There is a way to exploit users of the Fast Fold feature on PokerStar's Zoom tables. It works as follows:

1. There are 50 players working together, colluding on the Zoom tables. They all join the same one. They play normally against each other so that collusion software doesn't pick them up.
2. They all run a piece of software that tells all of their 49 friends who is sitting at their table and the time at which the hand started. So just to clarify, the software receives a list of all the players at each of the 49 friends tables. It also sends information about who is sat at the table of the player running the software.
3. From seeing who is sat at the table, it is possible to deduce who if a player used Fast Fold. If a player is at one of the tables which started at 15:10:12 and at another table where the hand started at 15:10:14, we know that he Fast Folded at the first table.
4. This information could be shown in a HUD. It would show "Folded" on those who used Fast Fold, so players who used this software would be able to see in advance who was going to fold.

PokerStars should immediately remove Fast Fold. It's completely unnecessary - the Zoom tables already play much faster than normal tables.

The way to avoid being exploited like this is to never use the Fast Fold button. I think it's important that players know of this potential exploit because it will almost certainly start happening at higher stakes and it might already be happening. The strength of this exploit is that it's virtually impossible to detect without very advanced analysis, which only the PokerStars team would be able to do since tables cannot be observed.

So, first we would need 50 people working together, along with a piece of software that the 50 would have to be using, and that would be able to tell us that someone used the fast fold button?

Other than that, I don't understand the problem.

It doesn't need to be 50, that was just a number I came up with. I don't actually know how many people you would need to cover a significant amount of tables. It depends on how many players are currently playing. You need fewer players using the exploit if there are fewer players at the table. You could use the exploit with just 2 players, it just wouldn't be very effective.

The problem is that it's possible to determine if a player Fast Folded their hand even though they haven't acted yet according to your screen. So for example, if you were UTG with 72o, and everyone except the big blind clicked Fast Fold and those players all ended up on tables of people who were using the exploit with you your software would know that everyone is going to fold because their names appeared on new tables. You would then raise 72o and steal the blinds very often.

Actually, now that I think about it, the people who are working together wouldn't even need to know who they were colluding with. All you would need is a central server where your software uploaded the names of players at your table and downloaded the names of players at new tables.

op is right. what he describes is possible even without software.. but then only in small pools. i noticed that on terminal poker where player pools rarely have more than 30 players.

but getting rid of the fast fold button destroys the concept of zoom imo.

So people are going to go to the trouble of developing software and risk a life ban on Stars for the sake of stealing the occasional extra blind?

Such as what? It would need to be something that screenscrapes and displays the info onscreen in milliseconds to work, no?

This doesn't exist, and we don't know that stars couldn't detect it themselves if it did

And surely email stars instead of posting this on a public forum. They've probably thought of it already

How do you know that I'm at your next table because I fast folded? Maybe I'm playing 4 tables at once and I just happened to be at both of those tables.

I could write and distribute the software if it doesn't exist yet in order to force PokerStars to remove Fast Fold.

It would be possible to detect the software if the player used it to gain maximal advantage, e.g. play like POTRIPPER did. POTRIPPER could've gone undetected if he played normally only using the knowledge of other people's cards in situations where it would be very hard to tell if he could actually see their cards. In the same way, the player using the Fast Fold exploiting software could use it without making it obvious, making it nearly impossible to detect.

I really do hope that they haven't thought of it already - it would be incredibly irresponsible to implement the Fast Fold feature knowing that it can be exploited.

So.....what you are are saying is to entirely give up and destroy the game because at some point somewhere in the future somebody might manage to write a complex computer program on the order of difficulty of the HUD functions of HEM or pokertraker and then share it with a massive colluding ring of people all to be able to be slightly more effective at blind stealing?

You can already do this on normal table with the fold or check/fold checkbox. I don't see how zoom is different.

It would be nowhere near the complexity of HEM or Pokertracker. And you would only need a central server which would only ever give you the names of people who have Fast Folded on your table. You need not know who you are colluding with.

