Monthly Archives: July 2010

Who Or What Is rs03rs03?

If you’ve ever played in DON (double or nothing) Sit N Go’s over at PokerStars you will likely have come across the user name rs03rs03 at your table. I did, but thought nothing of it. When he was on my tables day after day after day I started to get suspicious. There is actually quite an interesting story behind it…

If you find the same user on your table all the time one assumption could be that the player has been taking notes on your play and believes you to be a fish worth hooking. It is possible to basically follow you around the poker site and play at whatever table you decide to hit. I didn’t think this was the case with rs03rs03 as I’d previously taken notes on this player to the effect that they were very tight and not a very strong player to be honest. So I decided to have a mooch around the Internet to see what was with this rs03rs03 guy.

Apparently rs03rs03 is pretty famous (or infamous) over at PokerStars. There are entire forum threads questioning how rs03rs03 seems to always be on the DON tables, to the extent that other players have been questioning whether rs03rs03 is a poker bot or not (a poker bot in this instance would be a piece of software that is programmed to automatically join low level Sit N Go games and play via a pre-programmed algorithm on a large scale – hundreds of tables at a time). It seems that player rs03rs03 had been on the radar at PokerStars for some time and unusually PokerStars themselves decided to make public their investigations into the legitimacy of the player.

Just to add some perspective to this. PokerStars confirmed that when rs03rs03 was playing to full capacity his averages would be – 175 concurrent tables 100,000 (approx) hands in a single day Now some people are comfortable in multi-tabling. It isn’t that unusual to hear people playing 30 odd tables at once, but 175 at once! Of course it would be pretty much impossible to play this many tables at once without some custom tools… something that PokerStars would be very much aware of so they took the step of analysing rs03rs03’s play by running several tests as described in the following quote from PokerStars themselves –

We have been monitoring and examining ‘rs03rs03’ using those tools for quite some time, and the player has always shown very human characteristics, and an ability to pass various tests, including CAPTCHA and many others. Despite this, we, too, have been concerned with the seemingly astonishing volume of play exhibited by this player, especially in recent weeks as his volume has increased dramatically. As such, we recently froze his account and asked the player for a controlled demonstration, and the player agreed. We dispatched a PokerStars representative to the player’s home to observe several hours of play on June 1st, 2010. That observation convinced us that the player is not using a bot. We cannot violate the player’s privacy — the player has asked to remain anonymous, and not to discuss their strategy. However, among our observations: 1) The player uses a set of self-written hotkeys similar to many commercially available suites (TableNinja.com comes to mind). – The hotkeys manage automatically joining tables without regard to opponent selection – The hotkeys close unnecessary popups like “It is free to check”, automatically – The hotkeys require the player to enter every bet, raise, check, or fold manually 2) Both in prior play, and during our in-person observation, we witnessed many “mistakes”, such as pre-flop folds of AA and KK. 3) The player was able to verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play. 4) We took video of the play at various times, and conducted tests at various times during the observation (such as unexpectedly asking the player to remove their hands from they keyboard, to observe whether play stopped… and it did). We observed well over 3 hours of play, and then compared the play we observed to historical records of past play. We cannot divulge exactly what we compared, though we can say that it did include comparing his hand selection, action timing, and many other aspects. The resulting comparison very strongly indicates that the prior play is statistically identical to the observed play. In short, our bot detection tools have borne themselves out here very nicely. The tools always indicated that the player appeared human despite ever-increasing hours of play and concurrent tables. Now, through our observations, we’ve independently confirmed those findings.

It must be said that PokerStars should be applauded in terms of the breadth of the tests that they have carried out and also in making this public. To actually attend the player’s house and watch a few hours play is incredible and is a great testament to the rigorous standards PokerStars places on fairness in the game. Well done PokerStars! Full post at over at the Two Plus Two Poker Forums

Where to Sit on an Online Poker Cash Game Table

The position that you sit at a cash game poker table is of immense importance. If you’ve gone through the routine we have suggested in order to select the best cash game table to maximise your chance of profit, but choose to sit in the wrong position at the table you will often be in a worse situation than if you were seated at a totally unsuitable table. This is the reason why you will see full tables that have several players waiting for the chance to join them in correct seat position whilst there are hundreds of other tables with free spaces available.

Why Is Seat Position Important At the Poker Table?

When you are playing Texas Hold ’em it is important to have the aggressive players that have a habit of raising to your right hand side and the looser players that will simply call and check to your left. The reason for this is that by having loose players that constantly check to your left means that you can Continue reading →

Make Notes on Other Poker Players

When playing poker online it is important to gain as much of an advantage over your opponents as possible. Due to the nature of online poker you obviously can’t rely on a physical tell such as a twitch or a rub of the face. However, due to the privacy of playing online you can take notes on your opposition – not something that would go down well in a bricks and mortar casino!

Taking notes by hand is fine, but all poker sites now have a feature whereby you can take notes on particular players of your choosing and the record will be stored for you. Whenever that player pops up on a table you will be able to review all your prior notes. It is clear that taking notes can be an extremely useful mechanism for attempting to gain an advantage over your fellow players, but you must plan how you record your notes otherwise they will be all but useful.

First of all you need to ensure that you date any entry you make. Over time it is highly possible that a player’s style may change or they might improve dramatically so it is important that you have a chronological record. When you take notes, try to do it objectively. To write down that pokerboy4433 is a “lucky little sh*t” won’t be of much use to you in the future. However, to write that pokerboy4433 “Frequently goes for gutshots. Seems to lack patience.” is something that can be a valuable piece of information that can be utilised in the future.

The more entries that you make for a given player, the more detailed a picture you will start to get about his general Texas Hold ’em style. Of course if a player attempts to hide his identity by regularly changing his screen identity (which is no bad idea), your notes will become useless. But typically players will either use the same poker moniker at all the poker rooms they frequent or they will just stick to their favourite online poker site. If your player notes help you to bag a monster pot or two you will soon start to see that the massive benefits of taking detailed notes will outweigh the minor inconvenience.