Part I: Card Game Cheating · Collusion & Electronic Cheating at Card Games · #2.40
Superuser Account Exploitation
How it works
An insider (typically a company executive, software developer, or administrator) uses privileged access to view all players’ hole cards in real-time during play. This “God Mode” or “superuser” access was originally built into poker software for testing, auditing, or customer service purposes. Unscrupulous insiders or their associates create player accounts with superuser privileges, allowing them to see every opponent’s cards and play with perfect information. The cheating is nearly undetectable from the player side since the cheater appears to simply be an exceptionally skilled player making impossibly good reads.
Where it appears
Online poker
On the record
The Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker scandals (2007-2008) represent the largest insider cheating events in online poker history. The “POTRIPPER” account on Absolute Poker won a $1,000 buy-in, $100,000-guaranteed tournament in 2007 with play that suggested it could see opponents’ hole cards. When opponent Marco Johnson requested hand histories, Absolute Poker accidentally sent him a file containing all players’ hole cards, exposing the cheating. The Kahnawake Gaming Commission named 1994 WSOP Champion Russ Hamilton as the main person responsible for cheating on Ultimate Bet and ordered about $22 million refunded to affected players (some press estimates of total losses exceed $50 million). The scandal badly damaged both poker sites, which closed after the 2011 U.S. Black Friday indictments and remains the benchmark for online poker cheating.
Detection & preventionADVISORY
The paid halfHow a monitoring room catches superuser account exploitation, and what stops it recurring, written for the desk, not the reader.
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Published as a detection reference for surveillance, compliance and gaming-operations professionals. Thresholds and tuning are set by the property. Nothing here is instruction: the method is described so it can be recognised.