That's probably because you guys have matching hats.

The Problem is that Pokerstars RNG is only rigged to favor the bots!

bots run their own RNG.

Dont you guys know allready that every thread about online poker will eventually be about rigged RNG and the banning of huds?

its the new godwin's law.

This.

+Bots won millions (4.5+) and some of them are still playing as we speak.

1. The rec player is not losing much from a HUD user. I mean 200 hand sample for any post flop stat is like nothing + the lack of consistency. Plus anybody can buy a HUD. There are even free options.

2. If the RNG is "rigged" then it should be rigged to give some money back to the rec and keep them in the games longer or something stupid like that...

3. HUDs and RNG myths won't stop the rec player from playing imo.

This bot ring is something very scary for both the rec and reg players!

The fact that we basically have clue ,to why they are crushing some of the hardest poker games on the internet, by playing a style so different from what the real crushers play, is just mind-blowing at this point.

NO more HUD and RNG plzzz this topic is very important!

regs complaining now that they get bum hunted. there is some irony to this. is there a way for bots to wiggle the mouse just the right way ..in sync ..in large numbers?

the bot rings affect everybody in some way shape or form who isnt part of the ring.

i have to say some of those " real crushers" can only crush when their software tells them how to play , what amount to bet, and what action to take. i understand some peoples desperation to gain an edge to make a few bucks but jesus... thats not playing with skill, thats not even playing poker. sadly some of those r many of the ones who would be so quick to talk sh*t and label other players as bad.

online poker should mimmick live poker. if you cant use software, scripts, whatever else live then you shouldnt be able to online.

sadly i dont see much action going to be done by pokerstars or any other sites about bots. basically theyll close acccouns if they can when there is enough uproar and evidence. aside from that it will be the same ole look the other way and pretend not to notice while sending out BS enails and statements saying "we are looking into the matter" yada yada yada. its big corporate greed people. money talks and bullsh*t walks. its no different from most of the other big business politics out there

You would contribute a lot more to the cause if you simply stopped posting. If you must talk nonsense then you should confine your ramblings to the dedicated Rigged thread. I'm quite sure that no sensible person concerned about this issue cares about your ridiculous notions and irrelevant ramblings.

What can the site do about holecard sharing if there is a software for it? If it is renamed, it should be able to run and there likely are other ways also, but it should not be legal for the site to scan ur computer, outside of their own file i suppose. It just needs to keep everyones cards anonymous, then one can use the known cards at any table there is one or more using the same software. Is this the next standard extra software we need to start using? Should level the field and solve the problem. Maybe the site itself should show the cards dealt.

Not sure why people think monitoring software and interrogating of their file systems is not already happening with every process being run by their operating system.

Many pieces of software are scanning your processes and file system on a regular basis. The notion of this being an intrusion is largely redundant, as this is simply how software works. Software doesn't work in a vacuum. It checks versions of various things running on your system and in fact uses them contantly.

"You need Java version x.x to run this program"
"The following programs need to be closed to continue with installation", insert list of running apps that need to be shutdown
"You need to install MS Silverlight to view this page"
"Your acrobat plugin is outdated"

How often have you seen those and a myriad of similar messages. How the f do they know this

If you install a security product on your PC it will usually shutdown all the builtin MS services and firewalls etc. without asking you.

As an example of just how little idea most people have of what their PC is doing, open a command prompt Start-> Run cmd

type netstat -abf 60 > trace.txt

Leave it to run while you go have a shower or leave the house for a while. Come back and have find that text file and have a look. For anyone who frequents porn sites it will be enlightening.

tried typing this in but nothing happened, is there supposed to be spaces between the lettering like you have it?

should've explained it will run for as many minutes as that number is. Will just sit there for 60mins in this eg. File can still be opened and read though.

text in the comand prompt would be

netstat -abf 60 > trace.txt

You'll get a flashing cursor for x mins while it records.

I couldn't get that to work so just went with the basic netstat.exe command.
Does this look about right?

Two words...

