Quote:
Originally Posted by Josem
The concept of favouring one particular player on the community cards is impossible in the 'static shuffle' method used by PokerStars. The server can't possibly know what players will do after the cards are dealt, so there can't be a deck "favourable" to what they want.
The deck is shuffled, set, then dealt.
Right, I agree that as long as we have a static shuffle the kind of riggage I described is impossible. I guess my only fear here would be that the *shuffled deck* object is something of a black box to most of the programmers, and only handled by a few senior/trusted programmers that have been around forever. It would make sense to do this to prevent a rogue programmer from hijacking the code for their own gain.
But the concern would be that the black box shuffled deck is actually hooked up to something that is aware of the table action, and spitting out choice re-shuffles based on the flop action. All of the programmers not working on the actual shuffled deck object could treat it like a statically shuffled deck. When their code asked the shuffled deck object for the turn card, they would never know it was spitting out more dynamic values.
Obviously this is far-fetched. But in the real world for something this monetarily important, like banking software, several third parties would be hired to audit all of the actual code - not just run various tests on the output. Or at least that should be how it's done.
No offense but I have no way of knowing of the Isle of Man gaming supervisory commission is on the up and up and more than the KGC, which we know is full of crap. Given PS standing on the Isle of Man, I would tend to doubt they are that zealous in their regulatory audits. Can Stars point to a full audit of their source code performed by an established, trusted third party entity that has a reputation to uphold and does not receive a significant percentage of their revenue directly from PS?
Anyway the fact that PS claims a statically shuffled deck is a good thing and significantly reduces the chances (which were very low to begin with) of my thought experiment being true imo. I'm just describing the kind of due diligence that a big corporate client would do before they trusted their money or corporate security to some 3rd party web application. As we know from AP/UB, and even stuff like Bernie Madoff, there's a damn good reason for due diligence, even if you think the chance of shenanigans is extremely remote.