PokerNews article #140

What should you do if you suspect cheating in your poker game?

https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/suspect-cheating-in-a-poker-game-heres-what-to-do-about-it-26458.htm

Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

That's what a court in Germany said (well, approximately) to one player who had repeatedly cheated at poker, and was brought up on charges of criminal fraud.

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2014/07/germany-s-ali-tekintamgac-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison-for-18790.htm

(This was a couple of weeks ago, but I missed the story until now.)

Maybe it has happened before, but I can't think of another time that a player has gone to prison for cheating at poker. I wish it would happen more. The prison thing, not the cheating thing.

Stupid is not malicious

Last week, the Palm Beach Kennel Club, which had hosted a WSOP circuit event, announced the results of their investigation into the unauthorized removal of a tournament chip from play when it was down to the last two players. You can read their announcement here, and the PokerNews article about the situation here.

Basically, the casino concluded that the player who won the tournament, Chan Pelton--whom I do not know and had never heard of before last week--removed a T25,000 chip to keep as a souvenir. It seems important to emphasize that the investigation determined that "the integrity of the event was in no way compromised, and the impact of the incident only caused harm to the perpetrator himself."

In spite of that conclusion, the club lowered the boom on Pelton. He was stripped of the title and the prize money, and banned from the property. Caesars, which owns the WSOP, compounded the punishment by imposing an indefinite exclusion from all their properties worldwide. Short of additionally turning him over to law enforcement on charges of theft and/or fraud, there is nothing more that they could have done to him.

And therein lies the problem, as I see it.

When I first saw the announcement on Twitter, I dashed off something about it seeming harsh, but then didn't think much more about it until Monday, when my friend Jennifer Newell addressed the subject in her column for poker.co.uk, here. She wholeheartedly approves of the maximum punishment handed out. Upon reading that piece, I knew that I disagreed, but it took some mulling before I figured out how to articulate what I think the problem is.

Let me do it point by point.

1. There should be no tolerance for cheating. 

To quote Mike Caro, "I have long-ago stated that poker cheaters should be boiled and eaten. If you think I’m not serious, you boil; I’ll eat."

Even long-time readers of mine will probably have forgotten that early in my Vegas years I was very nearly the victim of a poker tournament cheater. I still think it's a pretty interesting story, and my only personal experience with this sort of thing, so go read about it here. I cite this incident in order to quote my 2007 self, to prove that I've long been on record as advocating the severest possible penalties for actual cheating in poker:

He was, of course, disqualified from the event. I’m guessing that he is also banned from the premises permanently. I hope that he also goes into the infamous big black book of barred persons that the casinos share. In fact, I hope that they turned him over to the police and that he gets charged with criminal fraud—which this surely was. I wouldn’t even shed a tear if I learned that he received a bit of the old-school-Vegas back-room security “treatment” to help the lesson sink in a little deeper.

If there were substantial reason to believe that Pelton had broken the rules in an attempt to dishonestly boost his chances of winning, I'd be right there with the villagers, pitchfork and torch in hand, ready to burn the monster alive. But as far as I can tell from news accounts, that is not the case.

2. Pocketing the chip was monumentally stupid. 

This guy is no newbie. He has apparently won at least one WCOP circuit event plus other tournaments before. He knows the rules. He also must know that security cameras capture everything that happens on the tables. Furthermore, he's experienced enough that he surely understands the reasons behind the rule. For one with his level of knowledge and experience, stealing that chip can only be chalked up to world-class stupidity and hubris.

But.

3. Stupidity is not cheating. 

There is a fundamental difference between the act of a major-league dunderhead and the act of a cheater. To fail to recognize this is to make a category error, and a serious one at that.

Because the club and Caesars have imposed every penalty they have at their disposal, the result is that they have no harsher punishment to hand out to a player who is caught actually cheating. And the consequence of that is that it puts these institutions in the indefensible position of saying that (or at least acting as if) there is no meaningful difference between breaking a rule in order to gain an unfair advantage--an act of cheating--and breaking it in order to take home a souvenir--an act of stupidity.

Granted, one cannot always tell the difference with perfect clarity. But here his story of seeking a souvenir checks out. Yes, it is at least theoretically possible that he intended to introduce the chip into play to his advantage in some later tournament, or that he is part of a conspiracy ring to create a bunch of counterfeits. But those seem unlikely, given the circumstances. Though one cannot achieve 100% certainty, I think we can reach a reasonable level of confidence that his actions are much more consistent with his claimed intention than one more nefarious.

4. Stupidity should not be treated like cheating. 

The most troubling part of the club's announcement is this:

The player’s intent in taking the chip is not considered by the WSOP Tournament Rules.

