Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal

Most of this long post will discuss matters that are also discussed in (much much much) greater detail over at the Two Plus Two Forums specifically in this thread. The blog of one of the people that originally did a lot of the digging in this investigation is here.

Anyone who plays online poker for any significant amount of time will run into the occasional retard that loses a hand and exclaimes "rigged" or something to that effect. It's human nature to assume that when you lose at something, the reason is because the game wasn't on the level. Of course these people are almost always full of shit, either paranoid or either blowing off steam.

Almost always, but apparently not always.

In the past couple of months over at Absolute Poker (AP for short) a player with a very suspicious hand history started winning big at high stakes, to which many top players took notice. The hand history he displayed was beyond bizarre, cold-calling almost every hand pre-flop and yet showing perfect "judgment" when it came to when to bet people off hands, when to fold, and when to extract max value with made hands.

A damning PokerTracker histogram can be seen here. For those not sure what they're looking at, the vertical axis of the graph represents a player's VPIP, or "voluntarily put money into pot". That stat is generally viewed as a general measure of how tight or loose a player plays. The higher it is, the more hands they are willing to see flops with. The horizontal graph is the measure of big blinds won per 100 hands, a general measure of profitability.

So what you're seeing is about what you'd expect: the majority of the most profitable players have a VPIP number between 10 and 40, with a relatively concentrated group between 40-75 or so, probably players that play mostly heads-up (one on one) games where higher-than-average VPIPs are still possible to maintain while being a winning player. And then you have a single point (red in the graph) WAY in the upper-right of the graph, where the player with by far the most winning history in this player's DB (over 4x the BB/100 of the next highest player) is also a player that has by far the highest VPIP - even more amazing when you consider that this player was playing full ring games in addition to heads-up. Even at heads-up, though, most players would consider it statistically impossible to have a VPIP of over 90% and be a significantly winning player over any substantial period of time, let alone show a profitability of over 4x that of the next most profitable player out there.

That's just what this player, who goes by the name "POTRIPPER", was doing, though.

Now cue an incident back from September. Before this highly suspicious cash game behavior ever came to light, this same player, POTRIPPER, had been witnessed to destroy a tournament using the same style of play: see over 90% of the flops, bluff out of the ones where the opponent doesn't flop strong, get out of the way immediately when faced with a situation where his opponent flopped something too strong to get away from. The player who finished 2nd in this tournament, named CRAZYMARCO, spotted the suspicious behavior and had sent an email to AP, who responded as they (apparently) often do to such accusations, by emailing him a file containing the hand histories of the tournament with all of the players' hole cards exposed.

CRAZYMARCO received this file, an xls file that Excel opened as gibberish, and so he forgot about it, until after he started reading on the 2+2 forums about a player named POTRIPPER destroying the high stakes cash games with highly irregular playing patterns. He still has the file in question and posts about it. A database wizard by the name of "N 82 50 24" offers to take a look at the file and is able to make it legible as a hand history. And shortly after, all Hell breaks loose at 2+2.

The raw hand history of this tournament is about the most damning evidence of poker cheating that you'll ever see. A video of the history has been made here, which requires free registration, but is worth it. It's also been captured on YouTube in 4 parts; here's part 1.

In this video POTRIPPER plays exactly how one would expect someone to play who could see the hole cards of the other players at the table, and wasn't trying to hide it. Every single postflop decision is 100% perfect, bluffing at all the right opportunities, value betting for absolute max profit, for over 130 hands. The xls file apparently cut off due to length for the last bit of the tournament, but apparently the final hand was a doozy, where POTRIPPER made an impossible call of a huge turn with 10 high when his opponent was bluffing with a 9 high flush draw.

Nobody with the slightest knowledge of poker could watch that video and conclude that there's any way that POTRIPPER is playing on the level. The timing of his decisions is too perfect for too long for it to be anything other than cheating. The tournament was fairly high-profile with over $1,000 for the buy-in, so many of the players in it are regulars at 2+2 and other sites, and have come forward saying it's legit, that that's what they remember from the tournament when they played it, so it's highly unlikely that it's a fake or prank (somebody playing over 90% of the hands of a tournament and winning it isn't something you'd exactly forget). It's a legit recreation of the hand history provided which has been corroborated.

So, with evidence in hand that cheating has beyond a doubt occurred, a bit of an Internet sleuthing operation takes place, probably the most impressive and detailed I've seen. First off, apparently the file sent out also tracked the spectators that watched the game, whose ip addresses were logged. And there was a user, tracked by his user number #363 (an improbably low number that would surely date back to before the public opening of the software). Speculation immediately ensues that this account #363 is a "super user" account that is able to see every player's hole cards, and that POTRIPPER is viewing his table with this user on the #363 account while simultaneously playing on his "POTRIPPER" account with the knowledge that this super-user observer was providing him.

And incredibly enough, the IP address of both the player and of this "superuser" account trace back to a man by the name of Scott Tom, who is one of the co-founders of Absolute Poker!

I won't go on to describe all of the evidence, suffice it to say that points directly to a certain Scott Tom, but AP has since come forward saying they are prepared to admit that their systems were compromised but that they are saying Scott Tom, who hasn't been officially involved in the site for a couple of years, had nothing to do with it, and that an ex-programmer is the guilty party.

Regardless, if and when the full truth comes out, this will be a fascinating story that should be picked up by the mainstream media. It already has been, to a degree, with brief articles at msnbc and the NYT, but the story is fascinating enough to have legs. Truly an incredible cyber-sleuthing job.

Perhaps the most incredible portion of this story, to an online player, is that the cheater(s) in question were only caught because of outright stupidity on their part. Whoever was playing under these accounts was extremely dumb. It would be far smarter to sit back with normal stats, occasional losses in cooler situations, and general good postflop decision-making and calmly and collectedly earn a fortune by posing as a typical pro that just makes very good postflop decisions. A great many top players, through experience and careful analysis of betting patterns, almost seem to have a kind of "sixth sense" anyway, and players beating the top games don't get an extreme amount of scrutiny provided their stats are in line with what's generally expected of a winning player. Choosing to play virtually every hand as the player does is basically screaming to get caught. One has to wonder if there are smarter cheaters out there, hounding this and other poker sites without sharing this particular cheater's abject stupidity.

It remains to be seen whether or not this was an actual "inside job" or the work of one rogue programmer that was able to hack the system, but the brick wall put up by AP as the questions started to mount up certainly seems more than a little suspicious.

Fascinating, fascinating story.