Merge Network

[ktx49]

There is alot of shady stuff happening on the biggest site left in the USA, Merge, and I am receiving zero help from people who seem all to willing to look the other way, as long as they:

a. have a place to play real money poker

b. can cash out any winnings

I'm not wanting to post too many specifics just yet, but I wanted to introduce myself here first since this site is basically devoted to outting and stopping this kind of thing in the poker community....I want to know if you guys have any suggestions or anyone else has brought to you complaints about merge.

anyways what a great site, I wish more people cared about the game the way you do.

[Dan Druff]

There is alot of shady stuff happening on the biggest site left in the USA, Merge, and I am receiving zero help from people who seem all to willing to look the other way, as long as they:

a. have a place to play real money poker

b. can cash out any winnings

I'm not wanting to post too many specifics just yet, but I wanted to introduce myself here first since this site is basically devoted to outting and stopping this kind of thing in the poker community....I want to know if you guys have any suggestions or anyone else has brought to you complaints about merge.

anyways what a great site, I wish more people cared about the game the way you do.

I would be very interested to hear your specifics.

I play on Merge all the time, and I would really like to know of any problems you've experienced.

Are you sure that the problems are from Merge itself, or perhaps just from a shady skin?

For example, Lock Poker is a TERRIBLE skin, but others on Merge are much better, in my experience.

So go ahead... let's hear what you have to say.

[ktx49]

ok if you want to talk about the business side of things, and get into skins etc....merge is a very shady site when dealing with affiliates etc....if you want to learn more about just this check out the forums @ http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com and do some research.

in regards to LOCK, again i suggest you check out the forums on PAL.... apparently lock/BCP/etc = Merge

if you want to talk about game security/integrity, where do i begin?

first of all, there is ZERO internal security....other than a few basic ways of automatically flagging accounts for their own fraud prevention purposes, there is NOTHING being done to make the games secure. nothing. ...if nobody reports it, then nothing is done about it.

there is a huge issue with collusion and feeders on merge.......mostly in MTTs. nothing new here, I just think people have forgetten how damaging this type of cheating can be in the smaller fields found on networks like merge.

[ktx49]

oh and there is something strange going on with the recent story uncovered on 2+2 about accounts being backed with tournament tickets only...via felstars(yup)....never using cash not even to add on or rebuy.....have you at least heard of this issue?

[chinamaniac]

I have a story to type up after my game

[ktx49]

and after reading your sticky:

These are the types of things I would like to see here:

- Poker sites closing accounts unjustly and/or without proper proof of wrongdoing

for this forum i guess i could include this in this thread....there are at least two confirmed reports of people who have had their accounts closed by merge after they contacted the KGC and filed a complaint regarding deposit or withdrawal issues...and merge basically admitted as much....telling the player they have the right to refuse their business and close their accounts without notifice or justifcation. and no, for the record, I was not one of these people.

these are the kind of things that point to a site run by the wrong type of people, and in the wrong manner.

[Dan Druff]

ok if you want to talk about the business side of things, and get into skins etc....merge is a very shady site when dealing with affiliates etc....if you want to learn more about just this check out the forums @ http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com and do some research.

in regards to LOCK, again i suggest you check out the forums on PAL.... apparently lock/BCP/etc = Merge

if you want to talk about game security/integrity, where do i begin?

first of all, there is ZERO internal security....other than a few basic ways of automatically flagging accounts for their own fraud prevention purposes, there is NOTHING being done to make the games secure. nothing. ...if nobody reports it, then nothing is done about it.

there is a huge issue with collusion and feeders on merge.......mostly in MTTs. nothing new here, I just think people have forgetten how damaging this type of cheating can be in the smaller fields found on networks like merge.

That pokeraffiliatelistings forum is a jumbled mess. Can you direct me to the specific threads you're talking about?