True enough. But they seem to be implying that, therefore, they are not allowed to take "intent" into account in setting a punishment. That is not the case. Tournament rules do not prescribe a fixed penalty for any violation. In fact, they take great pains to ensure that the tournament staff have maximal flexibility to assign variable penalties for infractions of the rules depending on circumstances. For all sorts of rules violations, it is commonplace for the tournament director to modulate the penalty imposed based on whether the offense was deliberate versus inadvertent, whether it was a first violation versus a second or third, whether the player is a newcomer who didn't know a rule versus an old pro who damn well did, whether any other player was disadvantaged by the action, whether the violator is being apologetic or defiant, and so on. This is all as it should be.

To treat an act of stupidity as being indistinguishable from an act of outright cheating--which is what the casino and Caesars are doing here--is akin to the moronic zero-tolerance policies of schools that fail to make a distinction between the kid who yells "bang" while making a finger-gun, and the kid who actually brings a gun to school intending to kill a teacher. It is akin to being unable or unwilling to distinguish premeditated murder from involuntary manslaughter (i.e., an act of reckless endangerment resulting in a death).

Were I in charge, I would have favored lesser punishments: perhaps knocking him down to second place instead of first (since he had apparently already earned at least second-place money when the incident occurred), maybe combined with a one-year exclusion from any Caesars-sponsored poker tournaments. But I don't think I'd go so far as to make him forfeit all the prize money, nor bar him from setting foot in Caesars properties, nor make his exclusion from participation permanent.

Those are the kinds of maximum penalties that should be reserved for the worst offenses, which this was not, and the worst offenders, which Pelton is not.

Cheater unreliable on who's cheating

I despise the utter lack of personal integrity of Richard Marcus (as detailed here and other posts), but I still subscribe to his blog's RSS feed because he sometimes points to news items about casino and/or poker cheating stories that I would otherwise miss.

Today he finally got around to doing a post about the Full Tilt Poker mess (a very nice summary of which you can read here from Shamus). It triggered a memory for me--hadn't Marcus previously endorsed FTP as one of the safest poker sites in the industry?

Yep, he had. A little searching led me to this post from January 8, 2010. Responding to the Brian Townsend/Brian Hasting allegations about improper sharing of mined hand data, Marcus says:

But in some cases, such as Full Tilt's, the online poker site in question becomes safer immediately after a cheating scam breaks. That's because the operators and administrators start cleaning up their act right away. See what I mean? What I'm saying is that it takes an online poker black eye to improve the overall poker complexion. So yes, as of now Full Tilt merits being rated number 9 on my oonline [sic] poker safety ratings list.

The search also incidentally led me to this forgotten piece of wisdom from Marcus (April 15, 2009):

Yep, believe it or not and despite all the scandals, UltimateBet has shown enough recent cheat-free statistics to make Richard Marcus's top-10 anti-online poker cheat ratings list.

So when Richard Marcus endorses an online gaming site as safe and secure, you might want to take the occasion to make a hasty withdrawal.

More on Cates and the scandal

Mere minutes after I did my post about Daniel Cates yesterday, an acquaintance of mine with excellent connections in the industry contacted me privately to say that I was likely to have to revise my opinion very soon. A few minutes ago, I learned the basis for this advance warning. Cates did an interview with NoahSD of SubjectPoker.com. He then contacted Noah again and admitted that he had lied in the just-completed interview, and confessed that it was he who had played on Girah's account, not Qureshi. They did a second interview to explain this. Audio of both interviews has been posted here. It's about two hours of audio, so I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but I wanted to get this note up as quickly as possible, since I expect to be asked whether this revelation changes my opinion of Cates. The answer is yes, it does, and I'm very sad to learn that my belief in his integrity was mistaken. I hope that this is all the bad news that is to come, that he learns from his mistake, and that, over time, he can rebuild his reputation in a manner similar to what Justin Bonomo has accomplished in recovering from his early missteps. I remain deeply grateful to Daniel for the opportunity he gave me at the World Series of Poker.

Addendum

There is an excellent "Cliff's Notes" summary of the whole mess here.

Jungleman's scandal

If you have any interest in online poker, you've surely already read something, somewhere about the "Girah" scandal that seems to be unfolding more every day. If not, you could start with posts by F-Train and Shamus today for links and thoughts about the whole mess.

Dan "Jungleman" Cates is caught up in the scandal. He clearly backed, tutored, and trusted Jose Macedo, and was apparently planning to move to Portugal to live with him. That degree of closeness to what now turns out to be such flagrant cheating naturally causes suspicion that Cates himself was more involved than has so far been admitted or proven.

You will understand that I'm naturally inclined to view Cates in a good light. After all, the list of people in my life who have handed me $10,000, with no expectation of getting anything back from me in return, is pretty short. So I'm definitely biased, and you would be right to keep that in mind when evaluating my opinion.

