WCOOP Winner Disqualified.

PokerStars WCOOP
Winner disqualified

PokerStars has announced WCOOP 2007 winner 'TheVOid' has forfeited his $1.2 million prize

By Jenny Southan
October 2007


The first place winner of this year’s PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker, who won $1.2 million dollars, has been disqualified for cheating. After a two week investigation PokerStars has announced that ‘TheVOid’ was breaking the rules and has consequently forfeited his prize money (the biggest win in the history of online poker), his bracelet, and been banned from the site.
It has been rumoured that ‘TheVOid’ is a top UK player who had been multi-accounting during the tournament. Although the details of these allegations have not been confirmed it is believed the player took over ‘The VOid’ account after he had been eliminated from the WCOOP, and then went on to win it.
In a statement posted on the website, Stephen W, Manager of PokerStars Game Security said: The investigation into the WCOOP Main Event has now been concluded. We have determined, based on the totality of evidence, that the tournament winner ‘TheV0id’ was in breach of the PokerStars Terms of Service.
“In the interests of Game Integrity, ‘TheV0id’ has been disqualified from first place. All other WCOOP Main Event prize winners in addition to the player who originally bubbled in 415th place will therefore advance one place in the prize pool. The necessary financial adjustments to reflect the revised tournament places will be made within the next 24 hours.
“Please note that we are unable to release further details of this investigation, for reasons of confidentiality and privacy.”
While this is bad news for ‘TheVOid’ online players worldwide are applauding PokerStars for its decision, as are the top 415 entrants to the WCOOP who will all receive a share of the first place prize sum. Second place finisher ‘Ka$ino’ will be bumped up to first place, banking almost $600,000 extra and PokerStars sponsored pro Vanessa ‘LadyMaverick’ Rousso who finished third, will be credited with an extra $250,000.

This is copied and pasted off of pokerplayermagazine.co. uk

Yep.
He deserves it.

Can you imagine that party poker the new first-placer will be having tonight?

how do they find out about this sort of thing?

Can you imagine the party poker the bubble boy is having tonight?

Indeed he does, just goes to show that cheaters ain't worth a cent.

That's the same thing I was wondering, my only guess is maybe someone ratted on him? I'm sure pokerstars and other sites have their way to track IP's maybe?

IPs aren't worth a double cheeseburger if you use proxies, which mask your IP, or a Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP), which gives each computer on a network a different IP address. And with millions of 192.168.0.x IPs that come off of home networks, it'd be hard for someone to track exactly where each one is coming from without taking a look at the host provider database of IPs that are handed out to who... and I can't imagine any self-respecting ISP just giving out that info willy nilly.

But whatever, he got caught, and now 415 people are celebrating. =D

You are assuming that poker software does not have IP trace coding built into it just to combat the easy to use proxies.....

The software itself could be looking at your computers I.P. and sending it to the site.. A proxy server in that case would do nothing but draw attention as the addresses would not match up. Sounds like an easy way to get the poker sites to look more closely at you.

I would be highly surprised to find out that any major site doesn't have IP tracking software that will automatically flag multiple accounts playing from the same IP address. Having worked in the IT industry for a few years, I can tell you that it is extremely easy to trace an IP address. If you wanted to get full contact information, you would have to go through their ISP (and thus needing a warrant or some other way to get them to divulge the information since it is illegal to disclose said information otherwise), but it can be done.

Proxies don't really do anything other than send off a big sign saying "hey i'm going through a firewall in chicago" or wherever the person is. You can get around this just using a tracert command from your command prompt in windows. Proxies are essentially just content filters.

As for the 192.168 addresses, home networks do indeed assign IP addresses in this manner. However, to an outside observer (read a poker site), they will see your DHCP assigned address from your ISP. And since most DHCP addresses are leased on a 24 hour lease (meaning you have to sign onto the network once every 24 hours to renew your IP address), you effectively have a static IP since almost everyone logs onto a computer at least once a day. Also, by just being able to see the IP address, you can pinpoint his general location since ISPs use set IP addresses for certain areas of the country (eg comcast assigns 24. and 69. ip addresses in the chicago area).

