The Men In Suits
Jul. 18th, 2010 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksAbout nine years ago I think I said that I trusted Paradise Poker to be honest more than I did my bank. And it was something I meant. I generated good income for them. There were probably only about 20,000 active players (I still remember the 50 millionth hand promotion, which at the time got a record 3,000 people logged in at the same time -- compared with the 180,000 you get these days at the weekend on Pokerstars) and Paradise treated you well. You dealt with real people who understood poker.
But, times changed. First there was the Ultimate Bet "superuser" scandal, and then the concept of "poker skins" developed. Not only did this change the economic dynamic of online poker sites (where there is one host of the technical stuff, and a number of "agents" who run the front ends for the punters) but it also brought in a few fly-by-nights. As is always the case when there's money around, some shady characters emerged.
But Pokerstars remained aloof from this, and it profited from it. First it overtook Party Poker as the biggest site, and then it moved on to dominate. From bing the place where people went for tournaments, it became the home of choice for the 2+2 multi-table grinder.
Then, when the UIGEA laws came in, Pokerstars did not bottle it, as did the by-now listed Party Poker (the men in suits got in there early and did their best to totally fuck it up). And Pokerstars did prosper goodly.
But, around the end of last year, things seemed to change. Basically, Pokerstars had become too big, and it wanted to become bigger. It was targeting the emerging nations, a fertile collection of fields as far as it was concerned. Many of the poker guys who had been there a long time began to feel that they were outnumbered by the new "numbers" guys who were coming in. The men in suits had taken over.
I think this is inevitable to most growing companies, and the result is usually disastrous. Look what a mess Apple got into when the men in suits took over. Only when the original "inventors" came back did the original spark return.
I don't know why Lee Jones jacked it in at Pokerstars, but I do know that the man loves poker, and, like most lovers of poker, he is not a "big business" guy. Lee Jones would never have made it at IBM, unless he had joined it in the 1920s.
There are, I think, three kinds of employees:
1) employees who like being in small companies because they can "make a difference".
2) employees who like being in big companies because "if you fuck up, no-one notices", and
3) people who want to work in the public sector.
Discarding the last, that leaves two distinct types of private sector wannabees, and these two types will never get on.
Pokerstars has moved into the "big" side of the fence, and employees who are instinctively on the "small" side have gradually been crowded out by the typical "big company" employee.
The good news is that it hasn't taken too long for the shit to hit the fan. One reason for this is that the poker "consuming" community is less forgiving than virtually any other community. And it also happens to have a small core who, if a company fucks up, will be shown to have fucked up. It's a classic case of the people on the outside being cleverer and more competent than the people on the inside.
Two scandals have broken almost simultaneously.
First, "Chiren80", a multi-tabler who came from the World of Warcraft sector (where he was "Athene") and was given a "Pokerstars team player" badge (equals a ton of rakeback), got kind of fed up with spending his entire life 12- to 24-tabling in order to keep the extremely valuable Supernova Elite six-star status. Being quite a bright chap, he spotted that the new "micromania" promotion dreamt up by some incompetents in the Pokerstars marketing department (see "big employee" syndrome, above) had a bit of a flaw in it. Basically, the victory points being awarded at this level were extremely generous. Since Chiren got 100% rakeback, he didn't need to worry that much about the rake. All he had to do was play a ton of hands against another Supernova Elite player, bashing the money back and forth (and settling up any difference at the end) and generating victory points (those things which define your player level on Pokerstars) in the process. In a sense, it saved Chiren a lot of time, and time (as I well know), is the most valuable thing when it comes to maintaining a high player level on Pokerstars.
I should point out that this is not about pennies. I am a Supernova and maintaining even that level is a struggle -- it equals about $18k a year in rake. For Chiren, he needs to pay about $180k a year in rake.
But the benefits are large -- I'm chalking up about $700 to $800 in benefits from $1250 a month in rake. This is four times what I would get at the "base" Bronze Star level. And Chiren's benefits are even higher than that.
Not being stupid, Chiren asked Stars if he could play a "hyper-aggressive" style at lower stakes. Here comes incomeptent level two at Stars, because they said, Yes, he could. No alarm bells ranng because, well, Chiren understands poker, understands points accumulation (shit, he came from World of Warcraft!) and can spot a flaw in the rules a mile away.
So he sits down and plays against one other player in this "hyper-aggressive" style, generating gazillions of victory points for both of them. As soon as anyone else sat down at the table, they sat out.
Where Chiren went wrong was that the people on 2+2 aren't stupid, and they spotted it.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/pokerstars-pro-chiren80-dumping-back-forth-vpps-829120/
Initially Chiren tried to spin the same line that he had played with Pokerstars (and which Pokerstars believed), but that got nowhere. 2+2 readers are a little bit sharper than that.
