Hi Noah,

I'm not trying to cast aspersions on your character. By all accounts you are one of the most stand up guys in this thread. I appreciate the effort you've put into this.

My issue is only with the guys that want to remain anonymous because they don't want to subject themselves to punishment for violating T's&C's. Guys like that cheat in my games and it offends me a little more because it is more personal.

I also don't want to imply that I don't think Nick and the other guy did something in the spectrum of unethical and crappy to flat out cheating potripper style. I'm comfortable thinking he's in that spectrum someplace. Crappy and unethical isn't exactly a great place to start. I'm not clear where in that spectrum he's living. I think it's worth examining.

Showing actual, real, accrued advantage would be very powerful. I appreciate that it isn't always possible given the nature of the data. The case for potripper style just gets a lot harder when you can't show that.

Again, thanks for all your effort and my apologies if you thought I was impugning your character.

Also thanks for pressing on the sites. It is efforts like these that make game security better. I truly believe that Stars does care about game security. Pushing them hard on it can only be a good thing.

This is a great point. Sort of what I meant by fancy math/residual edge vs the field, but you said it better.

Just trying to play devil's advocate here but what happens when friend opens QJs from CO friend folds AQ because he's softplaying and you ship AJ? I mean they both open ~20% right? If they weren't sharing holecards there would be a good number of this happening too.

I think the discussion about if something gives an edge or not is pretty much irrelevant. Cheating is defined by if you break the ToS, and that's pretty much it.

E.g., modding a poker client is normally against respective ToS. Many people don't consider this giving an edge, but in reallity it does give an edge (e.g. being able to see cards more crysp and thus doing less mistakes, compated to other players).

Once you break the ToS, there is no scale of "severity of cheating" - sure one can debate endlessly on this, but it will always be a debate. So my point of view would be that collusion is cheating from business agnostic point of view, because not only you break ToS, but you in fact play different game (from game theory PoV) than your opponents, so IMO is cheating at it's core.

Obviosly in order to collude/soft play/play differently than normally you would do this to gain an edge, why would you do it otherwise? If the 2 people softplayed only headsup situation, you can argue that this was to reduce variance (which gives edge to the players, but doesn't take away edge from the rest). But it was already clarified, that soft played occured in multi-player situation.

@NoadSD, I haven't have the time to read all your analysis (just browsed it, which was visually giving quite good and visible hints for collusion), but wasn't it a good idea to come with some statistics metrics as a front line summary? Sorry if you did this, but I just didn't read it. Otherwise, for example if you put how they acted in certain spot against all players, then estimate the mean and draw normal distribution (or the closest for such situation), then see if their play (amongst them) falls within 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations from this mean. This would be quite credible proof (Techically, it's not a proof, but std is kind of standard metric for confidence that what you observed indeed occured. Something like std 20 is considered a fact in pretty much any, no mattter how critical, scientific experiment, for this case I would say 4 or 5 would already be pretty much conlcusive, that is leaving <0.01% chance that something odd has happened).

first, as many have said, great work noah and your time here is both widely noted and greatly appreciated.

this whole nick/rob softplaying thing is sad.

i learned a LOT from both of these guys and would have NEVER imagined either would cheat/do anything illegal/immoral w.r.t. poker.

just some background info:

- i'm a bit biased to nick/rob's side just b/c i know for a fact how hard both studied and the amazing ideas they came up with when they were playing limit around 2006. they shared some of their work with me and i learned from it/implemented it and it helped a lot. maybe they found a way to add a small edge in a fair way and then it got 'out of control' to end up where it is? who knows but here's to hoping for some other explanation.

- nick and rob definitely know each other and are friends but this alone isn't daming and shouldn't be. they were *serious* students of the game and worked together on interesting problems. i guess at some point that process resulted in this softplaying? i'd definitely love to see the full uncensored hand history analysis for edge (rob+nick | same table) vs. edge (rob + nick | different table) vs. edge (rob) vs. edge (nick) controlling for limits, daytime etc.

