Topic: Texas Hold'em and Omaha/Omaha8 Poker Room - NL, Limit, Potlimit games - page 14. (Read 88206 times)

There are a lot of ways. I'm not gonna sit here and type of examples here for you so people can read them and start thinking of ideas. Use your brain. Heres one last one:

On the turn its 3 ways. Legit player checks, villian 1 bets large, villian 2 raises large....legit player decides to call this time, so hes winning money....river goes check, check, check....legit player shows the best hand and takes the pot....BUT DOESNT GET TO SEE WHAT THE OTHER TWO PLAYERS HAD. IF YOU CAN GET THIS THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL, THAT IS SOME NECCESSARY INFORMATION TO FIND OUT IF THEY WERE COLLUDING.

As for showing every hand at every showdown? I'd be fine with that.

Little limit experience hahahahaha thanks for making me laugh! I've played more limit hands than you in my lifetime old man, and that is a god damn guarantee. Unless you've played over 2 million which I sincerely doubt. Stop saying that this rule would solve "one tiny subset" of colluding, this rule would allow players to police them GOD DAMNED SELVES and solve virtually the entire problem of colluding

Enough moving the goalposts with regards to tournaments. First of all, I was just using that as an example to show that people will play regardless. I said right there in writing that 9.000 players played it, while 300.000 users were on the site. I am acknowledging that cashgames are the bigger game, and cashgames are all that is available on this site anyways.

You really have a hatred for multitablers. Do you realize its only possible to 2 table on this site currently? Anyways, the stars games you are describing, do you not see how its not all advantage to the 20 tablers? They have to put up 20 times the money, first of all, and second of all they have to think about a lot more stuff whereas someone focusing on 1 table can be concentrating a lot more on decisions on that table.

Anyways, its all smoke and mirrors anyways, just because theres some people playing 20 tables, you act like online cash was so tough. It wasn't, get over it, there were still plenty of fish till it got shutdown.

Anyways, stop putting words in my mouth. I've continuously said that collusion isn't a problem, it just could arise in the future, especially since Hippich is currently accepting deposits and everything is motherfucking anonymous. This doesn't concern you in the least though eh?

Having the site be heads up games only would be a terrible idea. Almost no people like heads up and the variance is much higher, among other reasons. The bad players also go broke more quickly heads up which is bad for the site and bad for everyone except the person they're playing.

And again, I would be fine with everyone's cards being shown.

You keep saying "there are a lot of ways", but show me how having a forced showdown actually helps catch the problem?  Why not show every hand at showdown, whether you folded or not?  Then you couldn't get away with ANY funny business!



You clearly have little limit experience.  The edge you gain is by the power you have that your opponents do not have.

A million ways, yet you cannot name any more of them.  And of all the ways you can collude, this solves one tiny subset of them (and not that well, since colluders will adjust).  In the "call to scare" case, why not raise to REALLY scare?  And if you suspect it, you call and make twice as much money on the last bet.


It changes NOTHING?  Are you kidding?  The player with the button has the advantage in the hand.  I'm not sure if this is news to you based on your complete ignorance of everything else poker related.  By having him act second, the small blind now folds FAR more often in correct play.  This makes a much more boring game.

What do tournaments have to do with cash games?  Why is that an argument?  Tournaments were the one thing that the multi-tablers could not game (unless they started entering multiple entries).  I am only talking about cash games.  Sunday Tournament is small potatoes for their revenue.  It was simply a promotion to get people to play other games.  And yes, the tournament grew so large, you pretty much had to give up an entire day to be able to play it.

I'm primarily talking about cash games (which hippich only supports).  If you have 800 casual users and 200 "for profit" players, you end up with a pretty nice balance at the tables and a fairly good game.  If the casual players play 1 table, and the 200 "for profit" players play 4 tables each on average, that means we move to a 50% solid player ratio rather than 20%.  If they 8-table, it means you have 75% solid player ratio.  It crushes games.  I've been around a long time, probably playing since you were in diapers.  I've seen the evolution of the game go from where you couldn't even multi-table, to 4-table max, to the expansion.  You end up with an army of nit-bots (who may not be huge in numbers, but play 20 tables) that make the game a rake-fest.  It's absolutely horrible.

