Some small background, I've played a ton of poker both live and online, and mostly all mix games for the last few years. I consider myself a very good 2-7 player. My friend who also plays on seals is also an excellent deuce player who plays very large.

I started playing on the new seals about as soon as it opened and did quite well, the 2-7 games were so good they were very hard to lose. I had a few big losses to people playing quite absurd but that happens. However, I played a session vs player in question heads up deuce at 40-80 or 60-120 and he absolutely crushed me. It felt very strange though, like he could see my cards. Basically he just owned my life in every 1-1 spot on the end in absurd situations. I catch and Ace, he "value bet" a King, every time I made top pair he would check call or check raise in 1-1 spots, and he had absurd aggression leading up to the river. Stuff that would make absolutely no sense unless you could murder your opponent.

Without going into to much details, he was the worst person I've ever played in heads up deuce and he crushed me, I couldn't wait to play him the next day. Later that night my friend texted me that he just got murdered by the same player in the most bizarre fashion and that it seemed like he could see his cards.
I found this highly suspicious as we both think the exact same thing in the same day about the same player.
A few hands for background, twice my friend bluffed the river in 2-7 with a pair of 8s and got called by a pair of 6s and a pair of 7s. That makes the pot ripper 9-10 call look standard. Other times he would fold in 1-1 spots. How can you fold in a 1-1 spot and call with 66. Anyways we text back and forth and I kept saying call me crazy but I think he's cheating me and I won't play him anymore.

The next day we are in a 6 handed deuce game and same player is just going off, 3 betting in absurd spots and playing with crazy aggression, basically raising whenever given the chance.... until I open UTG he 3 bet, I take 2 he takes 1, I check he bets and I call, I take 2 he takes 1. I check and he checks back the 2-1 spot (any decent player bets here 100% of the time so I'd expect a crazy aggressive player to never check), surprisingly I drew 2 to the wheel and he folds the river..... a few hands later he opens UTG and I call in the BB. I take 3 he takes 1. I improve to 2357 and check, he checks back the 3-1 spot......

At this point I texted most people I knew and said be cautious playing him despite being awful. Fast forward a few days later and I sit in a PLO game were unpromted the text in chat was about how this guy got murdered by the same player the previous day and it felt like he could see his cards...


At this point, I felt like I was getting cheated but it could easily just be a fish on a heater in a high variance game so I would just quit him and let it go; However, he was also the highest volume player on the site every single week and all of a sudden he disappeared off the weekly leaderboard which I found odd. Recently a different friend emailed the site about the player in question with suspicions that he was charting somehow. They responded "as to the reason you don’t see player in question we can’t go into details but were aware of the situation and its not because he was challenged in chat... we can't share results of investigations....
we are very viligent about all forms of cheating, please rest assured......

This is extremely worrisome as well given the site basically has no rules and is anonymous so it would be very hard to be banned for anything other than maybe having 2 accounts and playing at the same time, but most of his play was heads up.

Lastly, I really hope they can divulge some info because I won't play there until I know more information. They banned him for something, but he can easily continue to play on the site since you can easily have and fund infinite accounts.

Hopefully I'm just overly paranoid about a fish running like a god vs everyone and then randomly getting banned for some random reason, but I felt like I would share this information.

You may be overly paranoid, but they should certainly divulge information. Let's hope for the day that murdering your opponent becomes legal.

can't remember where I read it, but was about a bitcoin site that had their casino basically robbed of 1m+ from a hacker because they could predict the casino roulette spins or something and there was suspicion that there would be hackers on the poker side of things as well

The problem with admitting the player cheated without details is there aren't very many ways to cheat at online poker. AFAIK, it's essentially only

1) Collusion - Can't be this HU, and even if it was collusion, they would say they are vigilant against collusion instead of cheating.

2) Trojans - Couldn't be that as SWC could never detect it. Even if their client detected a trojan on your PC, all they can do is warn you they'd have no idea to ban for planting it. Yet they banned this player. And it looks like this player was able to cheat at least one other player, so how did they get trojans on multiple PCs (unless it was part of the install packages for the SWC client).

