How Poop saved pokerstars

tldr: I find a guy I strongly suspect is cheating on Stars, report it to security, two days later they change their software.

So Stars has been running these "races," which are basically a form of randomly allocated prizes to encourage you to gamboool. For NL and PLO, at a given stakes you earn points for each card you're dealt, really simple like A=14 points, K=13, Q =12 and so on. After x number of hands, you get a total of points and there's a payout if you end up in the top 10 or 20 or whatever depending on the stake and the game. You're limited to how many hands you can have contributing to the points total, and it doesn't matter what happens in the hand (i.e., you get points for what you're dealt, whether you play the hand or not). So it's basically a random bingo type of thing. This ran from Feb. to April.

https://www.pokerstars.uk/poker/prom...-leaderboards/


About a month ago they started this new promotion. It's like the first one, but here you also get bonuses for certain cards, like if it's your first ten hands you get 30 bonus points for every J. Fine, whatever. This second race was scheduled to run from April 17- July 16.

https://www.pokerstars.uk/poker/promotions/cash-races/


This is where it gets interesting.

A week ago, I noticed some guy had finished first on both PLO 25 and PLO 10. I think "that's weird, how many people are in these races, and how does a guy manage to get first in two of them? It's basically a lottery. Turns out it's about 200 people doing the race thing (i.e. playing hands at these stakes) per day. I'm suspicious but since it only happened once that I'm aware of, I just figure well, it's weird but it could happen kinda thing.

Don't play the next day, but then the day after that I play again and there's this guy in the top five in both PLO 25 and 10. I think 'wtf'. I'm not sure it's the same guy but I think it might be. I report this to PS and get the form letter back saying "we value game integrity and we're looking into it and can't disclose anything, blah blah blah."

I think fine, but then I look the next day (which was two days ago) and this SAME FCKING GUY is in the top five in PLO25 again (doesn't seem like he played PLO10 that day, at least he's not showing up on the list as having any points). Next day (yesterday), same thing, top five in PLO10 and now also top five in PLO25. I think "ok what the actual fuck," and I email PS again. I explain the math, like if you're in a random draw with 200 other players, to be in the top 10 once is 1/20, to do it five times in a row is 1/3.2 million...so gtfo this is happening by chance. Get the same form letter back and I'm about to lose my shit. I think if this happens again tomorrow I'm going to start shouting on 2p2 and twitter and everywhere else that Stars is running this promotion on dodgy software.

Get up today, turn on Stars and now they've gone back to the original races (ones that ran from Feb. to Apr.). Numbnuts with the magic bingo chip in his computer is nowhere to be seen on the leaderboards. So hopefully they're going to take their money back from him and give it to the people who should have been winning more if it weren't for this guy. We'll see.

My hero.

Awesome.

It would be fucking hilarious though if this was actually pure chance. 1 in 3 million odds (per x amount of time), something like that happens to around 2500 people (per x amount of time). We're not into ludicrously improbable territory quite yet (see Mike Postle). Just highly improbable (that jack high lady).

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Originally Posted by OngBonga

Awesome.

It would be fucking hilarious though if this was actually pure chance. 1 in 3 million odds (per x amount of time), something like that happens to around 2500 people (per x amount of time). We're not into ludicrously improbable territory quite yet (see Mike Postle). Just highly improbable (that jack high lady).

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Yeah I'd feel bad if he just accidentally had a horseshoe up his ass. Still, I'll take the 3,199,999:1 odds that he was up to some kind of fuckery.

Obviously if he's guilty we'll never know how he did it 'cause PS is not about to tell us, but I reckon he must have hacked their scorekeeping software to give himself a few hundred more points than he should have had every day. Seems easier than trying to change the cards to give him a higher score, which I would assume PS has some pretty hardcore security around.

But like most greedy fuckers, he pushed it too far. If he'd finished somewhere in the top 100 every day I certainly never would have noticed.

It's always greed that causes their downfall.

For every greedy fool there's a smart guy hiding in the shadows though. Makes you wonder if he fucked up a good thing for others who weren't taking the piss.

Good work. Did they give you anything as a thank you?

There was a Full Tilt promo years ago where the winner got to play Tom Dwan. It was based on winning consecutive hands when there was a flop. The winners all had won like 98/100 hands post-flop. When I complained and said that would only be possible with collusion, they told me it was perfectly possible.

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Originally Posted by The Bean Counter

Good work. Did they give you anything as a thank you?

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Thanks. I haven't heard a peep from them apart from the form letter thingy when I submitted the complaints. It's quite possible a lot of other people noticed it and made a stink, it should have been pretty obvious to anyone who was paying attention.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The Bean Counter

There was a Full Tilt promo years ago where the winner got to play Tom Dwan. It was based on winning consecutive hands when there was a flop. The winners all had won like 98/100 hands post-flop. When I complained and said that would only be possible with collusion, they told me it was perfectly possible.

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Well, something can be both astronomically unlikely and still "possible." I might not try to argue it's "perfectly" possible though, that sounds a bit too much like "normal" or "expected."