But if you want to start talking about tournaments when I'm talking exclusively about cash games, go for it.  In the smaller tournaments, you still see some of the same problems (especially Sit-N-Gos, where serious players will play tons at a time, and casual players won't, making the ratio worse).  But comparing it to a 1-time special event like the Sunday tourney is of course silly.  I will give Stars and Full Tilt credit, they did a great job making that tournament huge.  Unfortunately it did become so big that it became a huge time drain to play for a lot of people (myself included).

If collusion really is a problem, maybe the site should just be heads up games.  Or if you really want, just play people heads up.  Collusion could very well be a serious problem.  But if you put in simplistic and ineffective measures to stop it, colluders will just avoid that small part of detection and move on.

How do you feel about my suggestion of showing EVERYONE's hand after it is over?  That way no one can collude no matter what without being obvious.

Another user submitted patch for reversed blinds, but, as others says, current code base I leverage is a mess. So I might start building the whole thing from the ground. (Hell, if I will not be able to monetize betco.in, I can sell engine itself for a bunch of bucks =)).

As for enforced showdown.. I see a lot of opinions on this. I think it will make more sense to implement it by table instead of at the whole room level. That's been said, current software will not support this for sure in any way.

This is the whole point. The rule needs to be put in so that the players can police themselves, for the time being, till the project dies or Hippich expands it to include reviewing hand histories. But guess what? The more sure you are, the better, if "if you suspect collusion" well you're gonna be a lot more sure if you're able to see what hands people are going to showdown with. Furthermore, every hand isnt gonna be like the one I described, there is a lot more subtle ways to collude...I used a very obvious way as an example.

I for one cannot simply believe you are arguing that colluding is more profitable in limit games. How can that be possible? You say in one breath that limit games are games of very small edges. THIS PROVES MY POINT. Edges can be very big in no limit games and ffs you can gain these big edges by colluding. I just explained how you can force someone to make a 50bb mistake, if someone has a plan to fold river if someone else calls but call river if everyone else folds. Its really not all that "rare" a situation, and is just one of a million ways that colluders could gain an edge if cards aren't shown.

I understand Hippich has no resources to put into people working together right now and no time to ban people. That is why I suggested in an earlier post that he start charging rake and even went so far as to suggest a structure for it. Once he is making a small profit from it, he can decide if he wants to expand from there.

You clearly have some deep hatred for full tilt and stars, and its easy to guess why. I just cannot believe that your trying to claim that the sites were full of 20 tabling HUD users. Sure, there were a few there, but anytime you have a huge pool of fish, you're gonna attract the sharks. Its part of the game and there were 300k users on stars on an average Sunday. I guess none of them were "casual users" eh? Yeah all 20 tabling pros I'm sure. Haha, the stars tourneys were so filled with casual players it blows my mind that you would say stuff like this. Sunday million got an average of what, 9000 players all putting up $215.....how many of them were professional mtt players? I can give you an estimate since I have some knowledge...around 500.....thats 8500 "casual users" not affected at all by the "rampant HUD use" or "bot like multitablers". and thats just their flagship tourney....11 dollar tourneys would see 30,000 players regularly. All of these players were unaffected by and played despite the fact that their hole card information was available at showdown! Oh noes!

Also blinds being "backwards" changes nothing. It doesn't give advantage to any one player, all players must adjust to it accordingly.

BTW, if you really are concerned about collusion, just play heads up.

But the blinds being backwards are TOP PRIORITY in my opinion. It changes the game tremendously.

LITERALLY NO DOWNSIDE - except the entire table seeing what you had.

What is the upside?  The case that two colluders both call on the river?  Why wouldn't one colluder raise the other or just fold?

One I know off the top of my head is TruePoker.  You *can* see showdown hands, but you have to go through a bunch of menus and ask to have it emailed, and it takes 15-20 minutes to show up.

But hey, I know it would hurt you a lot if you are used to playing with HUDs and other "cheating" programs.  Stars/FTP had 90% of the market because they had huge advertising, had solid software, and catered to 20-tablers.  The more auto-pilot HUD-bots they had, the more rake they made as everyone passed money around.
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Sigh, dude I just explained the upside. Its amazing, really it is. Here we go one more time.