- i would be interested in seeing a public statement as to why the data show what they do. im just morbidly curious as to how they went from where i remember them being & their work ethic to cheating (it does appear cheating at some level occurred but im still holding out hope there is some legitimate explanation for all this).

- as public as nick is/was w/ stoxpoker etc., rob is just as non-public. he'd poke his head up every once in a while with a 'strange' theoretical question in HSL that people would be like 'wtf, why is he asking that?' when it was some fractional part of a bigger analysis he was looking into or just an isolated 'interesting' DS type theoretical question. i wouldn't expect to see/hear anything from rob here.

im really still in awe about all this and really really pray there is some rational explanation here :-(.

Barron

not another one of these people incapable of judging things with respect to scale. i will ask again, should someone who calls you a pos in chat have their accounts locked and funds seized? it is a violation of the ToS, so according to you, yes....

life is about constantly judging things on a scale. it isn't all black and white.


and again, this is not a comment on this specific case where it appears some significant unfair play was occurring.

Do you not think that this was the edge they made for themselves and perhaps why they were playing their sessions "together"?

No - this is a matter of what the ToS specifies. If you can clearly separate the "offense" you can posibly specify the consequences on ToS level (and make these visible to all players).

And most successfull systems are these that has to judge less or judge reliably.

I agree, for this case.

Noah, excellent work.

One question (and forgive me if this has already been covered). . . did you compare their 3bet percentages as a function of opponent stack size? Is it possible that they 3bet players with short stacks significantly less frequently than players with larger stacks?

To Everyone who is talking about softplaying:

It's my understanding from this data that these players only 3-bet each other with a very Narrow range 2-4%. There is no way 2 smart winning short-stacker would enter an agreement where they would soft-play each other and only 3-bet JJ+, AK. This agreement would be silly and not really solve anything. For example, lets say one short stack is on the button, and you are in the CO you could open a very wide range (the range you would normally open on the button). I find it unlikely two pros would enter in an agreement like this when it would so fundamentally alter play and the amount of money they were playing for is rather insignificant compared to their bankrolls

How i understand this data is that the players would share their hole cards preflop and whoever had the stronger hand people would play and the other player would fold. The only exception to this would be when they both had such strong hands that they 'had to play', or else it would look weird. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the data there is no way that this is 'softplaying', but explicit collusion where hole cards were shared and it was decided whoever had the best hand would play.

I only glanced off that data and did read it in depth so I could be mistaken in some of my conclusions.

-Andrew

Assuming one is CO and the other is button the CO could effectively open as if he were the button and win much more than his share of pots since the players behind him will misinterpret his range. This might be of value if the players were sharing bankrolls(I have no idea if they were or not. I am just talking in theory. I am also assuming that the CO having a wider opening range is better for the team, which is surely debatable.)

If that's the case I would think their 3 bet% would be higher. One raises and the other has a better hand so he reraises and thery chop the money up on the side.

Imagine you're at the table between two short stackers.

SS1 raises. All your stats say that SS2 3bet shoves 10% of the time, and 16% of the time when there's already one or more callers in the pot. What is your calling range? What is your 3bet range? If you call and SS2 shoves, what is your calling range?

Now, what if you knew that SS2 actually only 3bet shoves 2% of the time when SS1 is the opener. What is your calling range? What is your 3bet range? If you call and SS2 shoves, what is your calling range?

The difference between these two ranges represents an advantage for the their "team," and that's only assuming softplay, and no more explicit collusion like sharing holecards, setting up bluffs, or pricing in inferior hands.

Furthermore, how big of an advantage do you think SS1 has, knowing that SS2's 3bets ALWAYS represent EXACTLY {KK+,AK}? SS1 knows what SS2 has, and SS2 knows that SS1 knows what he has. The only person who doesn't know is you, and you just snap called 25BB with TT against {KK+,AK}. gg.

wow, long read, but Great work Noah!!!

Fantastic work!

'Legendary Detective' status and a very well paid consultancy at Stars security awaits IMHO...

