wp you and

wp noah!

really well done man, this must have required an insane amount of time. hopefully you eventually receive some form of compensation (along with those that were cheated) if stars/ftp steps up and actually does something about this, rather than standard finger-wagging/generic e-mail responses.

yea i guess my wording is completely off, you are right.

Noah, do u have a link to the post this quote came from? I did a search and can't find it. Must be a noob at searches. And thx for all the hard work u put into this investigation.

Ricky,
Fine. I ran a simulation in stoxEV, and AA/KK/AKs is 1.10% of hands after accounting for card removal effects from 40putts opening 20.4% of hands. Note that that doesn't account for the reverse card-removal (aka bunching effect) from the fact that nobody else has raised or called. So the actual number is a bit higher than that.

I sincerely apologize for being off by between 0% and 0.1% on a quick comment I made to give people a rough idea of what a 1% 3-bet % looks like. I hope everyone who was misled by my mistake will forgive me.

Stally,
Thanks. It's nice to get the perspective of a shortstacker to confirm what I wrote.

ItsOnlyChips,
Sorry.. should've been more clear. That was from an e-mail with Taylor.

Thank you for explaining that. I wasn't demanding anything of anyone. Good metaphor with the corked bat.

wow, that must have taken A LOT of time to put that together. Thanks for that dude. Sick work!

doesn't sound that sincere

amazing thread Noah, good job. Time for stars and ftp to speak up

unbelievable research

TS is to be applauded

lol @ the devil's advocate people

are you people serious, or just wanting to practice your debate skills?

While I call another forum home, after clicking this link I was amazed at the amount of work put into it. It did take a lot of time to read it. Noah and the folks that helped him, put a great deal of time and information included in this. I'am pretty sure Pstars and FT are aware of this thread and am very very interested in what there response will be. I'd imagine this response should/would be soon as players reading this that don't play at these stakes, would be curious to know if this is going on at the smaller stakes to go unnoticed. If its going on at the "big boy" games and it's going unnoticed AFTER a investigation, then maybe there security is not to be bothered with even looking into it at the micro to mid levels. If players are doing this and they can generate a reasonable profit then I'd imagine players could be doing it at the smaller levels as well (no this is not a rigged online poker theory), Iam just concerned with the level of security here and accountability.

Noahsd,

I personally would like to thank you for all your selfless work here. It is impressive and much appreciated. Not only have you helped make the poker community as a whole safer by exposing this instance of sophisticated and nearly undetectable cheating, but perhaps even more importantly you have forced the quality of the major poker sites security teams into question. They must address this and even of more importance, they must increase and improve their own level of security for their own continued survival. Nothing spells the death of the money printing machine that is running an online poker room faster than a reputation where the games are not safe.

For that I, and quite frankly the entire online poker world, thanks and commends you.

I've actually reviewed this post twice and I don't think I am even being close to being overly dramatic in regards to my praise of Noahsd, considering both the level of work and effort that went into his report; and the long term positive effects that will come from it.

latest stars email if anyones interested:

Noah did you ever get 3-bet ranges from PTR or did they give you numbers? It's been mentioned a few times that they would cold call simply to induce with strong hands (because 3-betting AA against the open doesn't show any profit if they're both on the same roll) but then someone mentioned they were 3-betting only those hands? Do you have any basis to show that they actually 3-bet the top of their range? I mean either way it's wrong just kinda curious is all.

high-stakes I'm pretty sure the profits come from a lot more small edges. The fact that a lot of people posting here don't really understand what they were doing shows that it's not like it's easy to do. This was the case of two people who as far as I can tell were very good at poker in their own right and decided to employ an additional advantage to get a slightly bigger edge. I doubt if someone was this good at cheating they would be doing it at micro levels. I mean if they're good enough to beat the games for 3-4 ptbb or something and cheating gets them an extra 0.1 it's not that helpful. When as someone else mentioned they beat the game for 1ptbb it gets a bit more significant every small edge you can scrape out.

Also someone correct me if I'm wrong but I've heard that people who collude at micro/small-stakes generally fail pretty massively and end up losing money because they don't understand how to do it properly and end up just giving people 2:1 in a lot of spots. I mean it's not like the people crushing the games think about cheating for that extra small edge, so you've got the people who aren't that intelligent to begin with attempting to cheat. Maybe I'm way off base here but I don't get too worried about cheating in small-stakes games and the cheating that does occur is usually blatant enough for the sites to catch.

Playing detective is the best thing.