It is also true that I'm not exactly on Cates's list of close friends. We've met a few times because of his WSOP seat giveaway, and I spent a pleasant, almost surreal hour over brunch with him discussing strategic approaches to my Main Event play. But that level of contact hardly makes me an expert on his character, his thoughts, or his actions. I have his cell phone number and he mine, but there's little reason to think that either of us will have occasion to use them, now that the WSOP thing is over and done with.

With those caveats firmly in place, I want to express my opinion that Cates is genuinely a good guy at heart, and is constitutionally incapable of the degree of scumminess that would be required for him to be complicit in the scandal. The facts that have been revealed so far basically require one to choose between believing that he was a co-conspirator (or, at least, in the know but not taking action on the shadiness he knew was afoot) or that he was incredibly naive. Given those alternatives, I have no hesitation in casting my vote for the latter.

My overwhelming impression of Cates when meeting him in person was that he ranked high on the nerd scale. I don't say that in derision; I wear the label proudly myself. He spent years perfecting video game play before discovering that many of the same skills could translate to poker and reap huge profits. I think Terrence Chan's sympathetic post about the roles of trust and loneliness and desire for social contact and peer acceptance within the online high-stakes-poker world are perceptive and likely to be an apt description of Cates's frame of reference in this thing.

Remember that just about two weeks ago Cates made a little splash in poker news because he decided to move to Canada in order to resume playing online poker. He flew to Vancouver, only to be sent back to the states by immigration officials because, apparently, he told them the truth--that he was moving there permanently to make his living. He seems to have had no clue that this would require first obtaining a work visa. It would not surprise me if he didn't understand what a U.S. "green card" was, or that other countries had equivalent things. My guess is that it never even occurred to him that there were strict laws and rules about taking up permanent residence to generate an income in another western democracy. While I found the episode amusing, I think it sheds some light on the degree of naivete that Cates brings to many real-world situations. His youth and relatively cloistered years of online play (video games and poker both) have left him ill-informed of and ill-prepared for many of life's challenges outside his ken.

Don't get me wrong--he's not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I judge him to be exceptionally bright. His aptitude for poker in particular is off the charts. I don't mind admitting that he thinks through poker situations ten times faster than I do, and I sometimes had a hard time keeping up with what he was trying to explain to me. But a narrow field of even the most phenomenal talent does not necessarily equip one to deal with, say, people whose values are so perverse that they're willing to feign a long friendship in order to run a big-money scam.

Some observers feel that Cates's interview with Bluff magazine yesterday further raises the level of suspicion about him being dirty. Take this exchange, for example:

Many have speculated that Jose is just a face/name attached to the account and maybe Haseeb or others were playing on the account. We know of at least one instance where this Haseeb played on Jose’s account. How can you be 100% certain that Jose is the one playing all of the hands on that account?

I am very certain that all hands played on Jose’s account are from him (unless Jose has allowed others to play on his account) except for the one instance in where Haseeb admitted to playing on his account. Almost certainly, over 95% of the hands are Jose’s.

When Jose was disqualified from the BLUFF Poker Challenge on Lock Poker, did you know it was Haseeb who had played on the account?

Yes, but I did not want to get involved. I know it was not a habit.

Surely nearly everybody reading this wants to ask the obvious follow-up question: How can you be so sure of those things? After all, I think the natural reaction to being shocked to learn that your friend has been cheating you and a bunch of your buddies out of a lot of money would be to say, "I don't know. I didn't think there was anything shady going on, but now that I see how badly I misjudged what he was capable of doing, I have to start doubting everything I thought I knew about him." Cates doesn't do that. He still retains faith, somehow, that the account-sharing was an isolated incident--in fact, says he is "very certain" of this, and that he "know[s]" it was "not a habit."

Some people apparently read this as evidence of his complicity--he's aiding in the cover-up, trying to minimize the problem. My reaction is to want to dope-slap him and make him reevaluate more critically what he actually does and does not know about his friend, carefully segregating what he knows from what he believes, and both of those from what he just wants to be true. To me this passage reeks of naivete further blinded by optimism and a friend's loyalty, not of a clumsy attempt at whitewashing.

Of course, I could be dead wrong. He might be guilty as sin, and when it all comes out I'll be the one with egg on my face for speaking up on his behalf. I don't think so, but I have no way of knowing for sure, no special insight. However, my experience with him, brief and shallow though it was, makes me highly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If expressing my opinion in this regard makes others temper their judgment in the same way, then I'll feel I've done what I set out to do here.

Cheating?

I was just checking PokerNews for updates on what's going on at the WSOP, and noticed in the margin a feed of Tweets from various pros, including one that mentioned an accusation of cheating. That's a subject that always interests me, so I looked into it a bit more. (This just happened within the past hour, so not much information yet available.)

You can see the relevant posts from Twitter below. Click to see it full size, then read from the bottom up.

