Anyone out there who has played online poker has undoubtedly posed the following question at one point or another: is the game rigged? While there is no proof that online poker sites are generally fixed, there is evidence that several sites could be shady, to say the least. Absolute Poker, as well as Ultimate Bet Poker both fell victim to internal cheating scandals between 2007-2008. While the culprits were eventually weeded out, this doesn’t lend any comfort to the victims of these crooks. What should come as comforting however, are the measures that online poker rooms have taken since these events became public knowledge. Many rooms have added heavily encrypted security settings to their existing plan, while others overhauled their systems entirely in favor of more advanced, state-of-the-art encryption programs.
While the various poker rooms’ efforts to prevent internal robbery are admirable, they omit to address one glaring problem: how do players prevent themselves from being cheated by other players? While collusion has long been a focus of the various poker rooms, there’s a new brand of theft going on now in online poker circles: identity theft. Virtual crooks everywhere are quietly stealing online gamblers’ information through dodgy email scams and logging into their poker accounts using the newly acquired information. Their goal is not to withdraw the player’s money to a bank account (which would be too incriminating), but to lose as much as possible to other players at the table, where crooked partners unquestionably wait in the wings.
While this seems like an uncontrollable problem, two online gambling researchers from the University of Buffalo, Roman V. Yampolskiy and his associate Venu Govindaraju have successfully written software that studies players’ playing styles. It notes not only the type of player that one is overall, but subtle nuances as well, such as one’s bet amounts in certain situations, the time it takes to place bets, and much more. All of these factors come together to form the player’s DNA, which can then be used to raise a red flag in the event of inconsistent account activity. Yampolskiy suggests that the software can determine a player’s DNA with 80% accuracy after a mere hour of play.
Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group in Edmonton disputes the effectiveness of this software for top-flight players however, remarking that “strong players try not to be predictable”. Thankfully, we humans are more predictable than we’d like to acknowledge, and that goes for the best poker players in the world, too. Considering the fact that Yampolskiy has authored books entitled Computer Security, as well as Feature Extraction Approaches for Optical Character Recognition, nervous poker players can feel confident that this DNA software has, at the very least, been designed by a leader in its field. So in spite of people like Schaeffer questioning the software, it seems well worth implementing.