flying around. I raised this question back in June before any of this stuff happened recently. Who knows? Maybe I am the one that started all of this!!