Question for friday:

Please assign % of delay in posting players meeting summary to:
Personal workload
Careful wording
Management clearance
Legal clearance
Nervousness

Please don't take more than 30 seconds on estimating %s. Put "these numbers are random-ish" at the bottom.

thanks for the update steve...

there is hope yet

please all i ask is that these guys are listened to. i personally dont believe its too late to save plo and turn it in to the billion dollar game it should be

+1

Even if it is a super simple fix like use the same rake chart for NL and PL games but have separate rake cap columns where the PL rake caps are lower than the current NL rake caps.

the spirit and essence of the games as a software contest? may the best coder win? i'd suggest to focus on keeping the game at the tables and not let them degenerate to a contest of software proxies.

why anonymous tables? what problem was that supposed to fix again? what alternative solution does stars have to offer?

brb, relocating to IoM. latency and all.

They don't hide that fact. They perrenially are advertising dozens of positions https://www.pokerstars.com/about/careers/ inc a new Head of Poker since April

I just emailed Pokerstars that I can't make it. The invitation came too late for me as I had made multiple plans already and in the middle of move from Asia to Europe.

That being said I would really, really like to see Do it Right and/or Eldodo42 attending the meeting. Preferably both.

People not wanting to relocate to the Isle of Man?

People not wanting to run the risk of prosecution?

People burning out after ten years at the company, or having share/bonus/option scheme mature and cashing out?

We know that Lee Jones left at the time of the move to the IoM, and one of the conditions attached to re-hiring him was that he had to move there. He said as much in an interview.

It's tough to hire smart people in niche industries.

but they could at least hire some grumpy old COBOL programmer to clean up the dealing codes mess. i have some code laying around they may use to get at least some holdem tables up and running while they go downstairs with a wrench in hand to stop the servers ability to aggressively prey on the button assignment routine ;-)

Thanks for the reports as the information is much appreciated.

I have a few questions about this specific topic. The information given above doesn't really state much about Seating Scripts other than what players already know, it seems like you're sort of beating around the bush a bit. Can you maybe go into any detail on the legality of the auto seating scripts as I think that's the sort of information regarding this topic that would be really appreciated by the players?

From what I understand seating scripts are currently permitted by PokerStars, is this because you currently do not have a practical way to reliably enforce such a ban or because by definition this specific type of software falls within the current ToS? Could you maybe also give a brief explanation as to why this type of software would be defined as legal or illegal based on the definitions laid out in the Terms of Service (regardless of if you can enforce it or not)? Also, if possible, could you go into any detail about what sort of efforts have gone into creating a way to ban these scripts and why this is so difficult?

This post greatly concerns me because it seems to directly contradict with pokerstars tos which say:

What steps are you going to take to prevent players from using prohibited tools and services?
We are going to look to see if any of those tools or services which may provide an unfair advantage are running on a player's computer

I'm not convinced that Pokerstars can't enforce the ban on table scripts. Even if it's done manually they could catch enough offenders that others would take note and stop using them for fear of having their funds confiscated.

As an example of how quickly Stars can do things manually is when players had a 1 day sit out last year. These players were booted off the site within 1 hour. Of course things do tend to work faster when Stars' bottom line is touched.

Whereas you may well be right with your main point, I don't think the comparison is really valid. (All they did with the sit out was to see who was sitting out at multiple tables and reduce their max tables to one. There were no checks as to whether it was a legitimate sit out or part of the protest, and it would have been very quick and simple to implement.)

I've just sent the rest of my report to Steve to run it by him and hope to have the rest of it put up in my thread shortly. I have been invited back for the second plo rake discussion and will be joining some other PLO players in the Isle of Man at the end of next week.

I didn't think this was a secret. The auto seating scripts are within our current ToS. We can of course change our ToS, but we have not seriously considered doing so to address this issue because of the enforcement problem.

I am not going to discuss enforcement methods here. There are good reasons for any company to keep details of security enforcement methods confidential.

I can ask someone from our game integrity team to discuss the scripts as they relate to our current ToS. As you might have noticed during our meetings, they handle enforcement of such things.

However, I think that focusing on the wording of the ToS is an error. You can argue the interpretation of the wording of the policy, but we keep clear lists of allowed and not allowed software on our website based on our interpretation of the wording, so there's really no room for doubt. If there's a type of software that we want to disallow (and can effectively prohibit) that we think falls within the limits of our current ToS, we can just change the ToS. The reverse is true as well. Arguments about what 'decision making' really means in the context of the ToS, for example, aren't going to change which programs are prohibited and which are.

I am not the right person to discuss this in great detail, but I can confirm that while we do still have some such abilities, they are far less powerful and comprehensive than what could be done.

Steve,
I'm afraid this seating script explanation raises a major security concern. If it really is true that you don't have the capability to detect something as simple as one of your regulars using a seating script then how can we have any confidence in your ability to detect sophisticated bot programmers?

Easy to enforce, table seating script just confiscate the players bankroll if they are found using it, noone want to risk that = noone will use seating script.

Stars' refusal to enforce a seating script ban can only possibly be down to either laziness or disinterest. In other words, if they wanted to ban seating scripts they could but it would require a bit of effort. Either they can't be bothered, or they don't want to.

This is pretty much how I see it and I'm sure others do as well.

What's concerning, as someone mentioned above, is if you allow a 3rd party software to run on your site, yet by your own words, you can't detect it. How can players be confidant that sophisticated bots aren't successfully flying under the radar. Pokerstars says they are both a concern, but can only deal with one? That seems a little odd to me.

Yeah, they succeed.

This is childish twaddle. There are far better reasons than "would require a bit of effort" not to enforce this kind of rule.

Stars made this decision around the time that we found out how deep the UB rabbit hole went. They voluntarily decided that they did not want to be in the business of monitoring the software on customers' computers. That sort of decision builds trust.

Likewise, here they do not want to be micro-controlling what tools customers use. They are making laws without the legal authority of a state, and they want to avoid having the "illegal, but everyone does it" like happens with some of the drugs laws or the underage drinking laws in the US. That sort of decision builds faith in the rules.

If Stars wanted to, they could easily monitor seating scripts from the server using a traffic analysis approach. Like with the 100m sprint, where if you leave the blocks in less than 0.07 seconds of the gun, you get false-started. I would guess that there is an event storm when a desirable seat opens, where 20-30 people try to get it. Those event storms should be "easy" to identify (in the sense that it can be done, although it would cost scarce dev resources), and someone who was known to win regularly could have a 3 second delay added for a period of like a week.

The traffic analysis approach should work to detect bots as well. If an account plays for long sessions, or has regular session durations, or doesn't appear to take pee breaks, or has regular decision timings, or plays the same hands in the same way without mixing strategies, or never takes certain lines, you might be dealing with a bot. Whether you prioritise the effort to write the code to detect this is another matter.

Bot programmers have to leave a traffic analysis signature. You can detect them from the server.

Guess I'll post the link, for those like me who mostly just check their subscribed threads:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...on-et-1344472/