Dig Deeper and you will find out some interesting facts:

Nick G/Stoxtrader is good friends with Rob P/littlezen/kinetica. Leatherass/dusty is good freinds with both of them also.

On stoxpoker there is a screename dusty refers too in a few of his past blogs:
it is "LAsNYFRIEND" this person/friend is littlezen and is Rob P.

Dusty blogs that rob P. taught him poker and essentially pays hommage to him. He also, blogs about trips to NY to visit rob and also, trips to Oregon where Rob visits him.

Need more facts to back this up?:
Video #491 on stoxpoker is a NL video with 3 person commentary, made from stoxtraders house in california. Just who are the other 2 people joining nick?
one is Rob P. aka littlezen aka Kinetica aka LA'sNYfriend
the other is of course dusty leatherass schmidt.

The 3 are obviously close associates and friends. And legitimate questions can arise as to why Dusty choose to disassociate himself from stoxpoker at about the time when this information became public?

Further dusty may want (or maybe he'd perfre not to) to come clean with his play vs. his friends/associates as is it pretty well known that littlezen and leatherass sat at the same tables often when he was making his supernova elite run.

All,
There are two things that you definitely shouldn't discourage in this thread. Reasonable questioning of my conclusions and reasonable speculation.

In the case where someone's being unreasonable, the most likely way to get them to continue clogging the thread is to respond to them (I'm obviously guilty of this too... oops).

zach,
Yeah.. a couple people want me to give ranges. Here's why I'm not doing that.

First of all, I pretty much can't. PTR just gave me numbers. Neither I nor PTR have anywhere near a large enough sample to get a good idea of ranges without having hole cards. For example, Kinetica had 2471 opportunities to 3-bet 40putts in CAP games. He 3-bet 1% of the time, so 25 times. 40putts presumably folded to those 3-bets somewhere around 2/3-3/4 of the time, so that only leaves 6-8 hands where we could see a showdown. As someone pointed out to me a few days ago, those could've all been misclicks.

Numbers are a little better if I do the entire FTP sample, but then I have to worry about stack sizes. Stars sample is similarly bad and has the stack size problem.

Plus, if I could get their ranges, I wouldn't post them here, and if I did post them here, I certainly wouldn't explain (or want others to explain) the merits of using certain ranges when colluding.

The blogs I refer to are all on stoxpoker, just have to dig a little, the video 491 is still on stoxpoker.

Question to Nick G IS rob P. the guy you made video 491 with at your house is he littlezen?

Like any good lawyer I know the answer to the question.

you are definitley wasting your talents playing poker for living. America need people like you to curb corruption. on a side note all I can say is wow, great job

Fair point, thanks.

was there ever a 4 bet or 5 bet shove between the players in question, and if so what were the hands showdown?

ps u answered my other question just by the lack of understanding which means my question was trite and the testing was unneccessary

Zach,
I am going through this thread hold on 5 minutes and please stop reporting every single ****ing post.

All,
The purpose of this thread is to discuss stox colluding, not to bring up random internet beef keep that in mind before you post.

This is what I'm getting to what people need to understand. At the lower levels you alot of time have two bad poker players who can't win on there own cheating.
Two bad poker players do not make one good poker player. When I first started to learn poker I read a good article by a pro who talked about this and how laughable some of these attemps at cheating were(this was low buy-in live games).
Bascily saying the same thing as you Zach that they will lose twice as much or if they do manage to win it will be very little, then they have to split it. Not worth the time nor the effort and is why they stop doing it pretty quickly.
I would suspect that at the mirco limits the colluders and cheaters are pretty easy to spot by comparison to higher limits. When two winning high stakes players collude I can't see it being easy to spot.
This is why I think FT and PS had trouble seeing it before. This dosen't mean that they didn't suspect it, but they could not take it to the next level and say they were diffently cheating.
There are not alot of post on this forum or others where PS or FT were wrong in closing peoples accounts for cheating. When FT or PS shuts down players accounts they want to be sure they are right. We hear very little about how many accounts these sites shut down as the players know they been caught and just shut-up and the sites say nothing. Yet, alot of us have gotten rebate/money back from these sites.
Nice work with this.
To people who question this, remember-he has already admitted to cheating so his words should hold little wieght in this matter. Second, as winning high stakes players it will not jump out like it would with two noobs playing mirco-stakes.

Just wanted to add my thanks and appreciation for your work noah

pretty sure that is 2p2er josem

Big thanks to Noah and everyone contributing to the investigation! Just hope stars and ftp can finally get their zhit right.