Cheating at poker

I'm thinking about cheating. No, no, I'm not thinking of engaging in cheating; I'm thinking about the subject of cheating, as it pertains to poker. It's hard to know exactly what to say about it, beyond "Shame on you" and "What the hell is wrong with you?" and "Didn't your mother teach you any better than that?" I don't know that I'll end up writing anything more articulate than that. But here goes.


1

The latest scandal in online poker comes from a European site, Betfair. See here for the details, so far as they are known: http://www.pokernews.com/news/2008/01/players-cash-betfair-programming-glitch-sng.htm. Basically, some players somehow discovered a glitch in the software such that if all of the players in a six-seat tournament (a very common format online) went all-in on the first hand, the winner would get the first-place money (of course), but the site would erroneously award second-place prize money to all of the other five players, for a sum well above the total entry fees. An unknown number of players rapidly conspired to exploit this software bug for as much money as they could wring out of the system before Betfair discovered the leak and plugged it.

Significantly, the "terms of service" document to which all players must agree upon creating a Betfair account contains this language: "9.2 If you are incorrectly awarded any winnings as a result of (a) any human error on the part of the Service Providers or (b) any bug, defect or error in the Software or (c) the failure of the Products or the Software to operate in accordance with the rules of any of Poker's games then the Service Providers will not be liable to pay you any such winnings and you agree to refund any such winnings that may have been paid to you as a result of such error or mistake."

There's a long discussion thread about the whole matter here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=101864, and more about it here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=119512.

I find it depressing to read. It's not exactly news or shocking to me to discover that people will be dishonest and unethical (after all, I had my life horribly disrupted by having my car stolen last year), but I hate getting slapped in the face with such overt evidence of how scummy people are. Peruse these threads, and you'll read players admitting that they were involved, others saying that they wish they had known about it so that they could get some of the free money, and lots of people saying that they see nothing wrong with what the players involved did.

For example, a guy who goes by the name of "Superluminal" writes, "Well, yes, for one that isnt cheating - the site made the screw up which made the games pay out more than they took in - this is certainly not cheating by any definition available." (This and all other quotations need to be chock-full of "[sic]," but I'm not going to bother.)

"Bad Beat Bill" said, "I think that most of us, if we found a bug like this would probably have tried to exploit it too. Being honest I would have tried knowing that I wouldn't have much to lose...and potentially a whole lot to gain." Psychologists out there will take note of the phenomenon of projection: He would do it, and therefore concludes that "most" other people would, too. I bet that "Bill" has no inkling of the irony in asserting that he is being "honest" about his dishonesty.

Similarly, somebody calling himself "ariston" wrote, "Any poker player who can put his hand on his heart and say they wouldn't have sat in a few of these if they saw what was happening is kidding themseleves or is lying." Note to ariston: I wouldn't have, hand on my heart. You may wish to believe that I'm kidding myself or lying, but I know better. I've done enough things in my life of which I have later had to be ashamed that I have developed both a genuine desire and a fairly keen ability to avoid such regrets in the future. It's a pity that you haven't.

Ariston also posted, "Oh and as I have already stated if I had been up that night I would have gotten involved and played these as well. I can honeslty say I don't know a single person who wouldn't as human nature/greed would've kicked in." To which the insightful poster "Bonified" replied, "Don't you know anyone with the foresight to realise how they'll feel about something later before they do it?"

One poster ("chillin_dude"), who admitted to having been involved, wrote, "I do think that people [apparently meaning those who have expressed outrage at the participants] took this a massive step too far in their judgements and their condeming of the players that took part, and that if they were in such situations themselves, it wouldn't be such a clearcut right or wrong...." Bullshit. I would have had zero difficulty determining, in about two nanoseconds, that it was a "clearcut" wrong. I'm not any super-saint, just a pretty ordinary guy. I think that the majority of people are on my side, and you and your despicable ilk are in the minority.

In a later post he added, "I truely do doubt that many people wouldn't get involved if they found out something like this was going on in the heat of the moment."

Apparently, the "everybody's doing it" (and its close cousin, "everybody would do it") defense is alive and well.

Another ("lucymagem") who confessed involvement is complaining bitterly about how Betfair is treating her. Among other things, it froze her uninvolved father's account. (I assume this is because they wanted to prevent the possibility of her dumping her ill-gotten gains off to his account.) She is so blind that she can't see the strangeness of having tried to rip off a company for several thousand dollars, and then crying foul when the company does everything within its power to prevent the fraud from succeeding.

2

Because I don't really play online much and don't spend a lot of time keeping up with online poker forums (yeah, I know that should be "fora," but it just sounds too pretentious for me), I was only vaguely aware of the "JJ Prodigy" scandal. Interestingly, unlike any previous online cheating episode, this one is spilling over to have effects on the perpetrator in the world of live poker, too, as he got banned from one prestigious live tournament. (See Gary Wise's columns for ESPN's Poker Club about "JJ Prodigy" specifically, and online cheating generally: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/columns/story?columnist=wise_gary&id=3210798 and http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/columns/story?columnist=wise_gary&id=3224481.)

