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Feds bust PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Inky_Wretch, Apr 15, 2011.

  1. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Poker is also a fantastic example of how long the long run really is.

    I've known a lot of guys who were seriously into the online poker thing, with humongous hand databases and heads up displays and all kinds of crazy stuff. They'd have a million hands at a certain win rate and decide that proved their abilities. Then they couldn't understand why the next million hands didn't go as well.

    Part of is that over time, the opponents improved, and raked poker is almost impossible to beat with good opponents. But another part of it was that even over a million hands, they still had positive variance.
     
  2. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Is not making money playing poker or deciding to play $10,000 per hole skins when they just picked up a golf club two weeks ago?
     
  3. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    With him? Probably the latter.
     
  4. Captain_Kirk

    Captain_Kirk Well-Known Member

    And if they get convicted, I'm certain they'll be hoping they won't want to hear their cellmates say, "I'm all in."
     
  5. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    Like many, I was attracted to watching "the pros" early on and reading all the stories about how they went broke, made a fortune in a big game, then went broke again, rinse and repeat. There was a certain degenerate romanticism to it. But I stopped watching televised poker when these guys came to the table with NASCAR-sized logos all over them -- plus they were in the commercials. Just lost its aura to me.

    Fortunately, I never played online either. Absolutely no entertainment value to me, plus you didn't need to be a Mensa Life Member to see that there could be some seriously nefarious crap going on -- which on some sites proved to be exactly the case.
     
  6. Shoeless Joe

    Shoeless Joe Active Member

    I'm not kin, nor have I ever met Lederer or Ferguson ... and maybe I'm just a trusting kind of person ... but those two don't look like guys who would sit around figuring up ways to purposely defraud people. In general, gamblers are better than most folks of paying debts.

    As for Ivey, I've read where both Brunson and Harrington have both come down on him because he has the ability to win 100K at the poker table and drop it on table games before he ever leaves the casino.
     
  7. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Uh-huh. And if we were in Germany, the guy on the bottom bunk would have to make the guy on the top bunk's bed.
     
  8. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    I don't know if Lederer or Ferguson are guilty or not. But if is in fact a Ponzi scheme how dumb. Either the money is there or it isn't.

    Ferguson has a Phd in computer science. If one of these game sites wrote a program to give fictional players an advantage who would ever know? They could rake off millions by introducing the fictional players into the game. It could be something as simple as having a guy at a screen with the ability to see all the cards dealt.
     
  9. Shoeless Joe

    Shoeless Joe Active Member

    That's absolutely true. That's part of the reason I've never played online for cash. I'm trusting of people, I guess, just not with my money!
     
  10. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Absolute Poker had a "superuser" incident, they got caught because people were combing through the hand histories and pulled out statistical patterns that showed he was acting in a way that could only mean he could see the cards. They claimed it was a rogue employee, but of course that begged the question of why was something like that programmed into the system to begin with.

    The online poker player community is/was very, very good at policing the things that the player could see, including the cards. There was definitely nothing shady going on with the random card generation (as was a popular theory with players who didn't win, which was 90% of them). But shills, superusers, and apparently flat-out stealing deposits? Apparently so.
     
  11. rmanfredi

    rmanfredi Active Member

    TJ Cloutier is apparently much like this - pretty much, it's known around Vegas that if he has a decent night at the tables, he'll lose it plus at the craps table on the way out the door.
     
  12. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    I went out early at a big NLHE tourney in Tunica and ended up shooting dice with Cloutier.
     
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