60 Minutes on CBS

As I don’t live in the US, I’ve no idea what was on the show or in the Washington Press. Here’s Poker News‘ article on the matter.

A cooperative mainstream investigatory piece offering an overview of the Absolute Poker and UltimateBet insider cheating scandals was aired by “60 Minutes” and published by the Washington Post on Sunday, though it shed little new light on a situation already familiar to many dedicated online players. The twin efforts from the two mainstream outlets rehashed the work of online players who uncovered the cheating over the past year, though the reports differed widely in their approach to the story.

The Washington Post piece, which was the first to go public on Sunday morning, began with a relatively accurate examination of the discovery of the cheating by players’ examination of hand histories, then painted a less than rosy picture of what it inferred was a lax regulatory environment that allowed the cheating to occur. The “60 Minutes” segment hosted by Steve Kroft followed a similar track but did so in a far more sensational manner, skimming many of the facts in the scandals themselves while becoming a superficial, politically themed fingerpointing, yet without connecting the dots or exploring the regulatory issues involved.

Both pieces – but in particular the “60 Minutes” segment — threw generalized aspersions toward the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, the licensing and regulatory agency that oversees some 450 online gambling sites and is primarily housed on the Kahnawake reservation outside Montreal. Kahnawake Grand Chief Michael Arihron Delisle was featured in the “60 Minutes” segment in a brief interview that hinted at the regulatory and legal disputes between the sovereign Kahnawake nation and Canada, which surrounds it, but those and other regulatory matters were not explored in detail. In fact, the regulatory and legal-recognition matters promised by “60 Minutes” to be a focus of the story were summarily dropped by air time, leaving only the sensationalistic aspects of the combined cheating scandals, which together exceeded $20 million in player funds, to be aired.

Also dropped from the “60 Minutes” piece were filmed interviews with several prominent poker players and officials, including Mike Sexton, Linda Johnson and Greg Raymer, who were interviewed together during the World Series of Poker this past summer. The broadcast did show segment host Steve Kroft walking the Amazon Room during the WSOP, where the CBS crew filmed segments with several online players that did make it to broadcast. The online players who received air time in the piece were Serge Ravitch, David Paredes, Todd Witteles and Michael Josem, each of whom was involved in some manner with one of the two cheating scandals.

The purchase of Absolute and UltimateBet by former Kahnawake Grand Chief Joe Tokwiro Norton in late 2006 also received brief mention, although Norton declined to be interviewed for either piece. Also declining an interview with CBS was former WSOP Main Event winner Russ Hamilton, who was publicly identified in a statement by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission as the primary cheater in the UltimateBet situation, along with five collaborators and a total of 88 known cheating accounts not yet fully identified by KGC investigators. (A final report on the UB cheating investigation has yet to be released by the KGC.) The total combined cheating tally of more than $20 million was mentioned, but the separate roles that Norton’s company, Tokwiro Enterprises, and the KGC played in securing funds and coordinating reimbursements to cheated players was not.

Also skipped in Sunday’s two reports was that the software used in the cheating was in both cases installed and put into use by the cheaters before the firms’ joint acquisition by Norton, a situation which led in the case of the UB scandal to have Tokwiro Enterprises legally seek reimbursement against former owner Excapsa for the funds needed to compensate known cheated players, a case settled in Tokwiro Enterprises’ favor, with the funds — some $15 million – immediately redistributed to the players.

KGC spokesman Chuck Barnett noted his disappointment in the attacks directed toward the KGC by the twin pieces, particularly the brief “60 Minutes” segment. Also blurred over in the pieces was the distinction between Joe Norton and his Tokwiro Enterprises, and the KGC and Kahnawake nation itself – Norton served as the Grand Chief of the Kahnawake nation for 25 years, a ceremonial title bestowed upon one member of the nation’s 12-chief board, but retired from that post in 2003.