In short, Christian Harder had a new player moved to his table, apparently thought he was pretty good, but didn't recognize him. He snapped a photo with his cell phone and posted it on Twitter, asking if anybody could give him a name or tell him something about his play.

This resulted in a couple of followers suggesting that such fishing for information on an opponent was "cheating," to which Harder responded with scornful dismissal.

I, too, am hard-pressed to see how it constitutes cheating. I don't suppose that one player has an intrinsic right to demand to know the name of another at his table, but he can ask. Or he can ask the player next to him, "Do you recognize that guy?" There can't possibly be anything wrong with that.

This is just taking the quest for identification a step further--but it's a difference in scope, not in kind. Suppose he had a friend who is a whiz at recognizing poker players and did the same thing by private messaging, rather than being open on Twitter. Would that be cheating? Again, I don't see how. What if that friend happened to be on the rail, easily accessible between hands? Or even happened to be sitting in the adjacent seat?

Disclosure: As I mentioned in my post Friday, some of my friends and readers helped me figure out who a couple of people at my table were; one I requested (I asked who Greg Raymer had meant in his Tweet by the nickname "Oogee"), others were volunteered to me. I have also done other similar things in the past. For example, a couple of times when a skilled, difficult player at a cash game has mentioned that he or she is from Washington, D.C., I have discreetly snapped a photo and sent it to Cardgrrl, asking if she recognizes the player, hoping for some background information. She has done the same with me when in cash games in town here. I suppose I might be accused of conveniently coming down on Harder's side here in order to cover my own butt. But that reverses causality. Until this afternoon, it never dawned on me that there was anything unethical about it, and I share Harder's surprise that somebody would go so far as to call it cheating.

I have also occasionally asked my friends in the poker media (who have a much bigger mental database of pro player names and faces than I do) if they recognized somebody, and never thought I was doing anything wrong. (To those friends: If you feel that I put you in an awkward situation with such inquiries, please tell me. I promise to accept your viewpoint, not argue about it, and refrain from making such requests of you in the future.) When Cardgrrl was playing in her WSOP HORSE event last year, one of our media friends just casually mentioned to her on a break who a couple of the players were that we hadn't recognized. I didn't think there was anything wrong with this, and the friend who did it is a 100% ethical straight-shooter who I am positive would not have said anything if he thought it was even a gray area. One of the ones named in that example was Jose "Nacho" Barbero, who had won two LAPT main events in South America over the preceding few months, a rather remarkable accomplishment. He hadn't yet risen to my threshold of awareness (or Cardgrrl's, as I recall), but it's likely that a large percentage of the players he faced knew perfectly well who he was. It's really hard for me to imagine how sharing such widely-available information violates any rule or ethical standard.

It's true that the identification of a less-known player is information that some have and others don't, which I suspect is the root observation behind the notion that going out of one's way to gain that information is cheating. But it's information that is, in many cases, out there, possessed by people both at and away from the table. It seems to me completely different than if, say, I had a friend who was in the ESPN editing booth with access to the hole card camera feed, and had him text me with details on how an opponent was playing. That would be information available to no other player except by deliberate and elaborate frustration of the security procedures erected precisely to prevent its dissemination.

I wish those who think that Harder's query constitutes cheating would find some forum on which to explain in more detail what, exactly, they find troubling about it, and where they would draw the line. If it's not OK for me to ask somebody remotely for help in recognizing a new player to the table, is it OK to ask the guy sitting next to me? If so, what's the difference? If not, how could you ever hope to enforce such an extreme restriction on sharing of information?

NoahSD

I like Noah Stephens-Davidowitz more every time he posts. Here's his latest on how repentant former poker cheaters can rehabilitate themselves: http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/04/cheater-challenge/

More crap from Cereus

Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but this post about a bad keno game being offered by Cereus (the fine, fine folks behind UltimateBlecch and AbsolutePuker) was completely new to me. I didn't know they offered keno, nor that a bad random number generator had been discovered by users, nor anything about how Cereus responded to the issue--which was by lying, shifting the blame, stalling, having Joe Sebok make public statements that were untrue, and ultimately doing nothing to admit that they screwed up or refund customers' money.

This company is just unbelievably corrupt and/or incompetent. I'm not sure which attribute is most responsible for this particular part of the scandal story, but in terms of deciding whether you want to trust them with your money, does it really matter?

It just gets uglier and uglier

I don't follow the minutiae of the ongoing UltimateBlecch/Absolute Puker investigations, but I do read what shows up in places like Pokerati, and, especially, Haley Hintze's blog. Her latest installment, here, drops what was for me an unexpected bomb (though I gather that it won't be as much of a shocker to those who have been following things in more detail)--and that is that the main cadre of cheaters may have included TWO former WSOP Main Event winners, not just one.

It's all just so disgusting. What's most disgusting of all is how the company still goes on pretending that its hands are clean, that it was a victim, that a paper transfer of ownership somehow wiped all the muck and stains away.

