PFR means how much they raised preflop. You can see here that knockstiff raised a lot more than just KK+/AK.

Agreed. I would answer yes to both questions.

Also, as per the edge generated let's just disregard my earlier post since talking about stuff like that in public cannot be good for the games.

I 2nd this

Thanks to all, esp Noah, who have put in the time and effort in this investigation. You boys did a great job.

what about open percentage. using the 2.1 number for AK, kk+ is misleadng.

This one?

Sorry. Here you go:

i do think 'colluding' is not totally proper when something is purely softplaying. i do believe sites should try to prevent even softplaying, but they are far from equal crimes. if the ONLY thing that happened was that the two players avoided big pots with each other, then it wasn't really cheating other players in any significant way. i am not saying it is right, but we have to give some consideration to degrees of severity here.

i also am not claiming they didn't commit more legit collusion i am simply pointing out that softplaying alone isnt worthy of having hell dropped on you in the same way as collusion by the community.

is there any evidence that they went beyond softplaying and used their relationship in a manner that manipulated a pot vs a third person? i don't think stars policy is that strange regarding once a pot goes heads up. the only real thing they must be very attentive of is when two people act in a way that affects a third.

very thorough post though, much appreciated.

Great post and good job Noah!

I have only read through the LittleZen part so far and one thing that came in mind is that you don't seem to take the relative positions of the players into consideration unless i missed it. For example if LittleZen would always take his seat to the immediate left of Knockstiff there would be more players to act after him on average in those 3-bet opportunities which would of course lower his 3-bet%.

However this is obviously just nitpicking since i dont actually assume that could make such a big difference.

Anyways great job and thank you for devoting your time for doing all this.

insidemanpoker, check out noah's post, #50 in this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=50

Radical Ed,
That's a great point. Especially since there was some early evidence that they liked to sit next to each other.

I'll try to look into it at some point. My guess is that I just won't have the sample size to say much about it, though.

However, seems like this can't change my conclusion. For example, say LittleZen always sat on knockstiff's immediate right and they weren't cheating. Then he probably wouldn't 3-bet knockstiff much, but knockstiff would 3-bet him a ton. But, obviously, that's not the case.

If they always sat with one player in between, things would be a little different, but they'd still have a lot of CO vs. SB hands against each other, so their extremely low 3-bet %s still wouldn't be explainable.

v well done

Whether or not they actually did cheat, I'd hate to be in those guys shoes right now.

if this is true why is there not more anger to the sites? they investigated this a year ago and said nothing is wrong? the sites dont care if two ppl are colluding in shorthanded high stakes? as long as theyre getting games running? wtf?

stars/ftp were always the flagship of online poker, you could always say "oh yea? well at least i dont play on ub! im a stars player buddy". now it seems no online poker sites are above having people cheated out of their money, as long as theyre making rake.

Well, if nothing happens... why?

thanks noah and to others who have helped out v nicely done

can we out the identities of all involved along with pictures so i know who some cheating scumbags are?

looking forward to more non-statements from Bryce Paradis and Taylor Caby.

Nick Grudzien, though you will face no legal ramifications that you are cheating, stealing, lying scumbag douchebag, you will face some consequences.

www.nick-gruzien-is-a-scumbag.com has a nice ring to it. along with every other effort to make it known you are ethically bankrupt and a thief. i pity your children for being born from the seed of such a person, and i feel sorry for your family having raised such a scumbag. FK YOU

hope there is some nice coverage on pokernews/bluff/cardplayer about the fact that Nick Grudzien, aka stoxpoker, is a scumbag cheat liar.

This. amazing work noah

I doubt very much the sites realized there was cheating and let it go on. The fact is, most of the people who work for pokerstars/ftp/any site seem to be pretty lacking in their understanding of poker. They just didn't understand what stox and robert papp(?) were doing.

I am very thankful for this type of work.

Very impressed with the statistics, had a good time reading your OP.

Very sad that this can happen, though

Very nice post. Read through most of it. Damning evidence. You did a really great job with this.

noah, you are my hero. that is some damn impressive work

Agree with this.

Dunno if I agree with this, but it's a huge problem if it's true

They were told what to look for by reputable people. They have teams of guys whose job it is to look for this stuff. They have every hand history that these guys ever played with all hole cards exposed. They have teams of software developers who can presumably write a script to look into this stuff pretty easily.

I'm one guy. I play poker and I was a math major and I'm a nerd who thinks about this stuff, but I'm not like trained to look for this or anything. All I did was used some basic logic, googled some statistics, and found some nice people who were willing to give me some data--obviously much much much less data than either site has.

Plus, as I understand it, they both reopened their investigations before I really started looking into this, and I finished first.... on both sites.. without hole cards.

That all really doesn't look good.

thinly veiled brag. nah jk

awesome work noah, really.

anyways, of those 30k hands you analized with both knockstiff and littlezen in the hand:
- what % of the time do both players have <25bb?
- what % of the time does either player have <25bb with the other one having >=100bb

also, of those other 48 opponents he has the largest sample against, how often are they playing with <25bb or >=100bb in those hands that were used to create the graphs shown above?


while im pretty sure youve thought about this before, the point im trying to make is that those unnaturaly low 3bet percentages might come from the fact that a lot of the time, both or either one of them was shortstacking, which obviously completely change the way both of them play against each other.

these absurdly low p-values might be consistent with the fact that most of his other most-played against opponents are not shortstacking themselves, which can be a result of games (esp 6 max) not often running with more than one or two shortstackers.


its quite likely i have made some very basic mistake here, if so, please point it out to me. thanks.


edit:

when you created the graphs comparing littlezen's play vs. different oponents based on different stats, did you extract that stats from hands actually played with knockstiff (e.g. how they would show up on his hud, assuming he doesnt datamine) or from some other source (your database, ptr's)?