Barnett, in commenting on the reports, noted that, “While Kahnawake has chosen not to engage in land-based casino operation, for Kroft to state that Kahnawake ‘has no experience’ discounts the fact that no other jurisdiction in the world has been continuously regulating iGaming activities (nearly 10 years), and with no outstanding player disputes is choosing to be ignorant of this industry’s history. In short,” continued Barnett, “this situation was not created in Kahnawake, but when it washed up on our shore, the KGC moved in to deal with the mess.”

Read all the latest Poker News from around the world.

60 Minutes on CBS

60 Minutes and The Washington Post reveal how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That’s because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints. Steve Kroft and The Washington Post’s Gilbert Gaul report.

Absoulte Poker and Ultimate Bet are incriminated in the scandal involving the players GreyCat and P0tripper. Those interviewed for the segment included Mike Sexton, Greg Raymer, and Linda Johnson.

From CBS

A collaboration by two of the world’s most respected news organizations reveals how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That’s because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.

The results of the four-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and The Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul will appear this Sunday, Nov. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.

“He was raising, just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy,” says Todd Witteles, a computer scientist turned poker player who believed he was losing too much to the same person. “It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn’t losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day,” Witteles, who played a key detective role, remembers.

Michael Josem, a player and a computer security expert, plotted the odds of such consistent success. “We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean…approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times.”

The cheating, which netted the cheaters more than $20 million, occurred on two of the Internet’s most popular sites, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The two sites operate out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica and run their games on computer servers housed on an Indian reservation outside of Montreal. They are licensed by a Mohawk tribe that has no background in casino gambling, a tribe that previously made the majority of its money selling tax-free tobacco. Though such gambling is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., the betting laws in those countries have no jurisdiction on the sovereign reservation.

The show airs this Sunday night at 7pm in most markets in the US. Check out CBS for more news.

Let’s back up a little. My story is quite a bit longer than that actually, so let’s start at the beginning. I started tinkering with online poker bots since they first hit the scene four or five years ago. I probably have purchased every single one that has ever been for sale, including a few outright scams. The road has been very rocky, to say the least.

Robots are better than you at sport

The first such product ever to become available was called Pokerbot Pro. What it turned out to be was a short report telling you that poker bots can be programmed, gave you a few ideas on how the structure of them can be designed, recommended that you learn how to program so you can make your own, and threw in an example of what was supposed to be a working script for Party Poker. It didn’t work. I was one of the early few who got their refund requests honored, but from what I heard later he stopped honoring refund requests because every single customer requested one.

The amazing thing is that product is still for sale today! I have no idea what it has evolved into by now, but since the guy ran a shady, misleading hustle in the beginning it’s probably a fairly safe assumption that it’s still garbage. One of the things the short report recommended was making a simple script to push the poker room buttons based on actions fed by another piece of software called Online Poker Inspector (now simply referred to as OPI by the poker botting crowd). OPI is a real-time odds calculating program that you configure to give you betting/folding/raising signals for Limit Holdem.

So I purchased the OPI software and started fiddling with it. It was pretty fun, but I couldn’t see any use for it other than programming a bot to follow it’s signals. I mean, why do you need a piece of software to tell you to take the actions that you already told it to tell you to take? Anyway I started hanging around the OPI forum and a guy posted about a bot he developed and was starting to sell so I purchased it and joined his website and forum. That was a pretty good piece of software known as Pokerbot Plus. The developer’s name is Ron and that website is still in business as well.

There is a decent-sized community of OPI-based botters who trade and sell profiles for Online Poker Inspector. They all claim to be winning profiles of course. The reality is that none of them are. It’s just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The problem with OPI is that it just doesn’t include enough variables to program a winning bot. It doesn’t know it’s position, number of opponents in the hand, or what happened on a previous betting round. It simply makes decisions based on hand strength alone. And that isn’t enough to beat the game.

A little while later something called Win Holdem came along. And it’s still here today as well, but most of the people who were into it moved to an open-source platform called Open Holdem. These are basically empty shells, button pushing programs that act as platforms for programmers to start working from. If you are going to use either of these you need to be a decent C/C++ coder and it’s going to take you months of hard work to have anything you can let loose in a real-money game.