No wait--what's even more disgusting than that is that there are apparently tens of thousands of people who continue to play on this site, who continue to hand over their money to these lying, thieving criminals. That I really, seriously, just cannot comprehend. What is wrong with you people?

Envelope Poker

A couple of weeks ago I was playing poker at the Stratosphere on a Friday, early evening, and learned that there was a promotion going on. Hitting a flush or better earned you the right to pick an envelope from a box, in which would be an amount somewhere between $10 and $100. This ran until the envelopes ran out--which, of course, happened right before I hit my first flush.

Last night I was at the Stratosphere again, and heard that the same promotion would be running today, starting at 11:00 a.m.. Apparently they have been doing it every Friday for at least several weeks. I was told that there was $2000 to be distributed, divided among 98 envelopes. I had evening plans, so I decided to put in my poker time in the afternoon. I also had played in the 10:00 p.m. tournament last night (came in second), which got me a coupon for an extra $10 in chips, good for the next 24 hours. So the Stratosphere seemed a logical place to hang out today. Neither the extra $10 nor the promotion really mean much to me, but free money is free money, even if only a little. Since the differences between one poker room and another are pretty small anyway, I thought I might as well take what I could get.

I started off playing my usual $1-2 NLHE game. After about an hour I had just broken even, running in place. I had hit one full house, drawing an envelope with the smallest prize: $10.

I had noticed, however, that the next table over, where they were playing $2-4 limit, was sending players to the desk to pick envelopes at a rather astonishing rate compared to ours. This isn't too surprising; it's much easier and cheaper to stay in a hand to the river in a limit game than in a no-limit game. Any promotion that depends on hitting a certain poker hand (high hand bonuses, bad-beat jackpots, the Palms "diamond flush" game, etc.) will always tend to shift the jackpot-drop money from no-limit games to limit games. It's one of the reasons that I would overall prefer that such promotions didn't exist, because as an exclusively no-limit player I will, on average, not get back from them what I contribute. But it's a small effect, so I don't spend much time worrying about it.

As I said, though, the hit rate at the $2-4 limit table was impossible not to notice. Every few minutes they were sending up one, two, or three players. In order to qualify for an envelope, one's hand need not be the winner, nor did one have to use both hole cards. If, for example, there was a flush on the board, everybody still in the hand at the showdown would win an envelope, as long as the pot had the minimum $10 in it.

A while after I had noticed the frequency with which that table was collecting envelopes, I started noticing snippets of their conversation. I put two and two together, and realized what was going on. They were not playing to win pots; they were playing only to hit envelope-qualifying hands at minimal cost.

I have never, in almost five years here, done the "play to win the bonus money" thing. If there's a bonus to be had, and I hit it, fine, it's a little something extra, but I don't go out of my way to try. In no-limit games, it's surely -EV to alter play so as to try to hit some particular combination of cards, because your opponents will just make it too expensive.

In the lowest-stakes limit games, however, that is not necessarily always going to be true. It was clear that the players at the table next to mine had decided, rightly or wrongly, that it was more profitable to try to play for the envelopes than for the pots. I thought this was kind of an interesting situation, one that I hadn't explored before, so I decided to join them.

(As a side note, I used to routinely play $2-4 limit games if that was the only thing available while waiting for a seat at a no-limit game. I eventually figured out, though, that it was a long-term loser for me. Maybe some people know how to play that game well enough to beat the rake plus tips, but I apparently don't. So instead I now carry a crossword puzzle and work on that if I have to wait for a seat. I am considerably happier that way. Now I sit in $2-4 limit games only on the rare occasion that I'm playing in order to be sociable with a visiting friend who doesn't want to play higher. Today was the first exception I've made in a long time.)

Sitting in the game, I quickly confirmed the hunch I had formed from a distance. The play was almost completely passive. People were limping in with what I assume was any two suited cards and any pair, and checking down nearly everything except monster hands. The pot was usually $10 just from the limpers. But when it wasn't, and somebody had a qualifying hand, he would make a little show of counting the pot, make a bet, and somebody would give him a courtesy call to get the pot big enough. Players were obviously willing to do this for each other because they could be confident that the favor would be returned if and when they needed it.

The only time I heard anything explicitly said out loud about what was going on was when one of a cohort of five friends at the table said to a newcomer, "We're not playing to win white chips. We're playing to win envelopes." But it hardly needed to be said. Anybody who knew of the promotion, and who had passing familiarity with how low-limit poker games usually play out, would have immediately noticed how this game was seriously skewed in exactly the direction that that announcement made clear. Players were, e.g., routinely checking flopped sets and two-pair hands, and one can only assume that the reason was to be sure the hand didn't end before getting two shots at turning it into a full house. There was no bluffing, and almost no semi-bluffing with flush draws. Many more pots than usual were checked all around on every street when nobody made a qualifying hand.

