Bots Playing with Real Money on PokerStars

I doubt I will ever see this again. A really high end real money table where two 'people' are actually playing. $1000/$2000 fixed limit Omaha High Lo. The first two screen shots are like the introductory part of a bad movie. The real meat is in the third.

Even if you had seven hundred thousands of dollars, would you really put it all at the table? Is this supposed to intimidate your opponent into being scared? Well I guess that failed because after several all ins where Fake survived he/she/it instantly added more chips. And the $19,500 added is way to small for a table with these stakes. $1,000 minimum to see the flop. Add another $1,000 because at this point you know your opponent is really aggressive. Another $2,000 for the turn. Another $4,000 for the river. Another $4,000 for the showdown. If you haven't wised up to your overly aggressive, baboon ass presenting and great card catching opponent by now your two thirds of the buy in deserves to be lost.

Now back to the the third shot. Why is this game even offered? There are ten seats there. No way that table is ever going to be filled. Lots of pots over $10,000 and naturally the rake is always just two dollars. How is PokerStars supposed to pay their bills?

And here we have it again. when someone goes all in the hole cards are turned up and the railbirds get to see the showdown. But PokerStars recently has made it inconsistent and most of the time the hole cards on an all in are not shown to observers. A convenient excuse for a player to muck cards on a three plus player game so you don't see the crap they went in on, but in a heads up game it's pointless since when they pot is paid out they are shown anyway.

Naturally observer chat is locked down. If I had $700k and was about to play for major cash I'd call up my friends and want them to be there to encourage me.

And conveniently it's a 'fast' table which explains why the betting is instantaneous instead of any pauses to think about the quality of the hand.

Naturally not a single simple 'nh' is posted by either player.

I don't like to use the term bots because it implies that someone has written a program that has made it through the registration process. These are clearly two positions of a database that an ordinary human would never bother looking at logging in hands dealt.

U Got Betted From There

Strangely I was just looking to play instead of busting. But when given a gift you sometimes just have to graciously accept it.

The reason I chose the table I did was that there was absolutely no chat. I join and I'm first in line for the game. I load up Microsoft solitaire and play until my seat becomes available, which was a surprisingly long five minutes. Since my solitaire window is smaller than the table window I can see that there has been no chat during that time.

Immediately after I sit there is a huge flurry of chat activity. And naturally it makes absolutely no fucking sense.

For starters it's whining not whinning.

Not as bad as "I will sign up the quit." Which to this day I still have absolutely no idea what it means. In this case I think I know what was meant. You(U) got betted from there probably means that you got bluffed. I hover my cursor over the avatar and the offender is shown to be from the United States. Seriously, what English speaking poker player with the ability to acquire the 40k minimum to sit at this table doesn't know the word bluff?

Next up we have the explanation for losing a hand. You see, I did it on purpose because then I make myself a target. Everyone else is gunning for me.

WTF? I can't remember the last time that my random(not)cards were able to make a specific other player lose.

Finally we have "brb, lol I'm making breaky." The least offensive of the transgressions, but a curious choice of words. A simple brb is all that needs to be said if you are taking a break. Making breaky is not cute or funny. It just makes you look like a low grade moron.

After these gems I lingered around for another twenty minutes hoping for me, but I was made. Not a single character of chat.

Capoch

BP is gone, but some of his playmates, correction - non-playmates from last night still linger in the same status of looking like they want to play but because of some bizarre man code thing don't consolidate into a single table.

So tonight my focus is on his dear friend Capoch. Capoch has hundreds of thousands of chips available and has decided to remain seated for at least a day just waiting for someone to join his table. That's a lot of real money to sit at a table or two, let your computer run for ages and be happy that a game didn't start. I hovered over my clock to show ya this is the day after yesterday's post. Gave you a bonus shot of Monkeyboy from last night that shows he's still waiting for a game to start, too.

And it looks like these players from the past three nights are so far evolved that it's a crime to give up and play some free money hands just to break the boredom.

This is far from real human nature and sure looks like positions directly connected to the server that an ordinary human would bump up against.

I felt a burning need to find out exactly what a capoch was. So I Googled it. And one of the top hits was a PokerStars newsletter talking about some awesome triple draw lowball tournament they ran where Capoch finished third. Here's the link:

http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/scoop/2010/scoop-a-number-one-for-buckeye-119-in-ev-069743.html

Now I'm not saying that Capoch is a fraudulent position since my lawyers have way too much work as it is. But what my fan base has been asking me about is, just what would it be like if a gambling site created fake positions that won a major prize and knocked real human players down on the winner list that the payoff they would have to give is vastly smaller than if the game was for real? They could save some major dollars. Shoulda won 6k finishing third but you only get $250 because fake positions that don't really need to be paid occupy the top spots. I've experienced this same thing many times on the free money tables.

But it's for real because they said so.

