I had a look through Ivey's stats on PTR just to see if there was anything weird in comparison to 14 other high stakes FTP players. There were a few unusual things that make him stand out but nothing suspicious imo. Basically the two things that stood out for him are:

1. He's really, really aggressive postflop (especially OOP) compared to other players. Isildur is a wimp in comparison. His flop check-raise in particular is roughly double the average of the other 14 players.

2. Despite this aggression, his WTSD% is really high - in fact only Patrik's is higher among the 15 high stakes players I looked at. The most spectacularly crazy stat is his 'call river bet', at around 49% (the average for the other 14 players is 33%)

I don't think is suspicious so much as just being a reflection of Ivey being an aggro gambler.

Now, one weird thing I found which I have to share it because it made me lol - it seems that the FTP pros really, really, really love cold-calling preflop:

Time to check-raise the flop more.

2 reasons why Full tilt can't be rigged.

1. Ivey can't be rigged because as much as he wins, I've seen him win against FT pros. Iv'e seen him destroy Patrik, Durrrr, Gus etc.

2. Gus loses a ton.

lol quality reasons...

lmao I love the idea of 2nl players seeing my post and thinking "ahaaa... so that's the secret to crushing the pokers like Ivey - play OOP, check-raise 1/3 of hands and call a ton of river bets, gotcha"

people are looking at the potential fact that ftp is rigged for JUST ivey, and not for other pros....and tbh, getting a player like ivey the results/reputation he has is of no small consequence. It's great hype for the site, and everyone wants to watch/gossip about the "best"

There's alot of other ways that could increase someones edge other than superusing or RNG rigging. Many of them would be virtually undetectable.

For example, say someone has access to villains holecards after the hand is played. It would give the guy an almost perfect understanding of the metagame going on and therefor a huge edge and his stats would not be much different from someone without that knowledge. But he would be able to adjust extremely fast, possibly faster than anyone his opponents ever encountered.

Something to remember when thinking how weird it is for a live pro like Ivey to make the transition to online without cheating:

No one has crushed the live game like Ivey since Doyle. And Doyle's cometishian wasn't as true.

Surely Ferguson wasnt intelligent/savvy enough to implement a system whereby certain accounts get slghtly better run good than others.

A marginally better run good account could come in handy, especially if someone was embarking on a $0 - $10k challenge

and did they also rig the WSOP for ivey?

ivey (along with benjamin) was playing online when the biggest game online was the 25/50 game on UB, ie, 6 or 7 years ago when people Like GP were grinding their way to 5/10.

loool, NGV is up iveys a@@ like noone else in the world usually. Nice contribution, Now go post your 12th post. lol

In before Ivey found to be biggest fraud in poker history

I can't see the PLO or the NLH tables. Anyone else having this problem?

point of thread, durrrr should not play limit anything

I'm impressed Durrrr is still top of the NL hold'em chart considering how many million he lost to Isildur and was stuck a mill or so in the challenge with Jungleman.

Tiger Woods in his prime won at a greater rate than any golfer, ever. Was he cheating?

Ivey never had to "grind" his way through the levels. He started at the top and played a releavtive few people during FT heyday. At those stakes, its more about playing the player and leveling than math, science, volume. Phil Ivey has won more money in Tourneys than all but one person, who had at least a 10 year head start on him, not to mention all of his bracelets have come from non-holdem events. Its fair to say, Ivey is probably light years ahead of most if not all online pro's at every game except NL and maybe limit. This largely due to majority of online pro's are pro's at NL.

With all that said, one could certainly argue a fix was occurring, however absent any proof, its nothing but conjecture. You read all the UB/AP scandal threads and see the amount of data players came together and shared and then when we talk about Ivey you do not see pro's coming together to share info. Why do you think that is? I'm willing to bet, it has to do with the pro's knowing Ivey was clearly the better player, if their was a significant discrepancy in any of their results I'm sure their would of been an collaboration of data and information along the lines of UB/AP situation.