3) Man in the Middle - Can't be this as if SWC client communications were insecure enough to allow it, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch someone doing it. And your opponent would have to be able to tap into your network path to SWC somehow, which is pretty hard unless they can co-locate their MiM server where SWC is and can intercept all of SWC's network traffic.

4) RNG prediction - Predicting cards dealt by reverse engineering the random number generator should be extremely hard or impossible to do with a well designed system. But assuming the player was able to do it, it would also be hard to detect as it's difficult to determine lucky play from actually knowing the cards.

5) Super user - Fits the description of the HU matches, and is the most likely way to see other players cards.

The fact they won't describe why they banned the player for cheating is really suspicious. Evidence makes collusion unlikely, and all the other forms of cheating are really scary. Worse, the people who ran the original Seals With Clubs announced when they shut it down that it was because of a serious security issue but they refused to disclose it.

So the weight of all the evidence makes it seem likely there are super-user accounts in use. I regard myself as a decent mix games player, but feel like I am running poorly on SWC over months of play. My experience is that I've had lots of sessions vs. certain players that make irrational decisions yet still win. It''s possible I'm just running bad vs. fish, or that I am not as good a player as I think I am, but some of their behavior is really odd.

I see a lot of checking back 2-1 spots when I improve, etc, I get 3B at a high rate redraw when I'm drawing rough or drawing 3, and often they are drawing 2. That's not weird as bad players spew, but the weird part is they rarely 3B me when I'm drawing 1 or a smooth 2. It's very strange when fishy players only spew when you are trying to represent a much stronger hand than you actually have.

This is also compounded by the fact that SWC hand histories aren't usable for analysis/review. They are missing some key information and in a format you can't load in a database anywhere to do statistical analysis on.

Knowing how shady this all is and how little information/trust players can have in the site, you would hope SWC would be more forthcoming about why they banned this player and any security flaws they have corrected or are correcting. Their silence seems to be a strong confirmation that it's a really bad situation, which is why I'm not reloading my account any more.

I read the article, it appeared to be RNG prediction. The article was light on details on how they determined it was RNG, but the hackers won at such overwhelming rates in such a short time it was statistically impossible for them not to be cheating. The sites engineers slapped a fast patch on the RNG, but very quickly the hackers found another way to cheat them, which implies very strongly that it was an inside job.

If SWC bans a player for exploiting their RNG, they have to fix it ASAP and shouldn't let anyone play until they do. Otherwise it's trivial for the cheaters to create new accounts to cheat with, as SWC doesn't have any information on you other than your email account, and once you withdraw bitcoin it's very difficult to trace it back to you.

So the fact that they've not shut down the site or restricted new accounts means either

a) they did not catch anyone exploiting their RNG, or
b) that they are criminally sloppy in how they treat customers while they have an open security issue.

Even if it's something they patched in a few hours after discovery it's still awful they didn't admit it. And any patch done in a few hours isn't likely to be more trustworthy, thats no where near enough time for full testing and security flaw analysis to ensure you don't create new problems.

Fwiw, I'm the one that sent support/Micon the email jon refers to. I was satisfied with their response, but I really don't know **** about this stuff. We've seen some odd things in the HS draw games. I don't know enough about online cheating to be able verify it. Heck, I've never even heard of half the methods DC is referring to. That said, after spending some years in max security up state and being treated like a king while I was there, I'm probably willing to do things that most aren't if I think I've been cheated.

I hope everything works out bc the site has been good to the players. They always pay out fast (like 1-2 days), offer crazy good rakeback (50% 2-3 handed plus your normal rakeback), and nobody else spreads the draw/mix games that so many of us love. With all the sadness re cheating in poker, esp online, I really hope that they just caught KuntyKunter cheating and banned him. If that's the end of it, I'll be happy.

Fwiw I'm decent winner on the site, but I also was able to avoid KuntyKunter bc jon told me about him and I stopped playing him. I will continue to play, but will feel like an idiot after proclaiming mix games to be the least likely cheating scenario online, if there is some bad info that comes to light. GL to us all

at least he followed pot ripper and chose an ironic name

Wow, interested in knowing what becomes of this.

https://www.hackread.com/gambling-si...itcoin-stolen/

Confirmed tough guy. Que the we got a bad ass over here jpeg

Don't talk to Deans dad like that. He might send the triad after you next!