It wasn't to be my lucky day. I was at this limit table for about two hours, had a net loss of about $60, and hit only one envelope-qualifying hand. Even that one was bittersweet. I had 8-8, flopped a boat with 8-10-10 and bet it as hard as I could; since I already qualified for an envelope, I figured I might as well also try to win as big a pot as I could. An opponent with K-10 and I got into the only raising war I saw the whole session, which he won when his miracle king came on the river. Grrrrrr. My envelope had $30, which made me about even on the hand.

Others, however, were doing much better. In the photo above, I was in seat 1, so it was kind of hard to take a picture of the guy in seat 10, but you can see much of his stack. He had arrived right at 11:00 and had been playing for envelopes all day. In this picture you can't see that he has two full stacks of red chips. He was sitting behind about $500, an amount almost unheard of in a game of this size. He said, very plausibly, that he had earned $240 in envelopes so far. He was definitely one of the ones I had seen popping up to the desk most often before I joined the table.

I knew only one other player in the game--Cindy (PokerMuffin) from allvegaspoker.com. She, too, was trying Envelope Poker for the first time. Like me, she was failing. She hit only one in the two hours or so we were both there.

Late in my session, there was some sort of kerfuffle. I didn't know what was going on, except that the player sitting next to Cindy, who was one of the group of five friends, accused her of having turned them in to the floor person, who happened to be a friend of Cindy's. She denied it. I had no idea what this was about, but soon thereafter the five friends all racked up and left, saying that they were no longer feeling welcome.

After they had gone, I asked Cindy what that was about. Apparently one of the floor people had said something to one or more of the friends--out of my earshot--about them colluding. It's not clear to me whether they left because of a genuine sense of insult, or because they felt that they weren't going to be allowed to play the same strategy anymore. It didn't matter much, because this was all happening just as it was getting to be time for me to leave for a dinner date.

As I was cashing out, the floor person--who has come to recognize me as at least a semi-regular and somebody who knows the game reasonably well--asked me whether I had noticed "collusion" going on at that table. I said no, at least not in the traditional sense in which that word is used. That is, as far as I could detect, the group of friends was not playing against each other any differently than they were playing against everybody else. They were not building large pots with two of them trapping a stranger's second-best hand in the middle, or signaling each other what they held, or soft-playing each other while playing hard against the rest of the table.

But I told her that it was perfectly clear that they were playing to maximize their chances of earning an envelope, neglecting what would otherwise be optimal strategy to win the pot. I also told her about the one verbally explicit acknowledgement of what was going on that one of them had made. She smiled, thanked me, and said that was helpful information.

This all raises an interesting question: Is such play collusion? More generally, is it cheating of any species?

I don't think so. Suppose the casino put $1000 in every envelope, or $1,000,000 in, say, each of 10 out of the 100 envelopes. It would be positively insane to play in any manner other than what I saw--the players tacitly cooperating to maximize everybody's chance of picking up an envelope. I think that mathematically there is a serious question whether the amounts available in this particular promotion were high enough to justify abandoning most efforts to win pots in favor of earning envelopes, but the ethics are the same if we change the amounts so that it is crystal clear that winning envelopes is far more valuable than winning pots.

The players are simply adjusting their strategies to maximize their earnings in rational response to the rather perverse incentives that the casino has offered them. As far as I could tell, they were not breaking any rules. They were just adapting their poker strategy as the situation warranted (or at least arguably warranted). It is no more cheating than when players slow-play aces during an aces-cracked promotion, preferring to win the bonus over maximizing the pot. It is no more cheating than when players drop down to the cheapest limit games and broaden their starting-hand range to include any two cards that can make quads or a straight flush when a bad-beat jackpot is bulging.

When casinos set up incentives that change what poker strategy will make a player the most money, they shouldn't be surprised that players do exactly that. If the room managers are too dense to anticipate how players will adjust their play to take advantage of the promotions offered, the problem lies with them, not with the players. If the room managers don't want the play of the game distorted, then they should not offer incentives that will predictably result in distortions. It is, in my opinion, misguided for the casino to blame players for responding to game-distorting incentives that the casino has put in place. Accusing them of cheating under such circumstances is muddled thinking, if you ask me.

Poker room managers should also be capable of anticipating that a promotion like this will result in many, many pots that just barely make the minimum size requirement, and that this, in turn, will result in lower-than-normal rake for the poker room while the promotion is running. This seems pretty dumb and self-defeating to me--but then again, nobody ever promoted me to be a poker room manager, so what do I know?

(Caveat: What I heard about the accusation and the players' reactions was almost all second-hand. I could have easily misunderstood something, or drawn an incorrect inference from the partial information available to me. Furthermore, it's possible that there was some sort of collusion going on that I didn't notice or know about. I don't believe that there was, but I hold open that possibility. But if the casino geniunely had evidence that there was, then I think their response should have been far more vigorous and definitive than an accusation or warning.)