And, lo and behold, Pokerstars eventually posts to the forum that Chiren would not be doing this any more.
+++++
The second balls-up by Stars was even more hilarious and worrying. Malloc posted that he had noticed that three players who had played a ton of hands with very similar styles (9%/9% shortstackers in Full Ring Games) had moved down in stakes at the same time, and then, a month or so later, had moved down in stakes again.
Now, any person who plays a lot of online poker would say that this screams "Bot".
This was the first response from the now famous "Pokerstars Jeff". I somehow get the feeling that Jeff is one of the "big company" employees that I talked about earlier.
Unfortunately, Pokertableratings, without access to the hole cards, was able to produce proof, within 24 hours, that there was indeed a 10-man bot-ring at work, and that it had been at work for 8 million hands or so. The stats that it showed were not only convincing, but they were easy to find -- including the most damning 0% check-call and 0% check-raise on flop, plus 0% bet-raise(by opponent)-call.
http://www.pokertableratings.com/blog/2010/07/bot-ring-discovered-on-poker-stars/
One of the comforting thing about big-company employment is that everyone else around you doesn't give a shit either -- which is why incompetent people in big companies survive so long -- it's a conspiracy of silence going right the way up the tree.
Unfortunately in the land of online poker, that doesn't apply. It's not just your boss who you have to keep happy, and brown-nosing doesn't work with the hounds of death that are 2+2 contributors.
For a while all was silence from Pokerstars -- fair enough, in a sense, in that it was night-time in the Isle of Man and then the weekend.
Over the night of Friday the 10-man bot team continued playing. I suspect that they had already withdrawn most of their $60k-plus-benefits of winnings.
The 2+2 thread was running very hot on early Saturday morning my time (late night the US, mid-morning in Russia and old USSR states, where these bots were playing from).
Then it got even odder. Pokerstars Jeff, clearly unaware of the "when you are in a hole, stop digging" rule, posted the following:
Most of this post was greeted with a combination of disbelief, abuse and sarcasm (plus, of course, the inevitable Photoshops and photos of Heath Robinson-types and 50-year old computers hard at work trying to detect bots).
But the worst part of it was this was actually libellous (well, I think that it was libellous). It's stated quite explicitly that Malloc had lied in his original post and misrepresented Pokerstars' response to his enquiry -- that Stars had only said that these players were not colluding, but that a concurrent investigation into whether they were bots was continuing.
Malloc was having none of this:
Which prompted this prompt response, presumably with two Isle of Man lawyers holding guns to the back of his head:
Oh my, this is almost textbook stuff of a big company fucking up. (And, should I add, all credit for malloc, who simply typed "thanks for the clarification" and took it no further. I would have been on the phone to my lawyers.)
++++
In a way this reminds me of AIG, a company that became the biggest insurer in the US and whose employees developed a reputation for arrogance along the lines of "we're the biggest". The employees from the old days were replaced by jobsworths who liked the comfort of big companies. It all went wrong for AIG. Pokerstars really ought to be careful that it doesn't head down the same route. One thing is definitely clear -- the people who are currently in charge are not the right people, and it's the senior management who should be replaced, not the likes of Pokerstars Jeff, who is merely a "big company" kind of employee who got himself into a situation where he was quite obviously completely out of his depth.
Don't sack him. Sack the people who put him there.
___________
But, times changed. First there was the Ultimate Bet "superuser" scandal, and then the concept of "poker skins" developed. Not only did this change the economic dynamic of online poker sites (where there is one host of the technical stuff, and a number of "agents" who run the front ends for the punters) but it also brought in a few fly-by-nights. As is always the case when there's money around, some shady characters emerged.
But Pokerstars remained aloof from this, and it profited from it. First it overtook Party Poker as the biggest site, and then it moved on to dominate. From bing the place where people went for tournaments, it became the home of choice for the 2+2 multi-table grinder.
Then, when the UIGEA laws came in, Pokerstars did not bottle it, as did the by-now listed Party Poker (the men in suits got in there early and did their best to totally fuck it up). And Pokerstars did prosper goodly.
But, around the end of last year, things seemed to change. Basically, Pokerstars had become too big, and it wanted to become bigger. It was targeting the emerging nations, a fertile collection of fields as far as it was concerned. Many of the poker guys who had been there a long time began to feel that they were outnumbered by the new "numbers" guys who were coming in. The men in suits had taken over.
I think this is inevitable to most growing companies, and the result is usually disastrous. Look what a mess Apple got into when the men in suits took over. Only when the original "inventors" came back did the original spark return.
I don't know why Lee Jones jacked it in at Pokerstars, but I do know that the man loves poker, and, like most lovers of poker, he is not a "big business" guy. Lee Jones would never have made it at IBM, unless he had joined it in the 1920s.
