I commend you for reading all that. I got as far as opening the link and scrolling down to see how long it was and instantly closed out.

Slow Cooked Squirrel

INGREDIENTS
2 squirrels - skinned, gutted, and cut into pieces
4 large potatoes, quartered
1 pound carrots, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
4 onions, sliced
2 cups water
1/4 medium head cabbage
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS

1 In a slow cooker, place the squirrel meat, potatoes, carrots, green bell pepper, onions, water, cabbage, salt and ground black pepper.
2 Cover and cook on low setting for 8 hours.

Makes 6 servings

Fixed your post

QPW

Ok, I am back from my trip to Winstar...

Would you mind showing your showdown winnings on this graph? Assuming the data was not manipulated, it is an extremely impressive graph.

I think it would be very easy for anyone to massage their HEM data to show only positive results to get the members of this forum to believe they are poker wizards but I will assume you are legit.

Some of your site handles would be very useful too so that your results can be verified from other tracking websites.

Thanks.

I also wanted to bring one important point to light after catching up with the debate posts.

It seems that it may be easy to assume that there is a whole army of programmers that are needed to create and maintain an online poker room.

I thought I would just give my incite to working on a development team for an Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game with a 50 mil budget and a player base of over a 1 mil players.

There was a core software team of mainly 5 guys that got the project off the ground and to E3 to win the "Best of Show" award. Each one had very specific duties as far as their roles as programmers. It was not until new content was needed were there many more programmers hired on.

It would not be far fetched to think that for a major online pokersite, the RNG part of the application would be handled by one person and treated as a black box, having the internal workings only understood by a single programmer and maybe logically by the CEO.

As far as multi-player online games go, poker games seem to be at the easier end of the difficulty spectrum to implement.

That sounds good...and it's squirrel season here. Where's my 410 at....

Cool, only 5 guys for that company, and 5 for each decent sized competitor, and a few for the smaller competitors each, and the CEOs in each company.

So let's say there are only 20-30 competitors of various sizes in the industry (as opposed to the hundreds of online poker rooms that have existed).

OK, so that only means 100-200 people need to keep the black box secret until their death, even after some of them leave their jobs and some of the companies they worked for go under.

This really seem that practical? It is more than just 5 dudes who will keep a secret (and seriously, why would they risk everything to do that).

Also, unless all the companies are "in on it" why wouldn't the honest companies just do what they can to expose the crooks? Should be easy since riggies can create worlds where they discover them, and it would be in their financial interest to cripple their competitors. If all are "in on it" then indeed an army of people keeping the secret exists, so which is it?


Amazing how some of you guys envision big businesses as being run as if they were the mafia only with absolutely zero rats somehow.

These theories remind me of guys who try very hard to mix -EV bets to build a system that will beat a casino game somehow. It just does not work no matter how much you try to jumble the assumptions.

This is a joke right? Have you run your hands through Pokertracker yet? Any chance your MIT crew could post their opinions on this thread? They'd obviously have to be careful about what they said in case Pokerstars found about their groundbreaking study of course.

"having the internal workings only understood by a single programmer and maybe logically by the CEO" - Xevoius

I posted this to indicate that only one trusted engineer could easily have the knowledge of the inter-workings of a major part of the application and it would remain a black box to the rest of the entire company.

"So let's say there are only 20-30 competitors of various sizes in the industry (as opposed to the hundreds of online poker rooms that have existed)." - Monteroy

Are there really 20-30 major player in the online poker world? I am thinking more like half that with any significant player volume but of course I could be wrong. Poker rooms and poker clients are two different animals as many poker rooms are just skins of poker clients and the entire network plays together such as Merge.

"OK, so that only means 100-200 people need to keep the black box secret until their death, even after some of them leave their jobs and some of the companies they worked for go under." - Monteroy

So then say there is about 20-30 engineers that are bound by legal contracts not to divulge company secretes, non-disclosure agreements for which I myself had to sign along with the threat of being black balled to get another job in the industry.

"This really seem that practical?" - Monteroy

Most certainly. Once you see how closely guarded information like this is, you would understand.

So in the game I was developing, there were objects that you could acquire in the game and sell them on Ebay for real world cash. Some people made a living off of farming these objects. Such as the Absolute scandal, there had been higher level development employees that had "spawn" information about these items and used this to create an additional source of income.

Once they were caught they were given the armed security escort out of the building and threatened with black ball of entire industry if they divulged company secrets such as communication protocols and other sensitive information.

I signed a document when I joined the project that I could not even talk about it outside the office or even with my family so that there would be zero information leaks.

This was for a freakin role playing game.

Which site do you think this applies to?

I am not referring to any one site specifically.

I am just trying to give some incite to how a development team for an online gaming company might work.

It is not like there are a ton of people involved in all aspects of the project. Very sensitive areas that have great effect on the entire game are usually and are well defined are usually handled by one person implementing and one person telling them how to do so.

On my game, I was the food guy at one point. I had implement how food consumption was going to effect your player's stats. All the other engineers had to work with was a function call like playerConsume(objectIdNumber) and that was their only entry into my "black box".

I can easily imagine the RNG being such a black box.