Also, it's not just pre flop. It can happen post flop. It's possible to select Fast Fold in situations where there is at least 1 player between you and the bettor. So it could result with 3 players seeing the flop then first to act bets, then the second player is using the exploitative software knows that the third player has Fast Folded so raises the 1st player's bet to make him fold.

It doesn't destroy the game at all. The Zoom tables are still much faster than regular tables because you get a new hand as soon as you fold. The Fast Fold feature is just unnecessary.

Just restrict each pool to a maximum of 49 Chinese players.

It's not the same thing. What OP is saying is this:

Zoom Table 1 11:00pm
Normal Player Fast Folds
Colluder A

Zoom Table 2 11:01pm
Normal Player Dealt In
Colluder B

Colluder B sees Normal Player at 11:01 hand and sends that info to Colluder A in hand started at 11:00. Colluder A now knows that Normal Player has folded in the hand he's involved in.

Regular Table
Normal Player auto-action check/folds
Colluder A has no way of knowing this until action is on Normal Player and he actually folds.

I'm not going to post it, but if you think about it there's a very obvious way to determine which instance a player is in if he's playing multiple tables that would work probably most of the time.

This needs to be addressed by Stars.

Screen scaping can be fast if the areo theme is off, and you scrape just a few pixels isntead of images. This is not to say that screenscaping is the only way to do this. The PT hud works on Zoom, and does not use screen scraping.

Isn't the ability to "fast fold" pretty much 100% of the reason to play zoom?

As for getting 50 people to work together for a marginal advantage... meh. I'll take my chances.

Seems like it'd be quite easy for stars to detect colluders having a (even slightly) too high PFR%, in spots when most/all of players ahead of them have fast-folded

I'd feel reassured enough by the deterrent of stars commenting here 'yeah we're monitoring the games, have security checks in place, and will lifetime ban all colluders'

Agree this should be fairly easy to detect.

Yeah. I can't imagine doing all this would be worth it. I'll take my chances too.

There’s no doubt this is a technically possible collusion strategy. But to gain any sort of edge will lead to a pattern which can be detected by Pokerstars security. So it’s important that Pokerstars security is on the lookout for suspicious patterns.

This is a totally different kind of collusion which will be nearly impossible to detect. The people colluding don't know who they are colluding with and don't know their cards.

I can't think of any reliable way to detect this collusion. Let's suppose that to detect it PokerStars looks at the correlation between VPIP and how many of their opponents Fast Folded. Players who used the software would raise and call more often when they knew that opponents ahead of them were going to fold. However, the same is true for good players who aren't using the software. Good players will predict when their opponents are going to fold ahead of them, so will have a VPIP that correlates strongly with the number of players who Fast Folded.

There's no way to tell the difference with a good player and a player that is using the software. This is what makes the exploit so deadly.

It's fairly simple. For example pre flop a player is on the btn, and over a large sample opens more often than normal when the small blind has fast folded. Do the same sort of analysis with other spots, and should be detectable if Stars are looking for it.

Yup, those 72o blind-steals would be impossible for Stars security to distinguish from the "regular" 72o raises that the good players are always doing from UTG.

Like someone has already said, its a non issue. Sure I can appear at one table at 10:30 and 14 seconds having been at a table at 10:30 and 12 seconds. But that doesnt mean I fast folded the first table for sure, I could well be playing more than one Zoom table.

This is not a problem and OP you are not the first person to consider it.

while I agree its less vunerable if you are playing 4 tables.

What if you wrote a mini-exploit

With FTPs rush poker it said how many tables a player was playing.

Lets assume you are on the BTN and a player playing in the SB (playing only one table) appears on one of your other 3 tables. (scraped by an automatic program)

Its safe to assume the SB has fast folded so you would almost certainly get the 66%+ folds from the BB to make raising ATC hugely profitable.

Knowing the SB has folded HAS to add to your edge in this situation.

This is hypothetical but im sure people smarter than me can come up with other senarios where even just using the info scraped from the 3 other tables might give you an additional edge.