There are, I think, three kinds of employees:
1) employees who like being in small companies because they can "make a difference".
2) employees who like being in big companies because "if you fuck up, no-one notices", and
3) people who want to work in the public sector.
Discarding the last, that leaves two distinct types of private sector wannabees, and these two types will never get on.
Pokerstars has moved into the "big" side of the fence, and employees who are instinctively on the "small" side have gradually been crowded out by the typical "big company" employee.
The good news is that it hasn't taken too long for the shit to hit the fan. One reason for this is that the poker "consuming" community is less forgiving than virtually any other community. And it also happens to have a small core who, if a company fucks up, will be shown to have fucked up. It's a classic case of the people on the outside being cleverer and more competent than the people on the inside.
Two scandals have broken almost simultaneously.
First, "Chiren80", a multi-tabler who came from the World of Warcraft sector (where he was "Athene") and was given a "Pokerstars team player" badge (equals a ton of rakeback), got kind of fed up with spending his entire life 12- to 24-tabling in order to keep the extremely valuable Supernova Elite six-star status. Being quite a bright chap, he spotted that the new "micromania" promotion dreamt up by some incompetents in the Pokerstars marketing department (see "big employee" syndrome, above) had a bit of a flaw in it. Basically, the victory points being awarded at this level were extremely generous. Since Chiren got 100% rakeback, he didn't need to worry that much about the rake. All he had to do was play a ton of hands against another Supernova Elite player, bashing the money back and forth (and settling up any difference at the end) and generating victory points (those things which define your player level on Pokerstars) in the process. In a sense, it saved Chiren a lot of time, and time (as I well know), is the most valuable thing when it comes to maintaining a high player level on Pokerstars.
I should point out that this is not about pennies. I am a Supernova and maintaining even that level is a struggle -- it equals about $18k a year in rake. For Chiren, he needs to pay about $180k a year in rake.
But the benefits are large -- I'm chalking up about $700 to $800 in benefits from $1250 a month in rake. This is four times what I would get at the "base" Bronze Star level. And Chiren's benefits are even higher than that.
Not being stupid, Chiren asked Stars if he could play a "hyper-aggressive" style at lower stakes. Here comes incomeptent level two at Stars, because they said, Yes, he could. No alarm bells ranng because, well, Chiren understands poker, understands points accumulation (shit, he came from World of Warcraft!) and can spot a flaw in the rules a mile away.
So he sits down and plays against one other player in this "hyper-aggressive" style, generating gazillions of victory points for both of them. As soon as anyone else sat down at the table, they sat out.
Where Chiren went wrong was that the people on 2+2 aren't stupid, and they spotted it.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/pokerstars-pro-chiren80-dumping-back-forth-vpps-829120/
Initially Chiren tried to spin the same line that he had played with Pokerstars (and which Pokerstars believed), but that got nowhere. 2+2 readers are a little bit sharper than that.
And, lo and behold, Pokerstars eventually posts to the forum that Chiren would not be doing this any more.
+++++
The second balls-up by Stars was even more hilarious and worrying. Malloc posted that he had noticed that three players who had played a ton of hands with very similar styles (9%/9% shortstackers in Full Ring Games) had moved down in stakes at the same time, and then, a month or so later, had moved down in stakes again.
Now, any person who plays a lot of online poker would say that this screams "Bot".
This was the first response from the now famous "Pokerstars Jeff". I somehow get the feeling that Jeff is one of the "big company" employees that I talked about earlier.
We have separate complex systems in place to automatically look for collusion, and for bots. Each is comprised of far more powerful servers than you can buy in a typical business/end-user machine, and each is dedicated solely to sifting through mountains of data to seek out potential suspects in their respective realms of responsibilities.
Exactly what they do and what they look at, we're just not at liberty to say.
Regards,
Jeff
PokerStars Game Security, Senior Bot Specialist
Unfortunately, Pokertableratings, without access to the hole cards, was able to produce proof, within 24 hours, that there was indeed a 10-man bot-ring at work, and that it had been at work for 8 million hands or so. The stats that it showed were not only convincing, but they were easy to find -- including the most damning 0% check-call and 0% check-raise on flop, plus 0% bet-raise(by opponent)-call.
http://www.pokertableratings.com/blog/2010/07/bot-ring-discovered-on-poker-stars/
One of the comforting thing about big-company employment is that everyone else around you doesn't give a shit either -- which is why incompetent people in big companies survive so long -- it's a conspiracy of silence going right the way up the tree.
Unfortunately in the land of online poker, that doesn't apply. It's not just your boss who you have to keep happy, and brown-nosing doesn't work with the hounds of death that are 2+2 contributors.
For a while all was silence from Pokerstars -- fair enough, in a sense, in that it was night-time in the Isle of Man and then the weekend.