Dealer's Choice

Can someone with Russian PTR suss out..

I've read this entire thread. Background about me? I'm a CS major, with a background in IT security.

Here's a few things I'd like to add. A couple years ago, I read a book called "Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents" by Michael Schrenk. In fact, its on my bookshelf. In the "How do I make money with web bots section" he specifically mentions online poker as being a profit vertical for web bots.

I've read many interesting solutions such as captchas, etc. I'm in the camp that thinks captchas will just be solved. Hell, even if you used some sort of bio-metric device, it's been proven that these can be hacked as well, although it could be a significant roadblock.

Here's a few potential solutions I could offer, off the top of my head of course.

1) Deal the cards face down and ask the user to perform a unique action to show the cards.

- This could be counter productive, as it could slow down the game, make multi tabling difficult, be confusing for new players... but if there were some sort of unique action that a bot had to perform (NOT a CAPTCHA) to actually see the cards, the bot would have to be programmed to brute force this action... then the security staff would have an easier time picking up on these anomalies. For a example, "To see the your hand, left click and swipe the community card area with your mouse." Then on hand 2, to see your hole cards, you may be required to drag the bet slider holding the right click button to see your cards.

If a bot were programmed to perform all of these actions to finally see the cards, a few things could happen

a) The bot would/could time out trying to perform the wrong action
b) Subsequent wrong actions could raise a red flag
c) Actions, such brute forced mouse clicks, could be stored for forensic analysis
d) This method could significantly decrease the time it takes to detect a bot farm.

Yes, you could hire someone in India to perform these actions, as it has some of the same pitfalls as a captcha, but again, you could even mix up the actions and ask for random questions that a captcha jockey wouldn't know off the top of their head. Such as, "Tell us the first three digits associated with your phone number on file..."

This would be a monumental task for a poker website operator to undertake and you may not want to implement these actions on every single hand... just randomly selected ones to throw off the bots... and when the bots/captcha operators stumble, you have your red flag and you can begin to more swiftly investigate.

2) PokerStars already uses RSA tokens for two factor authentication; what about using a second form of two factor authentication that is randomly implemented when certain internal thresholds are set. Such as, please enter the last 4 digits of the account number you used to deposit + your mandatory RSA token that you have for your account. Would it cost pokerstars a lot of money to maintain a robust RSA database, mail these hard tokens out (soft tokens would not be allowed in this scenario) and administrate this? Yes, of course, but the integrity of the game could be saved.

3) Using the cloud, bot operators can be in Russia one day, Bulgaria the next, Western Europe the next... and by using darknet websites like the silk road, they can get fraudulent documents. Please note how I didn't use the word VPN on this. VPNs are not needed for this setup. Simply ban all cloud services from connecting to pokerstars and only whitelist local, known ISPs. Bot net operators probably have some sort of "Golden image" with their bot software installed and when they need to move to a new cloud virtual machine, they simply upload the golden image and begin playing. I'm not sure what the software does, but pokerstars should do some sort of inventory on every machine that connects to its network. I'm not talking about MAC addresses either. Something much deeper, almost a kin to a rootkit that gets hidden in a random DLL file. Also, if there is any type of hypervisor, either level 1 or level 2 being used on the machine either at the host or OS level, I would deny the connection to the Pstars server.

4) Denote players on the software client as being "ID Verified." instead of the SuperNova Stars, etc. For example, in the rootkit example in the previous post, if a suspected bot account logs in from another computer and the rootkit type of mechanism isn't present (Another user suggested TPM, not a bad idea) red flags should be waved... This should start an investigation and a webcam verification of the person's identity who owns the account should take place. Websites such as Elance require you to do a web cam interview where they take a pic over Skype, compare it to the ID you have on file, thus making you a ID verified user of the website. Players should have more confidence in the game knowing that an account is ID verified.

