I thought I’d give Everest a whirl the other day only to find that after downloading their poker software, the lobby screen wouldn’t fit within the screen of my laptop. I use a netbook with a native screen resolution of 1024×600 so sometimes some sites need resizing a little. Not possible with Everest unfortunately. I checked their FAQ’s and in black and white I could see that the minimum specifications for software download is a screen resolution of 1024×768.

Remember the 1990’s when occasionally you had to check the minimum specifications for a piece of software? Well apparently in 2011 a poker room wants to curtail its user base amongst an entire set of Internet users. Given that sales of netbooks are outpacing traditional laptops significantly and the native screen resolution for a typical netbook is 1024×768 you would think that software vendors would want to cater to users of netbooks. I was sure that Everest wouldn’t be so stupid to design software so badly and that there would be a workaround so I got one of their support bods on instant chat and asked them to confirm whether people using a 1024×768 resolution are unable to use Everest software? The entirety of our conversation consisted of my question and his rather enigmatic “Yes”. So that was it.

My attempt to give an online poker room my hard earned money was scuppered by a software development team that apparently doesn’t do usability tests. Everest poker uninstalled…

If you’re a cash game player over at PokerStars you’ve likely come across their “milestone hands” promotion which is part of their main 50 billion hands milestone promotion. Basically for every millionth hand dealt, PokerStars are selecting a table and for each player with cards at that table they will win a cash prize (with the winner of the pot having their prize doubled).

Quite a nice promotion and one that’s bound to increase cash game participation particularly when PokerStars have a countdown of hands played in the lobby and even display a popup during existing games (such as tourneys that aren’t even applicable to the promo) when a millionth hand is nearly there. No doubt punters are rushing to multi table cash games when a milestone hand is imminent in the hope that their table is the lucky one. The part that struck me about this milestone hand promotion though is not the players that are in the hand but the players that aren’t.

Let me explain. When a table is selected as being a milestone hand table it is publicised in the PokerStars lobby and the hand is paused for a minute or two until a moderator explains how things work, etc. This is the time when the vultures start to circle. Due to the fact that everyone logged into PokerStars knows which table is the milestone table literally a couple of hundred observers descend onto that table waiting in the wings. Now some of the observers might be bloody stupid enough to think that they can sneak onto the table somehow and grab some of the spoils, but most of them are there to basically offer their critique, ahem, on how the players played the hand. In other words post a stream of vitriolic abuse at how the players should have done this and that – not folded, etc.

What makes me laugh about this situation is that there seems to be a band of milestone hand observer “groupies”. Basically people that are just constantly following milestone hands around so they can wait until the hand has been played to add in their pathetic comments and abuse the players on the table. This can go on for hours. A whole sub culture of the same observers who bring up stories of bad plays (in their opinion) from hands played several hours ago. Nothing to do with jealousy of course, I’m sure they just want to share their knowledge with the other players. However, based on the level of grammar, wit, articulation and knowledge displayed by the observers sending in comments I wouldn’t trust them to sit the right way round on a toilet seat let alone offer poker schooling. A radical idea for these “observers” may be for them to actually play poker themselves, rather than spending hours abusing the play of others.

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