Over the night of Friday the 10-man bot team continued playing. I suspect that they had already withdrawn most of their $60k-plus-benefits of winnings.
The 2+2 thread was running very hot on early Saturday morning my time (late night the US, mid-morning in Russia and old USSR states, where these bots were playing from).
Then it got even odder. Pokerstars Jeff, clearly unaware of the "when you are in a hole, stop digging" rule, posted the following:
Hello 2+2,
PokerStars would like to update you on the status of this case, and correct several misconceptions that have been perpetuated throughout this thread.
First, as of the afternoon of July 17, we have indeed removed ten players from the site for violations of our terms of service. We cannot give additional details about which accounts, or the specific reasons for their removal.
Second, we would like to clarify something that the OP has left out of this entire discussion, which is that there were two separate investigations here. PokerStars absolutely did *not* exonerate these players from being bots at any time. We conducted a review of the three users listed in the OP for collusion, and it was negative, and this was reported to the OP, who posted an incorrect "PokerStars said "All Clear'" here. A review of the players for being bots was concurrently being conducted, and was in progress until today, July 17th. The OP was notified of this concurrent bot review being in progress, and did not inform this thread of that fact.
We would like to address the fact that the play continued throughout the night of July 16th, after a third party source posted an independent review identified 7 additional players. PokerStars had also identified 7 additional players very early in our investigation -- prior to the third party site's identification of them. We were conducting a very in depth search to locate other potential accounts, to ensure we had located all of the accounts prior to closing them down concurrently. Shutting down only part of a ring in mid-investigation can spook additional, undiscovered accounts into cashing out prior to locating them. As of this afternoon, July 17, that review concluded that the ten accounts were the complete extent of the matter.
Next, please note that third party sites did not locate this ring unassisted. They had a baseline of three identical player profiles from which to start, which is a far more trivial task than saying "here's a collection of 4 million players... now, find me 3 who are identical.... without a baseline from which to search." One is a linear search (searching for a particular pattern) and the other is exponentially more difficult based upon the number of players. PokerStars located the rest of the ring faster than did the third party site.
...........
Finally, to address why these players played for a relatively extended period without detection, we can say that upon conclusion of this review that the bots were fairly sophisticated in certain aspects, including their human behavior modeling and their stealth capabilities. Our tools for bot detection are sophisticated, but they are not perfect. No site can guarantee you that they are completely free of bots. What PokerStars can and does pledge is that we use our extensive tools behind the scenes to detect bots as best we can... and they are very effective. We detect and remove most bots well before they even leave the development stage, and well before they could play long enough to come to the attention of players or third party databases the way these players did.
PokerStars takes its commitment to bot detection and removal extremely seriously, and will continue to do so, both behind the scenes with our tools (which are under constant review and improvement), and in response to player-generated suspicions. Most player reports of bot suspicions are false alarms, but we still investigate each one thoroughly, and when they actually do locate a previously undetected bot, appropriate action will always be taken.
Best Regards,
Jeff
PokerStars Game Security
Most of this post was greeted with a combination of disbelief, abuse and sarcasm (plus, of course, the inevitable Photoshops and photos of Heath Robinson-types and 50-year old computers hard at work trying to detect bots).
But the worst part of it was this was actually libellous (well, I think that it was libellous). It's stated quite explicitly that Malloc had lied in his original post and misrepresented Pokerstars' response to his enquiry -- that Stars had only said that these players were not colluding, but that a concurrent investigation into whether they were bots was continuing.
Malloc was having none of this:
Nowhere in that email does it say that an additional, parallel investigation into the possibility of bots is being undertaken.
Congrats, Jeff, you've massively pissed off another Supernova (2 years running) by lying to me and about me.
Which prompted this prompt response, presumably with two Isle of Man lawyers holding guns to the back of his head:
My sincere apologies, malloc. I did not intend to call you out or "piss you off". It is clear that you were not informed of a continuing investigation on the 13th, and haven't participated in this thread since I Emailed you on the 16th.
With sincere apologies,
Jeff
PokerStars Game Security
Oh my, this is almost textbook stuff of a big company fucking up. (And, should I add, all credit for malloc, who simply typed "thanks for the clarification" and took it no further. I would have been on the phone to my lawyers.)
++++
In a way this reminds me of AIG, a company that became the biggest insurer in the US and whose employees developed a reputation for arrogance along the lines of "we're the biggest". The employees from the old days were replaced by jobsworths who liked the comfort of big companies. It all went wrong for AIG. Pokerstars really ought to be careful that it doesn't head down the same route. One thing is definitely clear -- the people who are currently in charge are not the right people, and it's the senior management who should be replaced, not the likes of Pokerstars Jeff, who is merely a "big company" kind of employee who got himself into a situation where he was quite obviously completely out of his depth.
Don't sack him. Sack the people who put him there.
___________
