Poker Perambulation

Online we depend on our site to police things. It may not be our very best alternative but what it is is our only alternative. The site has the best chance of resolving IP address checking and the like.

The Internet is “OPEN” and most of the time we either ignore that fact or laud it. It started out as DARPA network – a cold war way for academics to exchange info. The era was represent by slow connections and a hodgepodge collection of operating systems and processors.

We like open. We can do our P2P or porn viewing. Crooks of all stripes like it too – especially spammers. Into all that we hope to add security. And, instead of building a predator tiger on top of the pussy cat net, we end up with that infamous horse that looks like a camel from the committee approach that’s all that is available.

I first accessed the Internet with a shell account. I was on a time share system running Unix. I had a user account that provided me with storage and access to a number of applications. The way you read and surfed was with an application called Gopher that was a reader from U of Minn. Shortly after the CERN Browser started to replace it. I manipulated all this using a simple terminal program that had modest color and formatting capability. If I wanted to view a picture, that was a download of a .GIF for local viewing outside the browser which was running on the time share machine.

From all that we evolved into the seamless appearance of the network today. It is a dumb network. The processing is at the edges. Our processor interprets the HTML and downloads the picture and builds it as a service using our processor. This happens typically using a dynamic IP address that is assigned by our ISP. It is easy to get other IP addresses. There are free shell accounts available that you can Google. It give you access to the net from another location. You can go here and surf anonymously. When you do it you are using a form of proxy. The IP address is no longer the dynamic IP address assigned by your ISP to your account and trackable as such.

Even if I were a Luddite, I could easily have 4 or more separate and active IP address going from home using a mix of cable, dsl, satelite and dialup.

If you’ve followed the various sleuthing done by the sites, you’ll notice that IP address checks are prominent in their tracking down the evil doers. People are being caught because they are lousy crooks – really, really, really lousy crooks. I see no reason I couldn’t create entities with accounts and addresses that played from my house to the point I could populate a ring game with only me playing me. That’d be -EV when you throw in the rake; but…

Bots are caught because the application provided by your site scans the computer for suspicious programs. Suffice it to say, that is even easier to defeat.

What can we do to protect ourselves? Well, first off, you need to be alert and suspicious. And that increases exponentially as you move up to high stakes play. Remember good crooks are smart folks. They understand rake and how abusive it is at low and mid levels. Unless they have card access like the Absolute incident, they cannot eliminate some gamble. The rake may damage the risk:reward of their cheating more than is acceptable. So, they seek to play higher.

Collusion is the obvious and easiest way to use that mix of IP addresses we can activate at will. As users we should compare the users we see with the results. The site is doing that too. But, the current crop of users aren’t that high tech. It is typically a couple of college student trying to eat next week or petty crooks. They both show up time after time and the site finally figures it out. The college students that took down a few hundred are probably going to slip through the spotlight. The site isn’t interested in publicizing how much of this might be happening. It is the high ticket events that get the attention.

So, do we exit stage left screaming? Nahh. All this is as old as Pokah on the first riverboats. It was encountered by folks like us from the git-go. You factor in that some of that is going to happen as another form of rake. But, it is a variable. And you control that variable to some extent with avoiding being naive. When you’re in a more dangerous situation, you walk as close to the streetlight as you can. Online that means when you suspect something you change your pattern or avoid the suspect situations. And, you hope your site has been shook by the recent events enough to tighten things up even more. I’m sure most of their security has revolved around their bottom line. Well, their bottom line will also be impacted if we lose faith in their ability to protect us. So, expect Machiavelli to get hired in security and expect more attention will be payed to all accounts – including yours.

ADDENDUM:

Check out Drew Carey’s look at the fine Dallas Police action against a game being run at a local VFW. It is entitled Texas Close’em

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A lot of people are telling Chip Reese stories. One of the people with a bunch of them including some personal experience is this blogger — Low Limit All Star.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under Journal, Poker Other. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.