Hello, I'm one of the three researchers from that article. We wanted to share some information here since 2+2 is such a big platform for poker. Firstly, we've released a 69 page whitepaper that goes into detail on everything we covered in the black hat talk and the article in much greater detail.
You can find that here:
https://ioac.tv/3YD9t36.
And then we wanted to answer a few questions/comments you folks had:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nycpokergrinder007
I think it has something to do with RFID cards for the shuffler to read each one or the cards have to be marked with barcode cards i think as well . I would like the IOS team to comment more on this in more detail then what was given in the article
The deckmate shufflers have no RFID readers - the deckmate 2 read the cards with a camera as they are being shuffled.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ladybruin
IOActive is getting a nice article on Wired, but several informed posters on 2+2 broke a lot of these deck shuffle exploits back in 2019, 2020 or 2022 depending if you are talking about a 2+2 thread on cheating in Boston or Texas or LA. Time for 2+2 to step up their game and not let **** heads derail threads. Then maybe 2+2 will be the one getting the Wired article type glory.
This is interesting! During this research we did quite a bit of initial research online to see if anyone had thoroughly looked at these shufflers (and released the details publicly). We didn't see anything like that on 2+2, but we'd be curious to read these old posts if you can link to them. We did see the Joey Ingram interview that discusses a proposed cheating scenario nearly identical to the one we present in the paper, but didn't actually see it until after the research. Furthermore regarding discussion here and elsewhere that this technique was "known" in the past - we don't disagree per se (after seeing the old threads and videos) but would make a distinction: we were not looking here to speculate about what might be possible, but prove, with thorough documentation, exactly what is possible and how it could be done.
Quote:
Originally Posted by George Rice
It's worse than you think. The Deckmate 2 doesn't shuffle the deck in the way most people might assume. It "stacks" the deck in a random sequence. What is does is take the top card from the deck (or bottom card) and place it in a wheel containing 52 slots (possibly more to allow for jokers, if used). The position where it's placed in that wheel is supposedly random. It continues that until all the cards are in the wheel, then unloads the cards onto the platter for disbursement out of the shuffler. Yes, there is a camera (or more than one) that reads the card and the shuffler verifies that all cards are present and that none are duplicated. What I don't know is whether the Deckmate 2 reads the card and uses that data to decide where to sort it, or just randomly places the top card in the wheel. It doesn't really matter. It's a software algorithm, and as such, is susceptible to being hacked.
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This is mostly correct, though the deckmate 2 is not a wheel shuffler - it has a platform featuring 27 slots (two cards each for a total of 54) that moves up and down to meet the cards as the are being shuffled from the intake platform. Functionally though, it works essentially as you describe. The suit and rank of each card are always recorded for verification purposes, but for a normal shuffle, these values are not used to determine position, and they are instead placed randomly based on their original position in the unshuffled deck. You're correct about sort mode - it does support it and it works by reading the cards with the camera before placing them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by George Rice
Just a thought. One way to minimize someone benefiting from knowing the sequence of the shuffled cards in Hold'em is to require that the deck be cut before the flop, turn and river as apposed to just burning a card. This should become SOP in private games that use the Deckmate 2. Asking for that may make you persona non grata now, but in the future if the community accepts that as SOP, those who are contrary may be suspect with regards to running a fair game.
If I remember correctly, years ago in the Mayfair Club in NYC (where the games were self dealt in the '90s) they had a rule that any player could ask that the deck be cut before the next board card was dealt. That was an effective rule for dealing with a possible cheat who may have stacked a deck.
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This is more clearly explained in the whitepaper, but the fix you describe wouldn't completely prevent the kind of cheating we demonstrate/describe in the article. The technique we used is capable of accounting for the deck being cut, and in fact the full order of the deck and the contents of all hands at the table can be known as soon as a single one of the cheating player's cards are known. Thus, cutting or riffling the deck
after the hands are dealt would limit the cheaters knowledge of the flop, turn and river, but they would still have a huge edge (knowing everyone's hole cards).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Polarbear1955
Since the point of adding a USB and a camera was to facilitate cheating why are you surprised.
This is something we were interested in learning when we started this research - were the shufflers, unmodified and running original software, designed in a way to skew the odds or allow for some kind of cheating? After thorough review of the software of both shufflers, we found no evidence of the shufflers doing anything other than what they were intended to do: shuffle the cards randomly (and verify decks and sort, when relevant).
The purpose of the camera in the deckmate two appears to primarily exists to
prevent cheating, actually. It is used to read each card in the deck and report to the dealer if there are any missing or duplicate cards which may have been pocketed or inserted by a cheater. The sort mode seems to be a nice bonus, but not the main reason for the addition of the camera.
The USB is used for two main things - first, the deckmate 2 supports an external display which the dealer can interact with for configuration and for displaying things like the player clock. It also is used for maintenance and software updates.
Regarding the discussion on RNG, we cover entropy and RNG in detail in the whitepaper for both shuffler models, and it's explained better there than I'd do justice to here, so please give those sections a read.
Obviously there is a great deal more discussion in the thread and I won't address it all in one post, but feel free to ask us questions and we're happy to answer.