Your Thoughts on Report-Bovada.lv2015-Online Poker In Danger

[IamGreek]

I'll just drop this here for your opinions and speculation:

https://medium.com/@dataminepoker/re...r-adf904952c41

I found this intriguing--"It is believed this group is attempting to take a legal stance within the United States to start new online poker rooms accessible nationwide near the beginning of Q2 2016"

It was also somewhat comforting to note that ACR takes security seriously.

Let the games begin.

[Sanlmar]

Skimmed this real hard.

So a group of private businesses are considering purchasing existing US facing poker software entities.

A bid was put out there seeking a company to examine US facing poker companies.

This outfit / Data Mine Poker was awarded the project.

Data Mine Poker is publicly speculating about their customers' intentions.

Data Mine Poker is releasing the contents of the report to the public before any action has been taken by their customer.

Data Mine Poker has not completed the study yet is releasing results.


This smells like complete bullshit. Who Data Mine Poker is & why they are posting this is more interesting than their results/allegations.

Some of the detail was cute if not impressive.

[IAmProfessionalTalk]

Loses a lot of credibility by calling card counting cheating.

[Dan Druff]

Looks like BS.

My problems with this report:

1) The justification for it is poor. Supposedly some group which was looking to purchase a poker site hired them... and somehow the study morphed into an expensive, exhaustive, and detailed analysis of Bovada security? Unless this company was looking to specifically purchase Bovada (which doesn't seem to be the case, according to the report), this would be a waste of the investors' money. It's almost like someone threw together this flimsy justification so as to feign neutrality.

2) It is not clear who is behind this study, and also not clear who funded it.

3) The contact e-mail is at hmamail.com -- an anonymous e-mail service. That doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in the report, or the people behind it. Why the intense secrecy?

4) This report makes a lot of harmful claims against Bovada, yet does not provide actual data to back it up.

5) The "secondary report", which will provide actual data to back up their claims, supposedly won't be available publicly, and will only be shared privately with select individuals on a "case by case basis". Uh huh.

6) The general premise of what they found -- essentially that certain players seem to know when a cooler hand is coming (such as AA over KK) -- is weak. If someone really was cheating from the inside, or had cracked the RNG, smart cheating would occur by folding to big bets in NL in otherwise marginal spots (such as when you have 2 pair and your opponent has a set). It wouldn't lead to more big-pot hands existing. If anything, it would lead to fewer big pots, as those with knowledge of the hole cards would simply avoid bad spots where they are going to lose a lot.

7) In an odd passage regarding collusion, these "researchers" admit to colluding and winning 12k by doing so! What kind of research is this?!

8) There is a strange plug for ACR near the end, essentially making the point that ACR is safe and Bovada isn't. Very suspicious.

It is clear that whoever put this report together has a fair amount of knowledge of programming and statistical analysis. However, that doesn't mean any of this is accurate. It just means they have this background, and are using their technical expertise to baffle critics and lend credence to their findings.

I don't buy it.

I cannot accept something like this unless it comes from a credible source, or at least with data that can be independently verified.

[sah_24]

As someone who has a reasonably large database of hands , been playing on there since BF and recording hands with Bovada hand converter since like 2012 or so . This whole thing is completely full of shit as I told Dutch on Twitter . Anyone who believes this shit is a fucking moron . . .

[IamGreek]

Good reads guys. Apparently Poker Tracker confirms to Haily Hintze that they did not furnish hand histories.

[anchordraw]

they said they are doing a similar report on other US facing sites including Betonline, ACR, Carbon etc. From the report:

Thank you for reading, and please look out for our team’s other poker reports coming out shortly. Alongside Bovada Poker, our team is creating security reports on:
1.America’s Card Room
2.BetOnline
3.Sports Betting.ag
4.Black Chip
5.Carbon



I find it odd that you can just buy or get hand histories in that volume (216 million) from Poker Tracker. They claim in the article they got them for BetOnline also. Well, PokerTracker doesn't even support BetOnline or SportsBetting. From the article:

"As a separate case study, our team was able to contact poker tracker and purchase a database of approximately 216 million poker hands tracked by their software from Bovada, Bet Online, SportsBetting.ag, America’s Cardroom, and 888 Poker."

why would Poker Tracker have hand histories on Bet Online or SportsBetting.ag that run on Chico network, when Poker Tracker does not support that network? Even if they had the hand histories, do you really think they would sell them? I'm thinking no to both Questions.


lol that they admit to colluding/cheating to see if they would be caught. Brian Hastings would be proud of them.