What if these five friends had explicitly agreed in advance--in an arrangement that they did not disclose to the other players--that they would play this way and after the game make an even split of the profits? Would that be cheating? (I have no knowledge that this happened; I'm just constructing a hypothetical to further probe into the ethics of the situation.) I'm less confident about this opinion and more subject to being convinced otherwise, but my inclination is to say no, because the resulting play does not disadvantage anybody outside their group any more than if ten strangers sat down, each independently arriving at the realization of how silent cooperation would optimize chances for winning envelopes, and played accordingly. Just as when players silently cooperate to "gang up" on a short-stacked, all-in player late in a tournament, it is not cheating because each is still making decisions in his own best interest.

My understanding is that today was the last day of this particular promotion. Sometime next week, the Stratosphere is shifting to some version of the more common progressive high-hand bonus structure. I do not know whether the envelope promotion is ending because the room managers felt that it was being abused, or just that they change things once in a while to keep it interesting, and this one had run its natural course. Either way, I won't be sorry to see it go. It was mildly fun and interesting to experiment with a radically altered playing strategy for a couple of hours, but I don't think it's the best use of my playing time, and I'd rather not have my contributions to the jackpot pool so distortedly be given away in games I'm not going to be playing. A single two-hour trial of Envelope Poker was enough for me.

Laak on cheating

I was just reading the February issue of Bluff magazine and came across another retrospective bit of insight about the Ali Tekintamgac cheating scandal. In case you haven't heard of it before, this player had at least one "blogger" secretly working for him, with media credentials so as to be able to get close to the tables. The blogger would position himself in a way that he could see other players' hole cards, and signal them to Tekintamgac. See Shamus's excellent two-part account of the whole sordid affair here and here.

Anyway, Phil Laak recounts an interesting experience sharing a table with Tekentamgac at the Partouche event:

I found the rhythm of the game rather enjoyable, except for this one poker blogger who was hell bent on seeing my cards. Yes, it was Ali's 'blogger'. I had no idea they were a cheating duo at the time. All I wanted was the for guy to stop shadowing me so hard. At the time I thought he was just curious as to how I was playing. Though slightly flattered I thought that he could get a better education sweating one of the better pros. Ahhh, but they were not at Ali's table. It is funny how the whole thing makes so much sense now that Ali got caught.

Letter to Prahlad Friedman

From Todd Witteles, about Friedman's apparent hiring as a UB sponsored pro, here.

The punchline:

Prahlad, you aren't being forgiving. You are being used by criminals to
give legitimacy to their tainted product and continuously dishonest company.

Please reconsider.

Cheating--some gray and not-so-gray areas

http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/content/cheating-9967

I saw this column by Ashley Adams a couple of weeks ago in the print version and liked it a lot. This kind of ethical questioning needs a lot more attention than I think it gets among poker players. I wrote to the author and pointed him to some of the posts I've written on exactly the questions he raises. Follow-up column hasn't been printed yet.

Thanks to Sauza for the Twitter message that alerted me that the column was now up on the intertubes.

Online poker cheating

Interesting article on the subject from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11250835

Hat tip: http://twitter.com/GamingCounsel

Cheating and more cheating

Cheating in poker

I refer you to this rather remarkable post on the Pocket Fives forum, containing several stories of apparently shady goings-on in the Partouche Poker Tour:

http://www.pocketfives.com/f7/cheating-accepted-partouche-poker-tour-598429/

I obviously have no way to verify any of the accusations. I await further eyewitness accounts. For the final and longest story, I checked Michael Binger's blog, because he is named as a vocal objector to the ruling made, but there's nothing about it there yet. Binger is unquestionably one of the brightest minds in poker, and, from everything I can tell, a completely ethical straight shooter (except for the fact that he agreed to be a pro for the cheatingest online site on the planet, and except for the fact that he knocked Cardgrrl out of the HORSE tournament at the WSOP on a horrendously bad beat, which is even more unforgiveable).


Cheating in blogging

I first learned of this story from Richard Marcus's "Poker Cheating and Casino Cheating Blog," here. It rather nauseates me to have to post that link, but integrity requires it. It's ironic to speak of integrity in the same paragraph as Marcus's name. On several occasions I've called him out on his dogged refusal to follow ordinary ethical practices in blogging; see here, and then follow links backwards. He's a slime bucket. I continue to subscribe to his RSS feed because it does serve as a useful aggregator of news on the subject; if there were another that did the same but treated its source material with normal respect, I'd use it instead.