Colluder 1 makes a large bet on the river with middle pair. Colluder 2 is next to act, he calls the large bet with 7 high, something he would never do if playing legitimately. Legitimate Player 1 is next to act, he was planning to call Colluder 1's bet with top pair, but after seeing Colluder 2 call, he folds his hand.

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So there is one tiny case he does this.  Instead, 2nd guy could raise the river.  When the "victim" calls, he gets twice as much.  Oh noes, how awful.  The "call a bet to make a guy scared" technique.



Since it's so easy, show them to me.  I've played 8 years on a site that never did this, and never once did it "help maintain game integrity".

TOP PRIORITY I SAY!

Meanwhile, if you actually are competent at colluding, it does nothing.  He has no resources to put into people actually working together, and no time to ban people who might be.

Yes, losing players are never affected, since all losses are equal.  Another idiotic statement by you.  Winning players are actually be affected, since they don't run out of money.

How can you *force* someone to make a 50BB mistake,  by scaring them by calling?  Have you ever played limit poker?  Limit poker is a game of very small edges.  Every time you double an edge, you make a HUGE difference.  In NL poker, skill level makes up a much larger portion, and you can control your bet size.  If I cannot see-saw an opponent (see-sawing is extremely rare to begin with), I don't lose as much as I do in limit poker.  Sure I can scare them by calling, as you insist is a serious problem.  I'm not saying you are looking to hustle the site, but you are looking to instill the same attitude that has made online poker unplayable for the casual user.  "just do whatever ftp and ps did".  I couldn't disagree more from a user's perspective.  Those sites catered to the biggest rake generators, tried to make a game where people paid as much rake as possible while losing as little/winning as little as possible, so that they were the big winners.  This includes catering and allowing HUDs, sites that analyzed play, making it easy to data mine tables you weren't at, allowing way too many tables, and rewarding players who played ridiculous amounts of hands only possible from severe multitabling with huge incentives.  For a grinder, it was perfect.  For a casual player, it's one of the most boring games to play.

I already named one.  You cannot easily get the result of the hand.  You have to jump through a million hoops, then check your email 20 minutes later.  This is FAR different than your require.  Never once did I check due to collusion, but to see what someone had.  If someone was smart enough to collude, and this was actually going to detect them, they just collude better.  Maybe request it if you were in the hand on the river.  Plus, online poker allows for the management to see EVERY hand at any point in time.  If you suspect collusion, notify the operator.  They can check suspicious behavior of 100s of hands easily, and if some guy keeps calling with 7 high, you can catch him very easily looking at hand histories.  My guess is hippich has none of this infrastructure in place yet, so it would be difficult for him.

BTW- I do agree that all showdowns should be shown in a tournament where chip dumping would actually affect the game (unlike in cash game play).

But calling this top priority is laughable.  This site is still in the stone age (no offense hippich, I love what you are doing, it's just super primitive still- which you would expect since this is a spare time type project).  It freezes up, it's slow, there are only one table of any limit, no players, etc...  Hell, it was getting robbed not long ago.  Even if this was important, there are a ton of things even more important to worry about.

Sigh, dude I just explained the upside. Its amazing, really it is. Here we go one more time.

Colluder 1 makes a large bet on the river with middle pair. Colluder 2 is next to act, he calls the large bet with 7 high, something he would never do if playing legitimately. Legitimate Player 1 is next to act, he was planning to call Colluder 1's bet with top pair, but after seeing Colluder 2 call, he folds his hand.

Do you really not see how its different if "one of the colluders just folds on the end"?

Do you really not see that there could be other situations like this, where showdown cards must be shown to maintain game integrity?

Hippich, if you currently don't have the skills to code this, I suggest you make it your top priority to learn them. As much as you want to call this a "play money" site, the fact is bitcoins are easily exchangable for dollars and there are people already playing for them here. .50/1.00 btc is essentially high stakes since its basically 2/4 usd now. It's easy to say "if you feel something is fishy, you don't have to play," but the fact is when it comes to gambling people don't always think rationally, and can't help themselves and will lose and continue to play in a game where they can tell something is "off" but aren't exactly sure what or are trying to get lucky and win some of their money back.

Eof, thank you for backing me up on this, I have also payed tens of thousands of dollars in rake and was getting frustrated nobody here would agree with me. I guess if you're a losing player it doesn't matter to you much, you're gonna lose anyways, what does it matter who its to? Its the winning players who are much more affected by this as colluders take money that could be won by legitimate players.