I believe you about the security problems. Anyone who thinks that the Merge Network employs a crack security team is kidding themself. It's probably just 1 or 2 dudes who are overwhelmed with complaints (some legit, many bogus), and they probably respond to this by just dismissing them all unless there's smoking gun proof.

I also believe you about the collusion. While I haven't seen much of this at my games, I know that collusion is more common at NL than limit, so that's probably why. Also, my games are a smaller pool of players, so it's hard for two total unknowns to show up and collude without the smart regulars figuring it out.

What do you mean Lock/BCP/etc = Merge? I mean, yeah, they're on the network, but Lock and Blackchip Poker are two very different companies, and neither are affiliated at all with Merge ownership, to my knowledge. I got some information awhile back that the Merge network owned Carbon, but someone told me recently that they split off into two different companies.

From what I've seen, Merge's approach to doing business has been, "We set this thing up. Now play and leave us the fuck alone." They don't seem particularly interested in rule enforcement, and the player poaching war between skins is starting to resemble the Wild West. (I will say, however, that I have recent information that they're finally clamping down on poaching -- or at least they're threatening this.)

They also don't seem particularly interested in getting involved when their skins do shady things, which is why Lock Poker remains on the network.

I don't know about the Feltstars thing you're referring to. Can you link that, too?

Bottom line with Merge, as far as I'm concerned:

1) Choose your skin carefully. Stay away from any with a bad or questionable reputation. Make sure the skin you're using doesn't have cashout issues.

2) Don't keep too much money on there. I wouldn't be surprised if they got busted at any point and crashed to the ground Full Tilt style. I also question whether they really have the player money on deposit.

3) If you're an affiliate, accept the fact that, like the players, you can get fucked over at any time.

4) Understand its limitations and realize that, as flawed as it is, it's still the only realistic option for US players at the moment. Everything else is terrible for so many different reasons.

[Dan Druff]

I have a story to type up after my game

I'm interested to hear this.

[chinamaniac]

I'm interested to hear this.

I told u this story last week , I will type up in detail as best I can this story as well as 2 other times I felt I was either cheated or something was possibly not right with a game on 2 other networks.

[Jasep]

I told u this story last week , I will type up in detail as best I can this story as well as 2 other times I felt I was either cheated or something was possibly not right with a game on 2 other networks.

Anyway China or Druff can rate the merge skins, I only have accounts at Hero and Black Chip and like them both, wont do an account at lock, but wondering if there are any other solid options.

[chinamaniac]

I blogged this and made a thread but will paste this here because it pertains to subject. Here is link to full thread too and merge part is below

http://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sho...&p=633#post633

The 4th instance came this past fall when I was playing on merge. I was playing a 6-12 or 10-20 LHE HU match when a player named "shadowmode" joined me. He played weird where he wasn't spewy but he did stupid things but they were all correct and I felt something wasn't right so I quit and began chatting with him.

Then my buddy commented to me through skype that I was quitting a huge fish. My buddy sent me a link and I opened it and it was this guys PTR page. I noticed he was a micro player and logged in 500 hands at about every micro limit in August and he lost about 20 BB 100 per limit played. Granted it was a small sample but it was consistent with every game.

I felt something was odd so I asked the guy how long he had been playing on merge and he said he told me this account was BRAND NEW and this was his 1st or second day playing. But his PTR said otherwise. It had hands tracked for a 2 month stretch in the summer. WEIRD HUH?

So I emailed merge and told them that I felt I may have been cheated. And told them to look at the chat where he says he is brand new and that he had hands logged in here before. Their reply was "oh players say diff things all the time etc.." and refused to look into the chat. But again what would be the motive for him to lie to me? Anyhow I put this one in the past and then about 3 weeks ago I started talking to a Merge reg on Skype.