Robots could be taking your money

Win Hold’em caused a bit of a stir among the online poker rooms when it first came on the scene and most of them put scraping programs in their software to hunt for it. As a result you now must use a complicated two-PC setup to avoid detection in using it. This was years ago and poker rooms aren’t so panicky about individual poker bot programs hitting the market any more, so Open Holdem doesn’t have the same trouble. Nowadays the poker rooms who actually care about preventing bots from playing (which is pretty much just Poker Stars at this point, being the biggest and having a brand-protecting attitude) simply watch for patterns instead. For example if you are playing 8 tables for 36 hours straight and never take a bathroom break – that sort of thing.

More OPI bots have surfaced over the years, including Frog Bot and Android Bot (probably the best one), but they all suffer from the same problem of not enough variables to be able to program a winning bot. Ron at Pokerbot Plus now offers bots based on other poker odds calculator programs including Texas Calculatem, but the reality is OPI is better than any of them still for botting purposes.

Enter Shanky Technologies. These guys have been selling a Blackjack Bot for cashing online casino bonuses for two years, and also a pretty good Omaha Hi/Lo poker bot that their customers use for clearing deposit bonuses and earning rakeback. In March of this year they released their Holdem Bot and have been upgrading it constantly ever since. This poker bot has evolved far beyond anything else that has ever been sold to the public. It keeps getting better and it keeps getting more and more user-configurable.

The Shanky Technologies Holdem Bot plays at two major poker rooms (plus a few other minor ones). It plays both Limit and No-Limit. Never before has there been a bot on the market that plays No Limit, and this one does it well. It knows how many players are at the table, how many are still in the current hand, what the bet/fold/raise count is, and what it’s position is. It remembers what happened on previous betting rounds and takes that into account in it’s decisions. It plays Tournaments, Sit and Go’s, cash games, 6-max tables, 9-max tables, play money or real money games. It recognizes bet sizes and will make good laydowns to large bets and raises. It knows the pot size and will draw when getting the correct odds. It will play up to three tables at a time, and each table can be a different game type or even a different poker room. The thing is amazing.

The Shanky bot has a large list of option settings for the user, including tournament settings where you can set it to just shove all-in based on hand strength before and after the flop. Those were the settings I was using to get to the final table in today’s tournament. I told the bot to shove with AA, KK, or AK preflop only if somebody else raised first – otherwise make a normal raise to 3.5 x the blinds and shove if reraised with those hands. I also told it to shove all-in post-flop any time it had a good hand (top pair or better on non-scary boards and two-pair or better on scarier boards, etc.) but only if there had been a preflop raise – otherwise play as normal.

It worked. Those are good settings for tournaments! I use different settings for cash games. And look – the tournament has gotten down to 3 players now and my bot is still in it with the second highest chip stack. Because there are only three players left the bot will automatically load a different profile for me now, one which I have set to play very aggressively and just go all-in with a lot of hands. We’ll see how it does.

Previously I cleared the $600 signup bonus at Full Tilt using this bot and not only did I get all of that bonus but the bot won some additional money as well. Now I am killing the tournaments with this thing. To check it out for yourself just Google something like Shanky Poker Bot. (I think their website is called Bonus Bots.)

Will an even better poker bot be for sale soon? Who knows. Seems unlikely, especially since these Shanky guys are way ahead of the curve in development. Some days I just like to hang out in their forum and talk about botting.

Recently a product called ICM-bot hit the scene. It’s not really a bot because it can’t make poker decisions. All it does it play SNG’s by method of shoving all-in preflop according to hand strength. Believe it or not this actually does work to a small degree. However this methodology is somewhat flawed because it cannot play post-flop. So when you get a free play in the big blind and flop a full house it will just fold. The Shanky bot now does everything this bot does by using the aggressive tournament setting, plus it plays good post-flop poker. So I see no reason to own the ICM-bot.

Read all about how to win with Poker Bots.