Online Poker Players Find Cheaters (Part II of III)

December 7, 2008

They started reviewing the old poker hands and they realized that there was no way someone could play the way that they were playing and not lose. When an other player had a great hand, they knew instinctively to fold, and when they had a hand that could beat the other players, they knew to play it all out – even though anyone else in the same position would have folded.

They went to Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet and questioned the way the player was handling things, but they refused to respond to the allegations. Poker rooms, chat forums, etc. were full of people who had been had by this player, with them playing the same way with all of them. Finally they realized that since they were getting no where going through the proper channels that they would have to investigate on their own. The poker community says that they knew they were being cheated, they just didn’t know who it was, or how they were doing it.

They figured out that it had to be a hacker of some sort, someone who could see the other players’ hands. They say that it either had to be someone who was really good at hacking or someone on the inside of the poker site itself. They requested hand histories of someone who was suspected of cheating the year before, and by mistake the poker site sent them 65,000 lines of data that they used to recreate the games.

What they found was astounding – the suspected poker cheater was winning hands that were statistically impossible. They were winning “one in a million jackpots” over and over again, and consecutively. Not only did it list all of this, but it also gave them their IP address and their user account, which the poker group traced back to an Absolute Poker employee.

Next Time: Where do we go from here?