Merge reg asks me this exact question after talking for a while

"Have you ever played Shadowmode?" I say yes I have and he follows it up with "did you think anything was strange about when u played him" I say yes and tell him my story and why I quit. He says he thought he was a superuser and told me his story. Shadowmode joined my buddys table and beat him out of 6k in 30-60 and was playing "very odd" but everything worked. Keep in mind my buddy is a world class heads up player. Not that world class players can't lose but he told me the guy was doing the most odd things yet the guy beat him for a decent sum. Since that match vs. my buddy Shadowmode has never played a hand on Merge.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/mer...rch/shadowmode

Were we cheated? I don't know. Were their odd things about these matches ? Certainly. Not only did some random guy who comes in and takes on the best HU players win BUT HE QUIT and left and was never heard from again. When most guys whether it be donks or pros win on a new account they usually don't just bail and never play again. They usually stay and try and win more. Also SOMEONE whether it was shadow mode or someone else played micros in August and got destroyed yet he told me the acc was brand new. And when he started playing on acc in fall when he played me and my firsnd he payed no micros. It was all 4-8 to 50-100.

[Rollo Tomasi]

[ktx49]

wow just wow....i was never willing to throw the superuser word out there for fear of instantly being LOLed and ignored, but as a high volume MTT player i can tell you for sure there is SOMETHING strange other than standard security problems I mentioned above...its been driving me crazy because I just have a hard time believing something like that could really be occuring.

but, if we are going to go down that road, I can tell you for sure that you are not the first person to say this to me. Back when I first joined merge after BF, I was playing HU cash alot, and i came to merge and just got DESTROYED. i had never seen so many perfect flats, limp calls, etc...just couldnt understand how I was being crushed like this so consistently. so I switched to MTTs and I had some success but I immediately noticed the completely unorthodox play from some players....merge plays so shallow in most of their tourneys, that there just isnt this type of room for creativity, etc but yet I see people who never limp and lose the hand at showdown etc....even when they have low M etc...just very very suspicous play. if i wasnt winning at my games and it wasnt my only option other than the anon tables(which disgusts me) at Bovada, I would have stopped playing on merge a long time ago.

however, someone brought up some very interested thoughts and I would like to share it with you guys just to see what the consensus is. I was told that their is some possibility that people are not viewing your hole cards, but are able to see the board or have some type of way of knowing the board cards...something along those lines. ive heard several people claim that the rabbit cam feature could be cracked.

from what I see on merge, from some players, this would be pretty good analysis. they lose hands but only with strange flush over flush, boat over trips, etc....and im only referring to all in preflop hands....just strange.

again i have a very large database and a slew of high volume players who are willing to donate HHs/DBs for the cause because they also believe something is up on merge.

anyways lets not rule anything out, just because it sounds ridiculous...thats all im saying

[ShadyJ]

Maybe this explains why guys that play like 38/13 and make the most horrific plays crush for like 60k in mtts. I'm just amazed when I sharkscope really bad players their huge winners. I always just chalked it up to the games being so soft. Regardless only other option for US players is to not play.

[ktx49]

Maybe this explains why guys that play like 38/13 and make the most horrific plays crush for like 60k in mtts. I'm just amazed when I sharkscope really bad players their huge winners. I always just chalked it up to the games being so soft. Regardless only other option for US players is to not play.

its exactly what I was getting at with my post above yours....when i was talking about the extremely unorthodox play. it just is something i have never seen even though ive played MTTs on 4 different networks now. i thought they were just exploiting the really bad reg-fish but after putting in about 6k games ive realized that they just play this way, and very profitably...and they play against top level competition....

if you read the thread on 2+2 or p5s about the feltstars ticket accts, you will see that even buy ins as low as $11 FOs are filled with VERY good regs...people who were playing the highest stakes on stars/FTP/CEREUS. just strange that this style seems so profitable on Merge yet its the exact recipe for bleeding out on any other network....i see people who are calling all ins as much as they are shoving. just lol.

but, I really would rather focus on the stuff that I feel is very blatant and much easier to prove....stuff like collusion, feeder accounts/horses, etc....