So the guy posts his graph and you have one question, and the rest are accusations? If he "massaged" his graph, it would show which filters were set in the upper left. That leaves datamining and attaching aliases, or purging losing sessions. Of course the last thing we should consider is that the graph is real.

This is why I didn't post my graph or screen names for snake, since he would think it's manipulated or my screen names are not mine. However, I would (if he were willing to pool money together for escrow) make a prop bet where Stars substantiates my claims directly. Then when he didn't respond I figured he would just think Stars is lying to him anyway, so I just dropped it. In the end, it doesn't matter; people like him are good for the game, so it's silly to try and show them reality since they'll either quit or improve.

Bottom line is a winning graph over a significant sample indicates the game is beatable, and this pulls the rug out from under the rigger dudes. Then people are left with:
a) The game is on the square and I'm just not really as good as I think I am, or
b) I am good and the graph is fake

Option b is blissful.

I am basically saying the theory that "since we have not heard employees coming forward saying that they worked on a rigged system, their is little chance any of the systems are rigged" is not a strong argument and I am using my experience with online game development to help explain why.

What am I accusing him of? Did you read this "Assuming the data was not manipulated, it is an extremely impressive graph." because yeah I gave him props.

I am sorry but I usually need proof and since that proof is easily obtainable using PTR, I tried to politely request his handles so that I can give him the respect he deserves if his results match his graph.

I think just blindly assuming someone on the internet is giving you the truth is very foolish.

"If he "massaged" his graph, it would show which filters were set in the upper left." - Mitch Evans

One could unload a sample of the data, create a new database and reload the exported data into a new database in minutes to make the results look incredible and you would not find any filters in their screenshots.

EDIT:

Oh yeah I also posted this "but I will assume you are legit.", again where are my accusations?

Along with being blackballed, you would get sued. This isn't just specific to programming and software types of situations, I worked for a bio tech company and a counseling agency that put this kind of agreement into effect. You just don't mess around with this stuff if you don't want serious problems. So this could very well explain why a small group of people are not coming forward. Also, I could reasonably imagine that a programmer hired for some very specific short term work at poker site could be someone who really doesn't know much about poker. So why would they care? Why would they blow the whistle if they are bound by contract and ignorant of the possibilities?

This is a decent argument. Whether it is happening or not is not really verifiable, so we are back to "Faith".

My point exactly and having blind Faith that big business is playing fair is very dangerous.

That's because my graph is almost 700K hands and has that similar 45 degree angle, so that makes me the fool, I guess. I suppose if I were a losing player, or only had a 30K hand sample or something, I'd probably need more proof.

As for PTR, it's a joke. It is good for determining if a player is a winner, but trying to reconcile large samples with it is silly. Sure, I got the steady eddy badge and all that, but they are missing a huge chunk of money and my BB/100 is .5 lower than it really is (which is significant for a limit player).

Seriously - your results would improve much quicker if you just concentrated on working on your game, even if you just spent half the time currently used on theorizing about evil corporate/programmer conspiracies to do just that. Maybe you don't care about winning or something.

Forgot for the moment you are one of the perma "well, what if?" breed of riggie ( I actually lose track of you guys), so my bad responding.

Whatever though - have fun.

Mitch Evans, I am not sure why your tone seems so confrontational.

I want to give props to good players and learn from them and if you have the stats then show them.

"As for PTR, it's a joke." - uh ok. I am going to have totally disagree with you on that. If there is a better site to track someone's cash game history then enlighten me.

I know they do not always get the complete hand sample from every session played and that their database does not go back very far but I think it gives more than enough information to determine if the player is as good as they claim they are.

I don't really wish to belabor the issue, so I'll just ask what do you think the chances are that the graph is fake? Especially since you know of dozens of ways to manipulate a graph what are the chances, 20% fake, 60% what?

Of course it's verifiable. The blackbox could have midgets rolling dice inside it, and nobody should care. All that matters is the output, and that is examined by millions of players.

My results have improved tremendously by just leaving Full Tilt.

I am currently running 31.81 bb/100 on Bodog and doubled my first deposit in under two weeks. I am way over $EV adjusted and I know a lot of it is most definitely due to simply running good for a short hand sample of 10k hands. I continue to read more books on poker and will probably start a Stox Poker account very soon since I am a big Ed Miller fan.

I would give you a link to my results on PTR but they are not tracking my Bodog cash game results.

I placed 8th in a live 100 player 160$ buyin tournament this weekend at a casino and then went on to end a live 24 hour session on 1/2$ cash game tables in the green.

Things are running well for me atm, but all that seems to come to a halt the moment I log into Full Tilt.

~Cheers

I'm not being confrontational and apologize if I sound that way. You called me a fool for accepting his results on faith. Based on the results of my own game over a large sample, it seemed more than reasonable to assume it's legit from my perspective, that's all.

As for PTR, like I said, it has its uses and it's the best out there, but that's it. If you looked that guy up, and PTR tracked all of his sessions on every site and his $70K graph shows $38K, would that be proof enough to verify his graph as real? Play a 6000 hand session and see just how many hands they actually track.

I never claimed there were dozens of ways first of all.

I think it might be fair to assume that for every ten to twenty people that would post a graph that impressive on an internet forum, there might be one person that is not being truthful.

So maybe 5-10%