Ok, the main point is people (experienced players that know a lot more about this stuff than I) are concerned about what is happening on a site they play or played on and paid rake.

I'm an idiot for even posting here.

I literally just read this last week and it rang a bell when reading this thread, this dude may have been onto something and it fell on deaf ears.

On bitcointalk.org this guy and Micon argue about a domain name and Micon posts some of the emails. What struck me as interesting is the following statements and no acknowledgement of it from Micon. I could care less which one of them is in the right and wrong it was these statements that caught my attention.

These posts by another member were also oddly replied to, wonder if there is a new guy behind seals? I suggest you read page 78 to 80-81 to see the full weirdness of the replies.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=962440.1540

Guy in that exchange is a scummy professional domain squatter who probably just sucks at poker.

Unless someone audits the software and server setup; there is no way for anyone but the owners to know if there is cheating going on.

They were using Poker Mavens software, which has a list of features such as remote administration. Yet it doesn't matter what is include because its easy to setup your own tunnel; where all players' cards flow to x player if you have access to the server.

Play on a professionally run site or never know if you're getting fleeced.

Yeah, he was... not good.

Figured he was not a player and didn't mind just gambling and giving it away.

I recommend that you post about 100 consecutive hands that you played against him. You can post them at scribd.com or dropbox.com and provide us a link to them in this thread. We should be able to determine how good or bad he is, and if he had additional information or an unfair advantage.

I don't have any hand histories but I'll try to summarize: he 3 bet me and took 2 with hands like 5-7-8 always. He would religiously lead into me after the draw went 2-2 and take 2 again. Basically lots of things to make the pot huge with rough draws if I was drawing; but the crazy thing for me was how rough he would draw on the end, but virtually always live and correct if he could see my cards.

Once hand that really stood out to me. I open 2345 button he either calls and takes 3 or 3 bets I don't remember. I only recall him taking 2 on second draw calling a bet on last draw and taking 1 on end, leading and I called with deuces and lost to his A-J-9-8-5 or some other A-J-9 hand.

Then there's calling with paired sixes twice and winning, checking back 1-2 spot when I draw 2 to a wheel....

.

I played a lot on Seals and never felt superused. Just started playing again on SWC recently and my only complaints are that there arent more games, and its tough to get HU action sometimes. There are other long time players I can ask - SWC has a small loyal following.

That being said if you're losing inexplicably stop playing.



Sent from my S7800 using 2+2 Forums

And bring the situation to the attention of others, as has been done here.

But it would be nice that if you do, come armed with hand histories instead of just a few anecdotes, impressions, and feelings.

Can't you request hand histories on SWC?

Agreed. I've never played on SWC, so I don't have any personal knowledge, but this may have some relevance ? :

Hand histories are auto saved to the hard drive. I looked at a triple draw hand and it is missing the showdown hands, though you can figure out your own final hand from the information provided. Still it would be nice to see some kind of evidence.

As of now, it is not possible to log in from multiple locations. But there was a recent update, and maybe in the past it was possible. Then all that would be needed is for the cheater to get your password, assuming you did not use two factor authentication. If an accused cheater was banned at the same time this software change was made, that would explain a lot.

Edit: If you play a suspicious hand, you can, anytime during the session, take a screenshot of the showdown in the hand replayer. This combined with the hand history would be useful.

sadly I just looked, and never bothered to check the save hand history to hard drive box, maybe I can get them from the site, but who knows if they have them from a month ago. It also will do little good without seeing showdown hands, as theres a big difference if I call with an Ace and lose to an 8 or I lose to the guy that "value bets' the Q or King.


While its not reassuring, you'll just have to trust that when both myself and my friend say he was one of the worst deuce player's we've ever seen, that we are telling the truth. But this is a pretty easy conclusion to make once you call a bet to draw on the end and showdown A-J-9-8.

Also, some of the accusations were from games I did not play in, nor know anybody in. 1 session I believe was a plo8 (which he is no expert in) where he won 20+ buy ins.