[XR71WhiteFish]

wow just wow....i was never willing to throw the superuser word out there for fear of instantly being LOLed and ignored, but as a high volume MTT player i can tell you for sure there is SOMETHING strange other than standard security problems I mentioned above...its been driving me crazy because I just have a hard time believing something like that could really be occuring.

but, if we are going to go down that road, I can tell you for sure that you are not the first person to say this to me. Back when I first joined merge after BF, I was playing HU cash alot, and i came to merge and just got DESTROYED. i had never seen so many perfect flats, limp calls, etc...just couldnt understand how I was being crushed like this so consistently. so I switched to MTTs and I had some success but I immediately noticed the completely unorthodox play from some players....merge plays so shallow in most of their tourneys that their just isnt this type of room for creativity, etc but yet I see people who never limp and lose the hand at showdown etc....even when they have low M etc...just very very suspicous play. if i wasnt winning at my games and it wasnt my only option other than the anon tables(which disgusts me) at Bovada, I would have stopped playing on merge a long time ago.

however, someone brought up some very interested thoughts and I would like to share it with you guys just to see what the consensus is. I was told that their is some possibility that people are not viewing your hole cards, but are able to see the board or have some type of way of knowing the board cards...something along those lines. ive heard several people claim that the rabbit cam feature could be cracked.

from what I see on merge, from some players, this would be pretty good analysis. they lose hands but only with strange flush over flush, boat over trips, etc....and im only referring to all in preflop hands....just strange.

again i have a very large database and a slew of high volume players who are willing to donate HHs/DBs for the cause because they also believe something is up on merge.

anyways lets not rule anything out, just because it sounds ridiculous...thats all im saying

It sounds like it's time to do an analysis of the client and sort this out.

I have not done any poking around Merge for fear of getting banned from one of the last places I can still play, but screw it...if there is a "board card data being sent to the client" vulnerability out there, it needs to be found and documented. Sounds like I don't have much to worry about.

Finding these vulnerabilities requires running the client in a debugger like OllyDbg and tracing back from calls to the packet receive area to get and log out the server-sent data, specifically at the beginning of a new hand, and then working out the actual data protocol, to establish whether board card data (or card values in general, beyond your hole cards) are trusted with the client.

I for a long time had my suspicions about the Bovada client having this problem when they rolled out the anonymous player/ rabbit cam feature last year, especially seeing as how it appears no network I/O happens at the time you "rabbit hunt". I'm still working that case reversing the network protocol. It's pretty funky. Anyhow..as for Merge...

You can be certain that if I discover something like this, I won't be the first to do so.

And this goes to my big pet peeve of playing on these poker sites - there is really VERY poor process in the software development side of these outfits. I think there's a sense that as long as packets between the client and server are encrypted, noone is ever going to dig in and work out the data the server sends the client. This is simply not true and lazy thinking. These smaller networks don't have the manpower/tech savvy to detect and catch people, for example, running the client in a debugger - and if someone finds a vulnerability to give them the board cards at the beginning of a hand? Yea, I highly doubt they're going to tell anyone.

I think the people that have the talent to find and exploit these sorts of things have learned a lot over the years when it comes to detection avoidance - i.e., the need to not just run it up insane and steamroll everyone...but to win some and make it a point to lose some, just lose a little less than you win. I doubt a network that, as Druff opined, probably only has a handful of folks at most paid to worry about security is ever going to catch people exploiting client/server design flaws.

I'll report anything of interest here that I find.