5) Do away with VPP system and just lower the rake overall. I'm a USA player so I have no stake in this discussion whatsoever. Instead, I'd make everything a leaderboard. What I mean is... Instead of poker tracking websites such as sharkscope, PTR, etc be responsible for stats on users... Pokerstars should make it completely transparent in regards to who wins and losses. This should be for every player of every limit and these should be sortable and contain player location information, times of day that the player typically logs in, wins and losses, of course, and the database should completely transparent. Would it encourage bum hunting? Perhaps, but isn't that already going on to some extent? When you have stats that are presented by the OP in the open for everyone to see, I think it would discourage bots from organizing because detection could be that much easier. I would replace the VPP system with a simple leaderboard system that offers the losers in the game more incentive to keep playing, and the top X in a certain game, certain incentives to take shots a higher games, which is what all normal winning players want to do anyways. This keeps the fish coming back and gives regs incentives to move up in stakes.

I have more suggestions, but this thread is getting long. PokerStars, I am available for consultation on this if you'd like to know about my background. I currently work for a financial organization listed in the Fortune 300. Thinking about going into independent consulting.

On a side note, Pstars said that they have a security team that looks at these incidents. They probably need a security army, dedicated to each and every game/stake level on this site. This army would scrutinize the specific player pools and use common sense to flag suspect player/accounts.

MSPLO

Colluders need to be spotted before they can cashout or whatever gets our money back. They can see their team members cards. Meaning heads up and maybe live poker as soon as ring becomes impossible, though it is already highly risky.

Want a Kleenex? I don't know what you want or are stating.

more posts like easyfnmoney's. And less of my post now and if stars is in on it all.

Thanks. If PokerStars really really really wanted to fix this problem... They could. My solutions are just solutions off the top of my head. Put me in a war room with other IT Security Professionals that love online poker and I'm sure we could come up with some sort of happy medium.

Here's additional thoughts:

Would my solutions piss of regulars? Probably

Would my solutions cost... >8 figures. For Sure

Would it bot-proof PokerStars? I can't say that for sure... but what I can say is...

PokerStars is certainly losing the battle now and they seem light years behind the botters. When botting is significantly more difficult, less people will try. With my solutions above, I could probably guarantee that more than 90% of the botters wouldn't be able to get around them. If they did, the poker community would catch them due to my reasons in point number 5.

He's running >$100k under EV over a huge sample. If the bots are sharing holecards, they'll run above EV, the inverse being true for everyone they play against. Presumably (I don't know) this person has played a large sample against the bots, accounting for the discrepancy. Indicating that the bots have stolen at least a portion of that $100+k

Not that hard to infer from a quick browse of the thread...

- Multiple problems here. But it has potential, especially combined with same jackpot...gamificate it. Def would make it a bit harder for bot-rings.
However, whatever reverse turing test you implement, it would have to be very easy for a human being to solve, and such test will always be solvable by skilled vc programmer.
See openvc game bot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxeauj7-X14

With OCR, it is easy to read the text and do the right action for a bot. If you make the text harder to interpret, bots would fail maybe more often than humans, but humans will fail too...
"To see the your hand and participate in Anti-Jackbot, do not left click and swipe the community card area with your mouse.", but i am sure some gaming experts could come up with better stuff

i have no right button

humans will too
if bot can't solve antijackbot it will try to stay calm and call bot-operate for help.
it will simply never brute force,or sometimes brute force like a human would
not my botfarm

Again, trivial for ocr and and bot to solve, probably more easy than for most humans.

"Not too often" is probably not working, simply alert operator for solving the puzzle, as probably being done now.

will be easier for a bot to use than for most humans.

Will never work. trivial to get whitelisted IPs for your bot. Especially for technical skilled people like a bot operator.

Not 8 figures, outsource to gaming, computer vision and psychology experts and you will get super cool stuff for 2-3 million. A buch of easy to solve games that would also upset botters... add implementation cost.

If you're solution would cost 8 figures then Stars will offer at the minimum 10 million reasons why it ain't happening. Do you think this scandal is costing Stars 10 million? In fact there's a reasonable argument that Stars is going to profit off of this if the refunds that people are posting are any indication.