Tom, you're simply very, very wrong. Colluding is not much more valuable in limit poker, its in no limit, where you can force people to make huge mistakes, such as 50bb losing mistakes. Where can you force someone out of a 50bb pot in limit? Its not possible. You still have yet to name one poker room that doesn't show all hands that went to showdown. True Poker still does, as you admit yourself. I would be fine with it taking 15 minutes and an email to get the information on betcoin, as long as the information IS available. Furthermore, your assumption that I am some 20-tabling HUD user, cashgamer, looking to hustle this site could not POSSIBLY be more wrong. I am a mtter, I never used a HUD and you show a complete lack of understanding of that software, the value does not reside in seeing people's mucked hands, the value is in large amounts of data on peoples folding frequencies and aggression levels on each street. Whether or not you can see people's mucked cards literally doesn't make a bit of difference in the effectiveness of a HUD.

BTW, if you want poker lessons, come to my home game, I will "teach" you.

Oh. Now it makes more sense. I will reconfigure tables once room will be empty since I need to restart server to changes take effect.

200/400 refers to the bet size, not the blinds, in limit poker.

NL poker does not have fixed bet sizes, so it refers to the blinds.

Colluders and cheaters are perfectly capable of cheating and colluding without being able to be caught by the showdown rule.  They are really hard to catch online.  Fortunately, most are really bad at what they do so they either are super obvious or end up not making anything out of it.  The rule is much more useful in limit poker, where a 4-bet fold is really odd on the river, so they have to call.  Also, bluffing with complete trash is a lot harder to pull off, and colluding is a lot more powerful since you can see-saw people and make big pots when you have hands, and they have no way to counter.  In big bet poker, anyone can raise any amount, so it makes it that much harder to get a benefit from colluding.

LITERALLY NO DOWNSIDE - except the entire table seeing what you had.

What is the upside?  The case that two colluders both call on the river?  Why wouldn't one colluder raise the other or just fold?

One I know off the top of my head is TruePoker.  You *can* see showdown hands, but you have to go through a bunch of menus and ask to have it emailed, and it takes 15-20 minutes to show up.

But hey, I know it would hurt you a lot if you are used to playing with HUDs and other "cheating" programs.  Stars/FTP had 90% of the market because they had huge advertising, had solid software, and catered to 20-tablers.  The more auto-pilot HUD-bots they had, the more rake they made as everyone passed money around.

Just rechecked transactions. Found that not all hacker's withdrawals were successful. Only 680 btc stolen.

I do not have a lot experience in online poker, so I am sorry for stupid questions.. Could you explain what is referenced by these 200/400 then if blinds are 100/200?



The whole server I believe is built around idea of dealing with hands like in real poker. I do not believe I will be able at this point modify code to enforce showdown cards in the end of game (I do not have needed skills for this).

I still believe our community is small enough to have such problems. If you do not believe to someone - do not play with them.

the particular security issue hacker used will not be avoided by technique you describe. Any code can have security issues. My bug was so simple... =)) Here is it - https://github.com/hippich/Bitcoin-Poker-Room/commit/ef5f1a181fb207fe5e1260b3190835384fe99190

I am using much more stupid but rigid system - coins are transferred from server to my own local wallet. Only small change is left to process small withdrawal amounts. Big ones proceeded manually. So even if code will be hacked (and this happens), only change will be lost, not the whole balance.

On the other note - hacker, who contacted me, never replied nor sent funds. So either he was not real hacker or just decided to use money instead of returning.

On the withdrawal security hole issue, I think a reasonable defense is something like:

* associate addresses with user accounts
* track deposits from each address associated with an account as a percentage of total deposits (see below)
* limit cumulative automatic withdrawals to an address to that percentage of account value
* users can optionally provide a public key for their account; if a user wishes to withdraw outside of the above constraints they request the site to send an email encrypted with that public key to them with a confirmation code.  The user then responds with the confirmation code and the amount to withdraw and the address to withdraw to and signs the response.  The withdrawal is then processed manually.