[FPS_Russia]

This sucks, I was hoping for another UB caliber scandal.

The math guys say its bullshit then its bullshit.

Still holding out hope Ivey was super using on FTP.

Edit: Wait a minute, that's a long and exhaustive investigation. Keep an open mind fellas, this could be YUGE.

[anchordraw]

from the report:

Any individual with a substantial background in encryption and advanced mathematical algorithm theory would be capable of both creating an edge case scenario as well as finding hidden edge case algorithms.

Phil Ivey might be involved in the Bovada scandal, as he no longer can use edge sorting at casinos, so he is a prime candidate to be behind this new technique of "Edge Case" cheating in online poker.

[Dan Druff]

Even more damning to the authors of this report: Their e-mail address is fake.

I just got this from a user here:

hmamail.com is not an anonymous email address, or more accurately no longer is. It's not simply a non-working email address.

Approximately a year ago the DNS entry for hmamail.com was assigned to 127.0.0.1. In other words it's assigned to localhost.

Therefore no hmamail.com email address is a valid address.

You can see that by going to a DOS prompt and typing
ping hmamail.com
or
ping localhost

Not surprisingly the hoax web page has a hoax email address at the bottom.

He is correct.

hmamail.com no longer exists, and therefore that e-mail address does not work.

[Dan Druff]

Never mind.

Somehow hmamail still works, despite pinging the domain resulting in a 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

I can't figure out how they did it. Anyone have a clue? Just curious.

But yeah, the e-mail works, though that doesn't validate the report in the slightest.

[vookenmeister]

Never mind.

Somehow hmamail still works, despite pinging the domain resulting in a 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

I can't figure out how they did it. Anyone have a clue? Just curious.

But yeah, the e-mail works, though that doesn't validate the report in the slightest.

Email is delivered by looking up the DNS MX entry for the fully qualified domain name to the right of the "@" sign. In this case the MX record for hmamail.com translates to inbound.hmamail.com which in turn translate to a real routable IP address. When you do a ping or nslookup it defaults to the DNS A record not the MX record.

The story still rings as complete bullshit to me though.

[Dan Druff]

Never mind.

Somehow hmamail still works, despite pinging the domain resulting in a 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

I can't figure out how they did it. Anyone have a clue? Just curious.

But yeah, the e-mail works, though that doesn't validate the report in the slightest.

Email is delivered by looking up the DNS MX entry for the fully qualified domain name to the right of the "@" sign. In this case the MX record for hmamail.com translates to inbound.hmamail.com which in turn translate to a real routable IP address. When you do a ping or nslookup it defaults to the DNS A record not the MX record.

The story still rings as complete bullshit to me though.

I don't know why I didn't just go to http://mxtoolbox.com/ (which comes up if you google "mail server lookup') because that would have answered my question right there. Wasn't thinking straight this afternoon. Had never configured a mail server before, so I didn't remember the MX record, though I knew about it years ago.

Thanks for the clarification.

[sonatine]

" This means that the odds of playing 20 million random hands and seeing the number of multi player big hands that our team collected would be roughly 1 in a few 100 trillion. "

If an unaffiliated, independent team verified this, wow...

[sonatine]

Even more damning to the authors of this report: Their e-mail address is fake.

I just got this from a user here:

hmamail.com is not an anonymous email address, or more accurately no longer is. It's not simply a non-working email address.

Approximately a year ago the DNS entry for hmamail.com was assigned to 127.0.0.1. In other words it's assigned to localhost.

Therefore no hmamail.com email address is a valid address.

You can see that by going to a DOS prompt and typing
ping hmamail.com
or
ping localhost

Not surprisingly the hoax web page has a hoax email address at the bottom.

He is correct.

hmamail.com no longer exists, and therefore that e-mail address does not work.

$ host hmamail.com
hmamail.com has address 127.0.0.1
hmamail.com mail is handled by 0 inbound.hmamail.com.
$ host inbound.hmamail.com
inbound.hmamail.com has address 96.44.163.218

[novips]

Has anyone definitively put this issue to bed one way or the other? It seems to me there is reason for concern given the number of complaints and the fact that Bovada has an incentive to create/ignore a problem like this given (1) it apparently increases rake; (2) it is hard to check due to anonymous tables and lack of regulation; and (3) given the complexity of RNGs, there's likely a good amount of plausible deniability. As for the motives of the researchers, I've met enough geeks (and I say that with the utmost respect) in my day to know they often don't need a monetary incentive to dig into a juicy problem.