In this case, Marcus does not name the source, does not link to it. In fact, he tries to make it sound as if he has personally been hearing these stories from the French poker tour from his own private sources, and his publication of them is original. I did a Google news search for "Mike Matusow Partouche" and quickly found the Pocket Fives post noted above. I then discovered that it contained in one place all of the allegations that Marcus names. His post tries to make it sound as if he is compiling them from multiple independent sources, but in reality, he has just plagiarized one pseudonymous post.

I have zero hope of reforming Marcus; I believe him to be an unredeemable thief and cheat. But I feel some obligation to point out his ethical violations when I become aware of them.

Warning: Dangerously funny

Remember the Monty Python sketch about the joke that was so funny that everybody who heard it died of laughter? I was reminded of that when reading the press release, posted at Pokerati (here), about today's sale of Cereus (UltimateBlecch and Absolute Puker) to a company called Blanca Games, Inc.

If you're willing to risk death, let's look at a few of the howlers in the memo.

"Stuart Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Blanca Games, said, 'The acquisition of Cereus is a significant opportunity for us. Cereus is a major platform of well-managed assets.'"

"Well-managed assets"! That's a good one, Stuart! It's so well-managed that it's bleeding money and needed to sell before it attained a value of exactly zero.

Mr. Gordon continues: "From our perspective, we have acquired a large, sophisticated online gaming operation with state-of-the art capabilities, ranging from compliance to business intelligence to online marketing to customer service."

Oh, he's piling them on now! "State-of-the-art capabilities," by which he presumably means an operation that doesn't encrypt the data stream, so that anybody on a wireless local network is vulnerable to having their hole cards read in real time, as well as having their account data read, and their funds subsequently transferred to a thief. Or maybe he meant software that awards to the pot to the company's most prominent sponsored pro, instead of to the player who actually had the best poker hand. "Compliance"? I guess that refers to "complying" with the absurdly low standards of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission--which basically only requires that they keep paying their licensing fees and pay a fine when somebody discovers wrongdoing (the "somebody" never being the KGC itself, which can't be bothered to actually, y'know, regulate anything or anybody, especially when it is tightly enmeshed in ownership of the entity supposedly being regulated). "Business intelligence"? This, one must guess, refers to the highly profitable business practice of owning a poker site and using one's privileged status to play against one's customers while looking at their down cards. "Customer service"? I reckon this is a sly reference to running the biggest and longest-lasting online poker cheating scheme in history, then lying about it to your customers for several years after being caught.

Gordon continues with yet another knee-slapper: "We intend to leverage the existing strengths of the Cereus Poker Network, particularly in the areas of security and customer service. Although we are impressed with many of the new security features on the Network today, security is and will remain our top priority." Stop, stop--you're killing me!

Whew! I somehow survived reading that thing for a second time. I fear, though, that I may have killed off a substantial fraction of my readers. Oh well. There's more where they came from (as UB and AP clearly feel about customers).

Poker gems, #383

Mike Caro, in Bluff magazine column, August, 2010, p. 39.


Strangely, many [poker] players think they should give friends a break. But when you soft play friends at the table others get hurt in the crossfire. Aggressive opponents, who are playing honestly, especially suffer. That's because they mistake what's happening through secret alliances as tactical traits exhibited by the group of friends. This causes those honest players to make poor decisions for the wrong reasons on future hands. Much worse, soft playing often means that honest players get less value when they hold strong hands because some opponents have decided not to participate in order to make it easy on their buddies. Also, honest players may call trying to catch a bluff, not realizing that the opponent would never have bet a weak hand due to a secret understanding with a participating friend. Soft playing friends is cheating. If you want to be generous, win the money through honest play first. Then you can give it away to your friends later.

More on Richard Marcus

I have written about Richard Marcus a few times before (see here and the links backwards that post provides). Apparently his willingness to be dishonest for purposes of his own publicity goes further than I had imagined. A Tweet from Andy Bloch a short time ago pointed me to this article, which is about the Steve Forte case that got a lot of press back in 2007. At the time, it was reported that this involved a casino cheating expert being caught doing something dirty, perhaps involving hidden cameras and poker, in a sting operation inside a private suite at the Borgata in Atlantic City. If the Magic Times article is to be believed--and I find it quite credible--virtually none of that is true.

But the really interesting part, I thought, was the role that Richard Marcus is said to have played in hyping the story. The section about him is well down on the page, so you'll have to either read or scroll to it. It's too long to excerpt in its entirety, but it starts with this exchange during the interview:

MagicTimes: One guy was especially harsh...

England: Let me stop you right there and say a few things about Richard
Marcus, obviously the person you refer to. Richard Marcus was way out of line
and the extent to which he lied about the case should shock you or anyone else
reading this. To any casino, cardroom, organization, conference, magazine,
newspaper or website that has ever considered spending 10 seconds with this guy,
I ask you to listen very carefully.

Cheaters never prosper

An interesting cautionary tale, about how to get yourself banned from the WSOP for life, told by Michael Craig here.

So, y'know, don't do that.