To the PokerStars Player Community on twoplustwo:

Cigital. Inc. has been contracted by PokerStars to perform an independent statistical analysis of play on the PokerStars system in the last few months. This analysis helps provide evidence about whether poker is a game where skill is dominant over chance which will be used in legal proceedings in the USA and in other countries. This is similar to what was recently ruled in Pennsylvania.

We are calculating a few interesting percentages in Texas Hold ‘Em: the percentage of hands that actually result in a showdown, and the percentage of showdowns that are ultimately won by the player that was dealt the best two cards initially.

It is important that our analysis be independent and that we demonstrate that PokerStars did not alter the play data they provided us. We are seeking confirmation of the play data directly from players, so that we have a statistically significant subset of hands that are corroborated by the players who played them.

We are analyzing over 100 million hands (note that we are under strict a strict non-disclosure agreement with PokerStars not to disclose these hands to any third party and to use them only for this study). Confirming around 40,000 hands allows us to say that the log data is sufficiently accurate. Obviously the more hands we confirm the better our confidence interval and the lower our margin of error will be.

Your cooperation with us is totally voluntary and any hand information provided to us is kept in strict confidence.

We are asking players to provide their play histories in Hold ‘Em ring games (with small blinds of 10 cents and higher) for December 1, 2008 to January 2, 2009 (the time period we are analyzing) and to attest to the accuracy of the history with a simple affirmation statement (see below).

The purpose of this post here at twoplustwo is to reach out to a large group of PokerStars playersand allow them to volunteer to participate. See the following post for how to participate.

Sincerely,
Paco Hope, CISSP
Techical Manager, Cigital, Inc.
http://www.cigital.com/

About Cigital:
Cigital is a software quality and software security consultancy, headquartered near Washington, DC, with additional offices in Boston, New York, and San Francisco.

Cigital has worked with PokerStars several times in recent years to independently verify the security and fairness of PokerStars’ software. Cigital independently verified the integrity and randomness of the random number generator used by PokerStars’ servers. More information on that assessment can be found at http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/rng/.

This is a real request, please take your time to help Paco Hope.

Scotty
PokerStars VIP Team

To participate in the voluntary corroboration of hand data, we must receive your data on or before January 31, 2009.

Include only games that were:

• Texas Hold’Em Ring Games on PokerStars.com with a small blind of 10¢ or higher.
• Played between December 1, 2008 and January 2, 2009 inclusive.
• It doesn’t matter how many players there were, whether you won or lost, or whether there was a showdown.

A PokerStars hand history is the easiest way to send us what we need. If you want to send output from poker tracking software, we need the following game information:

• HandID (e.g., 21499152117)
• Your User ID the User IDs of the other players in the game
• Your hole cards
• The board (as much as was dealt, if any was dealt at all)
• The user ID(s) of the winner(s)

Email your hand history to PokerStars-Audit@cigital.com. (DO NOT POST IT HERE) Please include the following statement in the email message.

Enter your real name (not your PokerStars ID) in the blank. If you ware unwilling to provide your real name, your PokerStars ID is acceptable:

I, _______, affirm that, to the best of my recollection, the attached data is an accurate representation of my activity on PokerStars.com.

We realize that sharing your hole cards is quite sensitive. You can understand, however, that determining whether the player with the best hole cards went on to the showdown depends on analyzing hole cards. Since this is a focal point of our analysis, we really must verify the hole cards. We do not need any betting information (blinds, calls, raises, pot size, etc.).

We cannot take any non-text database formats that are specific to any popular poker tracking software.

Questions or comments can be posted publicly here, directed to me by private message here at twoplustwo, or emailed to Paco Hope at PokerStars-Audit@cigital.com.

Hi Everyone:

Any help here is appreciated.

Best wishes,
Mason

I think this might be legit.

Does this mean that there *may* be some sort of anomaly with your current results or are these the stats you are contracted out to verify and test?

Scottyy - If you hadn't responded I would have thought for sure that this was a scam or something else by someone attempting to start his own datamine site or something.

If they really are being hired by Stars to do whatever analysis then why do they need the players to give them HH's? Wouldn't Stars have the HH's to give to them?

Color me confused (as usual).

probably comes off as more independant if they get volunteered HHs.

also Bob- assuming you don't give them your real name- what stars ID will you be providing?



















(let's see if it works while he's confused)

I think the best answer is that the independent reviewer doesn't even want a hint of impropriety. Getting the hands from the customers themselves goes a long way towards achieving that.

How do I send you all the hands I have played during the time period?

It sounds like Stars provided them 100 million hands. They need users to submit hands to verify that the hands that Stars provided are accurate, and haven't been altered.

I overlooked this part too in the original post....

I truly encourage all of you who have substantial hand histories to respond to this request. I can assure you that it is very legitimate and very important to the overall fight for legal poker. We need these statistics to advance our position IN COURT that poker is a game of mostly skill and thus NOT illegal gambling as it is defined in most US states (and if it is not "illegal gambling" per state law, then it is definitely NOT covered by the UIGEA either).

The reason Cigital wants player hand histories is precisely what they said - its to verify that the data they received from Pokerstars is truly representative and statistically reliable. In a courtroom, one can easily imagine the lawyer for the other side arguing that Pokerstars has a bias as to the outcome of this study and thus may have provided skewed numbers. Aside from asserting the integrity of Pokerstars in response, we also want to be able to show that we checked for that by comparing the PS data with independent data.

These are all very reputable operations and I have no doubt all your data will be completely safe. And I can personally assure you that at no point will ANY personal information in your data be part of any court pleading or evidence.

This is a very important part of the fight to protect and advance the legality of poker. A little bit of effort here could be of signifcant help - especially if it came from someone like MicroBob, who alone must have millions of stored hands in his private database .

Seriously folks, this is truly a way in which you long time PokerStars grinders can significantly contribute to the cause and have nothing to worry about. Please do it.

Skallagrim - also known as Patrick Fleming, the attorney working as the Poker Player's Alliance Litigation Support Director.

Just to confirm:

1) The hands sent in by players won't be the only ones used in the statistical analysis.

2) The purpose of players sending in the hands is to authenticate a subset of those submitted to you by stars.

This seems like a pretty bad way to show a non poker player that poker is a game of skill. Hands like AA are often best preflop (and usually win), but if you were to look at only the times it went to showdown, you'd almost certainly see them being beat by sets/two pair/straights/flushes more often than pure preflop odds would dictate (just because by your own rules -- you're throwing away all the times they win without going to showdown).


Since this is supposed to be a result used in legal cases, I must admit I'm pretty concerned about the ramifications of your selective sampling.