A PokerStars Emoticon Problem

PokerStars has a horde of chat problems and it's my favorite thing to bust on. Conversations that don't make sense. Play for two hours at a sit and go and nobody even posts a simple 'nh.' Someone able to post the word 'dick' in chat even though it's on the naughty list and shows up as **** when a mere mortal posts it.

And let's talk about that last one a second. A bit ago PokerStars added the upgrade to allow emoticons in chat. If you Google something like "How do I add emoticons to" the auto guess feature doesn't bring back any suggestions to a program that adds emoticons in general. It wants you to make it be on Twitter or some existing program. If you extend it to "How do I add emoticons to chat in PokerStars" it doesn't do mmuch but show the screen I've captured here with the proud announcement that the feature has been added to chat with their emoticons they've added for your chatting pleasure.

Personally I think the emoticons are a disguise so that non-English speaking admins can easier add a tiny bit of value to chat. Why get the chance to post, "Boy howdie won did last hand I!" when you can post a smiley face that says it all? And as our friend that posted 'suck my dick' years ago in chat, that was surely for my benefit, there are people that have capabilities that I don't have that supposedly have the same set of capabilities that I have.

So here we have some dumbass admin posting a shark emoticon in chat when it's clearly not in the available set.

If they can cheat in chat it's not too far of a stretch that they can cheat with the cards.

Triple Draw is Popular, Or Maybe Not

The tournament lobby shows four tables that are almost identical. The similarities are also seen when you drill down onto the table. It's the same buy in, antes and blinds. There's exactly one player at each table. The fact that chips are showing means they are active - otherwise they would show as sitting out.

One of them is our good friend BP from last night who is still waiting at 16 odd games for someone to play with him.

Here's a suggestion since a one player game doesn't exist and a two player game sucks balls. Consolidate all four of you together and play against each other. I doubt you'll ever get the chance again to play 500/1000 real money with that many players on a 5 draw triple draw lowball table again. It doesn't even make sense that a six player table would be offered except that this is the standard for PokerStars five draw games. It would be too hard to change the code. It would confuse all the bots.

The Real Table Rake Problem

Let's pretend time again. Let's pretend that BP is an exceedingly wealthy futher mucker that has a penchant for what most people would consider odd games. He/she fills up multiple tables with thousands of chips just waiting for someone to make the mistake of playing the same tables he's at.

And someone bites. And wow it's 5 card triple draw, one of the oddest of the odd. There's tens of thousands of chips out there in this heads up contest of titans.

And that's a problem. There's a lot of empty seats out there, and it sure seems unlikely that two people would sit, much less fill up the whole table. Why doesn't PokerStars just offer heads up or maybe a four player table?

But the real point is the rake. Or lack thereof for all practical purposes. Since we are pretending that PokerStars main source of income is not the cheating of real people out of their hard earned money, then like a brick and mortar the money made to pay the staff, pay the rent or mortgage, pay the utilities, pizza parties for staff birthdays, insurance, electrical repairs, pest control, licensing fees....need I go on? The way these non-cheaters pay is the rake.

Wiki tells us that the normal rake is 5-10% of every pot. And here we have a rake on $14,000 of real money bets that gets them a rake of just - $2 -.

Now if this one some sort of private game that two Nigerian princes sat at it would have been a simple matter to block me from even seeing it. This doesn't explain why one would join so many tables just waiting for an opponent.

And if these guys have 50k real money to put down for their private game they can afford to pay a real rake bigger than -

less than 1.5 THOUSANDTHS OF A PERCENT. That's more than 300 times the rake percent for a brick and mortar

Seat Numbers at PokerStars

I've posted about this before. After almost two weeks of not seeing it I thought maybe the message was received and they had given up on it.

Seat number 4 is bad. Very bad. There's bubblegum stuck underneath, cigarette ash burns on the material and it calls directory assistance for numbers it can easily look up on its own. Bad seat. No treats for you tonight.

Well geniuses, let me clue you in. There are no seat numbers and posting in chat about them (this is the third time in recent history) makes no sense. Without specifically identified seat numbers the next step in logic makes one guess that it would make sense based on your position relative to the dealer- not the player with the dealer button but the graphic of the dealer. The most sense would be in the direction of movement of the dealer button. Next most sense would be the opposite direction.

I'll give you another paragraph after this to digest what's wrong with that. Anybody that does gets a free Big Lay Down T-shirt. But I will have to charge $5.99 postage and handling.

I take advantage of what is for me a nice option. Maybe it's because I'm extremely left eye dominant. Maybe subconscious superstition. But I like to see my position in the lower right hand corner of the screen. And the multitude of screen shots posted here show that. So my seat is kind of random.

OK? Figure it out yet? In nearly two decades of messing with PokerStars the graphic of the dealer's stack of chips and the cute little leather sleeve that shows the rake is ALWAYS at the top of the screen. Which, without specifically assigned seat numbers makes every personal player's viewing of other seat numbers personal to them.

Just another one of those tables with an insane amount of chat that tries to make it look like it makes sense when it really has no basis in reality.

But what comes next is better.