Ivey cheating is conjecture and all logic points to him being legit based on the information and facts available.

not a good comparison. a better comparison would be if tiger woods took up video game golf and pwned that better than any gamer in the history of the world but only ever played one video game created by a company he co-owned and co-founded.

nobody is calling ivey's live results into question or the fact that he is probably the best live poker player in the world.

Exactly. And somehow he is instantly better than the best of the best who did. And nobody else has been able to do that. Weird.

So why don't other live pros dominate at nosebleeds online. It's only Ivey. That alone is suspicious.

Live tourney results mean nothing when discussing nosebleed online cash game results. The fact that you would even state this shows you are out of your league even attempting to discuss this.

Lots of live pros are 'light years ahead' of online pros in these games for the same reason. They've been playing 2-7 and badugi and all these games for many many years and lots of online guys have just started playing them recently.

Yet Ivey is the only one pwning these games online. Weird.

To my knowledge this is the first time his results have ever been questioned in a serious way. Ivey being considered some kind of god surely didn't help. where everything he does is gold including being a degenerate gambler literally giving our deposits away to vegas casinos playing nosebleed craps

I would bet a lot no comprehensive analysis of his results has ever been done. Thats why it would have been so genius of them to allow him and only him to cheat - nobody ever suspected it. It's Phil ****ing Ivey.

Perhaps this thread will be the catalyst necessary for the 2+2 detective squad to start digging into hand histories etc.

Fantastic post chadmack. Maybe someone with more reputation than I could start a thread about it? (Id get torn apart lol) We're getting a bit off-topic here, and everybody who could contribute to this topic is rather going to stumble across this if it had its own thread.

lol @ Comparing Ivey playing online to Tiger Woods playing video game golf, so dumb. There's so much bitterness towards PI cause he's perceived as old-school. Unless anyone has any suggestion how PI cheated this is getting boring. Who helped him cheat? Why? And how?

The idea that FT was rigged to give him run-good is absurd as is him being a superuser.

If anything was rigged in Ivey's favour on FTP, he didn't know about it. I can say this with relative confidence because I'm certain that he played under the 'raiseonce' account on stars - and every crazy, potentially suspicious outlier stat in Ivey's FTP play (and there are several of these) is matched by raiseonce's stats on stars. See my post in the raiseonce thread for details.

In other words, Ivey played exactly the same way on stars as he did on FTP, suggesting that his unusual tendencies on FTP were not reflective of any cheating within Ivey's consciousness. I presume nobody would claim that he had a special deal with stars to rig things for him

The only real difference between these two accounts of course is that on FTP he won mirrions whereas on stars he was break even. So either:

a) he just ran well on FTP
b) he got outplayed by the solid stars regs
c) the ftp rng was rigged in his favour without him knowing
d) he just ran badly on stars and is actually the stone cold nuts

Who? Chris Furgeson is the first name that comes to mind. He's got a PhD in Computer Science and presumably wrote or at least mapped out the very first iterations of the software. It could likely have been done with literally only him and Ivey ever knowing about it.

If not him it could have been any number of other people high up in FTP, depending on which method was used to cheat (see below).

Why? Money obviously. Either sheer greed or a way to fill the gaping hole on their balance sheet created by them paying out our deposits as dividends.

How? Any number of ways. Could be something coded into the software to rig the RNG (something I consider unlikely FWIW). Could be super-user type ability to see hands in real time or possibly something as benign as giving Ivey access to the hand histories after they took place, giving him sick reads on how his opponents play. This would explain why he always loses to people at first and then crushes them later.

If it was this last one, there were probably 100+ people at FTP who could have done this for him. Or somebody like Furgeson, Bitar, Lederer or a bunch of others could have given him admin access to get the HH's himself.

No PL/NLO8 was played at the nosebleeds. It was 2k/4k LO8 all the way. Games were built around David Benyamine who lost his ass (5 Mill. ++) in a rather limited number of hands (-100$/hand for him I think). Pretty sick when you think about it. Gus Hansen crushed those games.

starting to think this way myself...any of the math genius on 2+2 ever come up with some kind of graph on Iveys incredible winrate?

Not sure if you knew this before posting, but this is how OMGClayAiken described what playing vs Phil Ivey felt like. And I mean basically word by word.