[HowQuaint]

I tend to think this abomination was the result of some disgruntled affiliate site making some sort of pseudo-science argument in order to hurt Bodog's reputation. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the timing of this article's creation correlates rather well with Bodog and Bovada's decision to cease all poker advertising with affiliates. I know it was a major kick in the nuts for the super-affiliates. It hurt us too as Bodog was our most recommended room at the time.

[Daly]

I can't speak to this report in the slightest.

What I can tell you is I play a lot of live poker. I can go a whole month.... 40-60 hours of live play and not get a true "bad beat" or put a bad beat on someone else. I'm talking about Set over set he turns quads he calls down with A-K and goes runner runner Broadway..... Something like this just doesn't happen that often. I'm not saying it NEVER happens, it's just rare when playing live.

I'm telling you I could deposit at Bovada and within 2 hours I'd flip top set and someone would go runner runner st8/flush for my whole stack. It happens all the time and it usually happens when you are all to willing to give it all in.

I'm sure it's just a recent bias on my part...... But I wouldn't be in the least bit suprised this is true.

[JoeD]

I can't speak to this report in the slightest.

What I can tell you is I play a lot of live poker. I can go a whole month.... 40-60 hours of live play and not get a true "bad beat" or put a bad beat on someone else. I'm talking about Set over set he turns quads he calls down with A-K and goes runner runner Broadway..... Something like this just doesn't happen that often. I'm not saying it NEVER happens, it's just rare when playing live.

I'm telling you I could deposit at Bovada and within 2 hours I'd flip top set and someone would go runner runner st8/flush for my whole stack. It happens all the time and it usually happens when you are all to willing to give it all in.

I'm sure it's just a recent bias on my part...... But I wouldn't be in the least bit suprised this is true.

I agree with this and have had the same experience at low stakes MTTs over the last year. I'm convinced that the software somehow more often than not analyzes the hole cards of the players in a particular hand and then generates a board that creates the bad beats you mention. Not always, but at a much higher rate than I've ever experienced in 10 years of mostly live poker. At least with the software prior to the recent update, I swear that sometimes you could see the software "thinking" for a split second before generating the turn and river cards.

[HowQuaint]

I can't speak to this report in the slightest.

What I can tell you is I play a lot of live poker. I can go a whole month.... 40-60 hours of live play and not get a true "bad beat" or put a bad beat on someone else. I'm talking about Set over set he turns quads he calls down with A-K and goes runner runner Broadway..... Something like this just doesn't happen that often. I'm not saying it NEVER happens, it's just rare when playing live.

I'm telling you I could deposit at Bovada and within 2 hours I'd flip top set and someone would go runner runner st8/flush for my whole stack. It happens all the time and it usually happens when you are all to willing to give it all in.

I'm sure it's just a recent bias on my part...... But I wouldn't be in the least bit suprised this is true.

I can't speak to this report in the slightest.

What I can tell you is I play a lot of live poker. I can go a whole month.... 40-60 hours of live play and not get a true "bad beat" or put a bad beat on someone else. I'm talking about Set over set he turns quads he calls down with A-K and goes runner runner Broadway..... Something like this just doesn't happen that often. I'm not saying it NEVER happens, it's just rare when playing live.

I'm telling you I could deposit at Bovada and within 2 hours I'd flip top set and someone would go runner runner st8/flush for my whole stack. It happens all the time and it usually happens when you are all to willing to give it all in.

I'm sure it's just a recent bias on my part...... But I wouldn't be in the least bit suprised this is true.

I agree with this and have had the same experience at low stakes MTTs over the last year. I'm convinced that the software somehow more often than not analyzes the hole cards of the players in a particular hand and then generates a board that creates the bad beats you mention. Not always, but at a much higher rate than I've ever experienced in 10 years of mostly live poker. At least with the software prior to the recent update, I swear that sometimes you could see the software "thinking" for a split second before generating the turn and river cards.

One live poker table = 20-35 hands an hour.

1 Online poker table = 100 hands an hour

2 Online poker tables = 150-200 hands an hour

4 Online poker tables = 300-400 hands an hour


When you play online poker, you see 10-20x more hands per hour being dealt. You will thus see 10-20x more "bad beats" than you would in a live environment. The statistical output is the same. With this massively larger volume, your brain may not properly adapt. It's alright, you're human and we all have this issue. You'll *think* that you see more bad beats than you normally would statistically speaking, but you're incorrect. You're suffering from a negativity bias.