My guess is that this guy used a bunch of friends' accounts, that all were registered under different IP addresses. He then played each of them in the tourney and just kept going with the one he was doing the best with. Once the system flags all the accounts as having the same IP address, a big alarm goes off and the investigation begins. Since there are laws in place to deal with this, not to mention it is against the ToS, a warrant for the information wouldn't be hard to come by.

A computer's IP will almost always be 192.168.0.x

Click on Start>>Run and type in "cmd". On the black screen that follows type in "ipconfig /all" and look what comes up.

Notice the "IP Address..........192.168.0.x" line. That is this particular computers network IP.

Now you can go out to WhatIsMyIP.com and see what it says there. You will get something different. The IP that shows up on the site is the IP your computer uses to connect to the internet, which is handed out by your ISP.

In your ipconfig /all thing, you will also probably notice, "Dhcp enabled.......yes" This means that every time you connect to your DHCP, you'll get a different IP. There's also an option in your LAN/Network Connections area of your Control Panel that gives you the option to dynamically obtain an IP from your DHCP, which results in the same effect-a different IP. Every computer in your network will have a different IP it uses to connect to the internet, that's how DHCP works.

You will also notice "Physical Address.........." with six sets of two characters (number/letters). This physical address is unique; no other computer in the world will have that same physical address. So in effect, using that to try to locate multi-account users is worthless. Besides the fact that there's an option in your Router settings to block the view of your physical/MAC address.

And the whole point of proxies is to mask your IP. With the thousands of people that use any given proxy, it is nearly impossible to find out exactly who is who, even if they could find out what the incoming IP was.

Case in point: IPs these days are basically only good for networking and file sharing. There is just too many ways to get around IP blocks and stuff.

Feel free to correct any part of this, and don't hesitate to disagree. I have enough humility to admit when I'm wrong, even if it takes a little persuasion. =Þ

Total BS in my opinion.


Moving or playing the main event in a hotel room with a newly registered screen name would let THEVoid play again. He would just need someone trustworthy to register his new name under so that person can actually cash out. Is there anything more Poker Stars can do to stop people from making new "Screen Names/Alias" if they really wanted to? I don't see how.

Dotde, you are partially correct. A computer will indeed show a 192.168.x.x address when you type in ipconfig in your command prompt (or rarely a 10. address). That is known as your internal ip address. That is the ip address other computers on your local network use to identify you. The address you get when you look it up on sites like whatismyip.com or what have you, is your external address. This is the address that wide area networks will identify you with.

Think of it like this, you are staying at the Rio in Las Vegas. To anyone outside of the Rio, your address is you are staying at the Rio. To anyone inside the Rio, your address is room 1827 or whatever.

As for DHCP, read the part in my previous post about leasing. You will almost certainly NOT have a new IP address the next time you connect to your ISP's network. The only times people ever get a brand new IP address is when they 1) go on vacation or 2) manually force an IP dump and refresh (which is not something a normal user does anyway).

MAC addresses are irrelevant to how IP addresses are distributed (although there is a separate topic of MAC cloning and all that good stuff). Mostly, MAC addresses come into play when you are setting up the security system for a network and you restrict it based on MAC addresses.

As for saying that IP addresses are only good for networking and file sharing, I'd like to point out that if you didn't have a unique IP address, connecting to the internet would be impossible (I won't get into the topic of subnetting since that is really beyond the scope of what is needed for proving collusion in an online poker site).

Kind of off the point, but wouldn't you consider online poker scammers to be not-normal users? I sure would. ;-)

And I think I sort of acknowledge the "same IP won't allow the internet" thing when I said, "Every computer in your network will have a different IP it uses to connect to the internet, that's how DHCP works." Though it could have been more clear if I'd made a note that every DHCP has a certain range of IPs it can dish out, in effect preventing any doubles.