Good. Count me in with Greg Raymer and Dani Stern (both quoted in Wise's first piece), wishing that the poker community as a whole would band together to ostracize known cheaters. Casinos should ban them from both cash games and tournaments, just as they would ban cheaters who had been caught by other casinos and placed in the infamous "Black Book" of "excluded persons." That they were caught cheating online, rather than in person, should make zero difference. The possibility of a lifetime ban from both online and brick-and-mortar casinos might actually give pause to those whose defective consciences alone are insufficient deterrent to cheating.


3

To get some inkling into how many people will cheat at the game, given the opportunity, check out this twoplustwo.com thread, which invites members to confess their poker sins: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=90438. This is, of course, just a tiny sampling.

4

It's not exactly about poker, but contemplation about cheating generally prompted me to recall an online exchange from last year.

Last summer, somebody on http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ (specifically, here: http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2002&highlight=) posted this:

on my recent trip to las vegas i played a little blackjack at the golden
gate casino downtown. they had a $3.00 table so i sat down with $20.00 and
played for abour 1/2 hour. i left the table with 8 $5.00 chips and went to the
cashier. she counted them out and said "$175.00" and took the money from her
drawer and counted it out in front of me. i said "dear would you count those
chips again. thats $40.00" i got the correct amount and left.

i was wondering if i shouldn't have just taken the $175.00 and left, but
then i know she would have been short when she balanced at the end of her shift
and the whole transaction was probably taped, so i think i did the right thing.

I found this so irritating that I posted this admittedly rather nasty reply:

I think:

1. You are not genuinely wondering if you did the right thing, but just
wanted to brag about having been honest.

2. If you are, in fact, genuinely wondering "if i shouldn't have just taken
the $175.00 and left," then there's something seriously wrong with you.

3. If, in fact, you have concluded that pointing out the error was correct
for the reason you stated (because "the whole transaction was probably taped"),
then you're truly a moral midget. That is, your statement pretty clearly implies
your conclusion that if you had reason to think that the transaction were *not*
taped, then walking away with the $175 would be OK. Which means that despite
your apparent attempt at bragging about your honesty here, you are not actually
an honest person--just one who'll reluctantly manage to be honest if the chance
of being caught in your dishonesty is too high.

Criminy.

5

I recently discovered a whole blog devoted to the subject of casino and poker cheating: http://www.richardmarcusbooks.com/blog.htm. Might be worth bookmarking, if the subject interests you.


Wrapup

There is, sadly, abundant evidence that lots and lots of people have no meaningful ethical compass to guide their decisions. If an armored car's door accidentally opens and cash spills on the street, they'll help themselves to as much as they can grab, and run off with it. If a cashier gives them too much change, they'll dummy up about it and smile at the windfall. If the bank credits their account with an extra "0" in a deposited check, they'll try to withdraw the money before the mistake is discovered. If they hear of a software bug that allows them to drain money from a poker site, they'll exploit it as fast as they can. If they can figure out a way to multi-account a poker tournament or purchase another player's position late into the game, they will.

The only things preventing them from being dishonest are various external constraints that reduce their ability to cheat and steal, or that raise the cost and/or other disincentive to do so (e.g., locks, surveillance cameras, threats of prison sentences, iron-clad software).

Meanwhile, I worry about whether I'm being unethical when I inadvertantly know one of an opponent's cards because of a mark on it (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/ethical-dilemma-non-grumpy-content.html), or take a commemorative chip off the table without putting another $5 into play (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/going-south-and-not-for-winter.html), in technical violation of the rules. I don't mean to sound or act holier-than-thou; I'm just struck by the strangeness of my worrying about being even a hair's breadth over the line between ethical and unethical, while sharing this worldwide poker community are untold thousands of unabashed cheaters and scammers, perfectly willing at the drop of a hat to take money that isn't rightfully theirs; untold thousands more who would do the same if they could do so without being caught; and at least hundreds more who will take time and energy to write and post rationalizations and justifications for all of the above.

I would dearly love to be able to believe that poker players are, on the whole, more honest than the population at large. Unfortunately, I think that's a fantasy. The best I can realistically do is hope that we're not statistically less honest than the general population.


I lived in Minnesota before moving to Nevada. We had four, um, interesting years with professional wrestler Jesse Ventura as our governor. Among the countless controversial things he said and did during his term was to give a speech to University of Minnesota students, in which he told them that he had lived by the motto, "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat."

I wonder if he's a poker player.



Note: So that I'm not engaged in a different type of cheating, I need to point out that I stole the idea for illustrating this post with a photo of cheetahs. Wicked Chops Poker did this a few weeks back for a post on the Chris Vaughn/Sorel Mizzi scandal (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/im-not-cheater.html and http://wickedchopspoker.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/12/chris-vaughn-an.html). I thought it was funny enough to copy, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all. (Yeah, that's a stolen line, too.)


Addendum, February 5, 2008

See Gary Wise's comment on all of the above at http://www.wisehandpoker.com/blog/index.php/gary-wise/2008/02/05/the_missing_word.