Computation of percentage would proceed as in this example:

* Initial deposit from address A for 10 BTC.  Address A now has a 100% deposit share for the account.
* Player builds balance to 20 BTC.  Address A's 100% share means that the whole account could be withdrawn in one-click to address A.
* Deposit of 5 BTC from address B.  Address B is assigned a share of 20% and address A's share is diluted to 80%.  The withdrawal maximums are now 20 BTC for A and 5 BTC for B.
* Balance declines to 15 BTC.  Address A's withdrawal limit is now 12 BTC and address B's is 3 BTC.
* Withdrawal to address B of 2 BTC.  Address B's share decreases to 7.6923076923...% ( (3-2)/(15-2); rounding error can be handled by for instance allowing any excess to be withdrawn from the account with the greatest share) and address A's increases to 92.3076...%.

(this is all based on speculation that the attacker in this case found a vulnerability that allowed the requestor to request a withdrawal to an arbitrary address)

All hands that go to showdown *must* be visible to anyone.  It is "rude" to ask the dealer to show "both hands" or "all hands".. but you are allowed to for good reason.  As someone who has paid tens of k's in rake in my life; I would consider this an essential feature.

Bot fest infected? It is a known fact that other sites such as bodog, ub/ap, had well known botting problems that still exist, whereas stars/ftp at least had good support and eliminated bots when they first showed up on the sites, as well as having built in security now like captcha, not to mention a huge database of real player hand histories, to compare with suspected bot users.

The reason all cards must be shown at showdown is not due to when two colluders are HU in a pot, can't believe I have to explain this to you.

Its when a pot is multiway and someone is squeezed in between, and then river goes like one colluder bets the other colluder calls, and the person squeezed in between folds.....and then the callers hand is just mucked. Huge edges can be gained by making someone make incorrect folds in big bet games, such as no limit holdem. Implementing this rule we are discussing...This would be a very good situation and there is LITERALLY NO DOWNSIDE....more information is exchanged but like I said 5% of hands go to showdown anyways and the information is exchanged uniformly, it doesnt benefit anyone specifically, which is FAIR GAME.

I have tried to explain rationally why these are the rules basically everywhere, and you talk about sites that have a .0001% market share. How about you name some of the sites that have this supposed rule? I doubt you even can because they don't exist anymore. Stars/FTP had 90% of US market share for a reason, it was a pure free market, and they had the best game integrity, and customer service. Agreed, it was pretty terrible but it was the best in the industry, and as far as anyone can tell they both ran a fair game.

Sorry but its completely different in live poker, Tom. In live poker, it is quite easy to tell if people are communicating, signaling, or using strange speech in order to telegraph their hands or the strength of their hands. In online poker, it is impossible, its just anonymous and anyone can come in with a friend and start sharing hole cards over the phone or an IM program. It is essential that this feature be implemented until there is sufficient support to review hand histories and prevent collusion. Preventing cheating and maintaining game integrity should be the #1 priority of this poker site.

I don't care if one gets a kick in the nuts for doing it live. For the record, I have played thousands of hours live and have never once asked to see someones mucked hand. I hope you can understand how completely different it is. Hands go to showdown around 5% of the time anyways, so its not like its gonna be showing your cards every hand. It will simply show the cards when someone bets with the best hand and someone else calls with a worse hand, it needs to show what worse hand they were calling with, this is extremely important if you just think about it for 5 seconds, come on man. It already shows someones hand if they are bluffing, at least if they are out of position, I'm pretty sure the software shows the bluffers hand and then shows the callers winning hand (but only if the caller had position, this should happen regardless).

There is a lot of differences between online and live poker, and one of them is you need to be able to see all hands that went to showdown, every time. You don't want your hand to be seen, then go play live poker and kick people in the nuts for asking. You wanna come on here, then abide by the rules. There's a damn good reason online poker has its own set of rules, that have been carefully honed and perfected by Full Tilt and Stars, the two main sites in the US market till recently. Its because those rules are the best rules for running an online poker room. Just because the rule only prevents collusion rarely, that is your argument for not having it? That is a god-awful argument, not trying to be a dick, just speaking my mind. It shouldn't matter at all how often it prevents collusion, if it does it ONCE its worth having.

Yeah, I mean, if everyone could see the hands, then what value would bluffing have?  I know Tom wouldn't want that!  ;-)

-EP