To avoid the very likely possibility of beginning to talk out of my ass I think I'll leave this topic alone for now.

nt

So in laymans terms he in a sense rigged the poker site or the game in such a way that he actually made it too the final table and won 1.2 million freakin dollars to boot, oh no online poker is on the up and up, yeah my A_S. Granted they did catch him, BUT now just imagine how many do not get caught.

NAT would also be helpless to prevent an IP tracer on your local machine (built into the poker software) from informing the poker site of your private IP address.

I'm not so worried about this. He still had to pay several entries, so it's not going to increase his ROI unless he has multiple accounts at the same table, which is very unlikely in a big MTT. Plus even that isn't terribly helpful.

As long as they can't see the face down cards and they can't see what cards are going to come, I'm not concerned.

ok back to the article rather than IP address mumbo jumbo (i thought i was gunna die if i read another post about IP address tracking)

that must SUCK to win 1.2 million dollars only to be busted because you played the event with multiple accounts...

on full tilt i have several accounts but I only use one of them for real money, and all the others were because i did not like my screen name at the time so i would change it.
all of my accounts are inactive (for about a year now) and I only use willthegreat24

is there a way to delete your previous accounts on full tilt?

+rep for Stars taking care of this right away.
-rep for Absolute for not being as forthcoming.

I only play at Full Tilt, but agreed anyway.

You're still confused about the IP thing, dot . . . maybe this will help:

If you are on a LAN (local area network) created by a normal router at home, work, coffee shop, airport, etc., each client on that LAN receives a unique internal IP, either via DHCP or manual configuration, which lets the router distinguish one client from another and direct traffic appropriately. HOWEVER, all those clients connect to the internet via the same external IP, namely the router's WAN (wide area network) IP, which is assigned by the ISP and can be static or dynamic, but will always be traceable to at least that ISP. (And the ISP, of course, keeps detailed logs of which customer has which exact IP at any given time; they typically will/should not release that info, though, unless there's a really good reason, like a criminal investigation, for example.) Hope that helps. . . .

Anyway, whether they used IP tracers, MAC tracers, or something else, I personally find it encouraging that PS obviously has safe-guards in place, and that they can - and will - go after cheaters. At the same time I can also imagine what a logistical nightmare it must be to try and monitor tens of thousands of accounts that are playing and/or logged in to the site at any given time; it doesn't surprise me at all that they can't catch everything in real time, and that invetigations like this one take some time to sort out.

By the way, I myself work in the IT field, though I've only been there for a few months. Any and all knowledge is helpful.
I understand the whole part about internal network IPs and external IPs, but I was under the impression the DHCP gave each client a separate external IP from the rest. But anyway thanks for the info.

Oops, sorry about the IP thing, wk . . .

Anyway, if you have more than one (real and/or play money) account at pretty much any poker site, you are violating that site's ToS. Technically, you shouldn't have been able to even set up more than one account; I'm assuming you had to use different email addresses for each or something like that, which might work on play money accounts since you don't have to enter all your personal info? As long as you didn't use more than one account at a time, this would be hard to track and hardly cause for concern from their end. . . . If you called or emailed them and explained the situation, I would imagine that FT could/would manually delete your inactive play money accounts; I don't think that'll get you in trouble, and might be a good idea just in case you ever win something huge where they might scrutinize your account before they pay you. . . .

By the way, I can't even begin to imagine how badly it must suck to win and then lose $1.2 million -- I also wonder if this guy might be facing bans from other organizations (WSOP, etc.), not to mention criminal charges. . . .

Bumpity

I missed this thread, thanks for the bump Rex. I railed this final table, and its a little shocking to say the least to see a player this high profile "outed" by Stars where-as if they left it be there would have been little outcry, ppl would prob never even have found out. Fair play to them.

As far as the IP thing is concerned. Stars do indeed track every single ip address. You are stopped from playing sit and gos and ring games but as far as i know, 2 accounts can play MTTs, correct me if im wrong. (or at least they used to)

i am surprised pokerstars split up the money and didnt just keep it for themselves lol