[ktx49]

very nice man, i agree with most of your sentiments.
first of all even if its near impossible to detect, i think there should still be an effort to try...

and your right about them learning from the past and getting better at avoiding detection.
this is something I want to also bring up because i find alot of people on merge who hit a few big scores in MTTs and stop playing...which OK is not out of the realms of possibility until you think about the fact that you cant cashout more than 2.5k at a time on some skins. and i doubt it even more when its someone who ships the high roller in their first 10 tourneys after buying in for as low as $1! are they gonna have the discipline to sit on 8k or something for months at a time while they cashed out 2,500usd per check....its just weird....

if you need any help please let me know...i am not too worried about being banned or anything ive cashed out most of my roll on merge anyways although ill admit it had nothing to do with this lol.

anyways,....i also play on bovada and am interested in any potential vulnerabilities that could exist on there especially considering they are supposedly using the old UB software which had several issues not just the superuser scandal.

[BuSTMeANuT]

wow just wow....i was never willing to throw the superuser word out there for fear of instantly being LOLed and ignored, but as a high volume MTT player i can tell you for sure there is SOMETHING strange other than standard security problems I mentioned above...its been driving me crazy because I just have a hard time believing something like that could really be occuring.

but, if we are going to go down that road, I can tell you for sure that you are not the first person to say this to me. Back when I first joined merge after BF, I was playing HU cash alot, and i came to merge and just got DESTROYED. i had never seen so many perfect flats, limp calls, etc...just couldnt understand how I was being crushed like this so consistently. so I switched to MTTs and I had some success but I immediately noticed the completely unorthodox play from some players....merge plays so shallow in most of their tourneys, that there just isnt this type of room for creativity, etc but yet I see people who never limp and lose the hand at showdown etc....even when they have low M etc...just very very suspicous play. if i wasnt winning at my games and it wasnt my only option other than the anon tables(which disgusts me) at Bovada, I would have stopped playing on merge a long time ago.

however, someone brought up some very interested thoughts and I would like to share it with you guys just to see what the consensus is. I was told that their is some possibility that people are not viewing your hole cards, but are able to see the board or have some type of way of knowing the board cards...something along those lines. ive heard several people claim that the rabbit cam feature could be cracked.

from what I see on merge, from some players, this would be pretty good analysis. they lose hands but only with strange flush over flush, boat over trips, etc....and im only referring to all in preflop hands....just strange.

again i have a very large database and a slew of high volume players who are willing to donate HHs/DBs for the cause because they also believe something is up on merge.

anyways lets not rule anything out, just because it sounds ridiculous...thats all im saying

This is quickly turning into a bad beat, run bad, not as good as you think you are, excuse to tell people how you're being cheated etc. thread.

We need to look at the real issue with Merge especially Lock Poker.

The main issure with Lock Poker right now is their payouts. They supposedly implemented their own "Cashier" on Feb. 1st and since then all hell has broken loose.

WU withdrawls drop from 850$ a week to 250$ a week(lol).

They add a new bank wire option which dozens of people have used but not one person has actually received a penny according to the 22 thread.

They actually talked some players into cancelling checks that have been in the works for almost a month and using the wire option instead.

They have 2 reps on 22(Rizen aka Eric Lynch and some guy named Shane) who respond to almost every lock poker thread but weeks later they have still conveniently overlooked the bank wire thread and Lock doesn't answer emails, leaving everyone in the blue.

I'd be interested to hear if any users here have cashed out from Lock recently.

[Bootsy Collins]

So let me throw this scenario out there. Say Lock Poker who many refer it as "Cock Poker" somehow gets "Merged" with Black Chip Poker. Would it then be known as Black Cock Poker? Sorry by the way I have been drinking tonight

[ktx49]

i play on lock and i have never had an issue receiving my cashouts, but i have always cashed out 1 way, via check.

since their new cashout procedures or whatever starting in february ive cashed out two checks via courier and received my first one start to finish in less than 20 days(started feb 9th in hand by the 29th; no bounce)...my second one was approved/processed a few days ago and if it follows the same timeline as the first i should have that one in hand within the next week or two.

but i agree, id prefer to keep the thread about issues we can actually look into...thats why I wasnt prepared to bring up the stuff that others did.
....however, since the cats out the bag per say, and someone is offering to look into it further, why not? at worst we can put some things to rest.