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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.
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