Oh and This message is hidden because Run Ricky Run is on your ignore list.

Andrew,
What you said is possible but not necessary. They would definitely gain an edge just from softplaying but nothing else.

I considered looking into your idea (it is possible to test for that without hole cards), but there's clearly collusion in some form going on here. I figure it doesn't matter much what they did exactly. Plus there are a lot of different things to test for and they'd all be really really easy to look for with hole cards but a huge PITA to look for without them. So, I kinda just wanna let the sites handle that part and maybe I'll check their conclusions myself.

This only gives people better odds when they do call (which is what a lot of bad cheaters do and end up losing money). You're saying your edge comes from a 3-bet being perceived as stronger than it really is and them folding strong hands? There's also the part where the original opener is just putting dead money in the pot that helps offset that when someone does have a strong hand.

You've posted a bunch in this thread but didn't address any specifics about any of the tests/graphs noah posted in his analysis. It doesn't even take that much of a stat background (basically if you took high school stat you're good to go) to understand the report if you take the time to read it. Maybe you're right (kinda doubt it though) but you haven't attempted to explain your side in any detail so it's hard to understand what you're saying.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/6188320.html This link was posted earlier in NVG by Noah and I think it got overlooked. It's an article by Daniel Negraneau titled "Softplaying is cheating". It was written in Dec 08 and Daniel joined PokerStars in June 2007. One of the quotes from Daniel was this:

"If you’re playing online and you smell something fishy, e-mail customer support and have them investigate. At reputable poker sites, a representative will look into your claim by reviewing the hand(s) in question, as well as the betting history of the suspected cheaters. If suspicious betting behavior is detected, the crooks will be banned from the site and you will likely receive a refund for the money you lost due to player collusion."

i guess this form of collusion would have been detected by stars security. it is interesting you come up with a completely different opinion than most people before regarding the 3 bet thing.

good2cu's quote of amount of money is insignificant to their bankrolls??? is this true??? does he mean the amount of money gained from doing this?

Also could of someone just made up their own mind without telling the other person "Im not going to 3bet this guy unless i got kk+" just because i dont feel like getting entangled in pots with him. Basically there never was an agreement if this happened he just decided not to do something.

The correlations between your statistics and proving actual collusion is over my head, and i hope im not the only one thinking this. I mean when i saw the ub cheater's graph it was pretty basic (hes the loosest and wins at an absurd amount at showdown even without the potripper video those graphs were just way out of line) Most were headup tables as well. This is a completely different scenario which I just dont understand well enough.

I see to many posts of people who find this data inconclusive. You might look at it this way if you don't make money from or playing as a short-stacker.

"Deciding" to 3bet 2% of your range as a winning short-stacker would be telling yourself "ok from now I'm just going to start bleeding money away".

Thinking the 3bet range could be this extremely skewed because of the opener is a short-stacker is also wrong as he is always playing as a short-stack himself. Effective stacks blablabla.

A pre-flop softplaying strategy would be extremely weird without telling each other their hole cards as the one who is OOP will gain more +EV and the one IP will have to forego some EV.

People saying this doesn't prove/mean anything and asking for more proof is just idiotic because it will be very hard to do without all the holecards however just using common poker sense makes it pretty clear that there is more going on than just softplaying.

Unfortunately this will be very hard to get across to most layman without more data.

Noah has shown that they are both successful shortstackers/cap players with a winning strategy. He's also shown how they use that particular strategy vs. players very similar to the other and how they deviate from that strategy vs. each other. Professional poker players who are pushing very small edges at high stakes don't just say "eh, i know this is a profitable spot but I'm going to continue to pass on it for no real reason other than I know the guy."

No i don't mean they don't gain much of an edge. I mean when they are playing with 20BB stacks ($200-$1000) dollars, and they have made millions of dollars playing poker there is no reason to 'soft play' becaause you don't want to take money from your friend. The only reason to do so would be to gain an edge.

the statistics are the nuts and bolts, but the last 3 posts is the car. tyvm

Still no reaction from FTP and Stars?