Recently on one of the forums, I saw a poster complaining that he had bought the newest “cheater” software for online poker rooms. The ad had claimed that it would reveal the opponents’ hole cards. It hadn’t worked. I thought it strange that he might post the complaint and wonder what type of response he wanted, but thought the idea of a cheater program could use some discussion. There are a great variety of poker “helper” programs out there and some are pretty good. There are some excellent automatic record keepers, there are even some true poker bots out there that might be effective, but I find it rather ludicrous that some would think there is an effective “cheater” program out there. The security, inherent to poker programs, simply precludes the development of an external “cheater” program. (With inside help at the server site, it is possible, that is why personnel integrity is so important in the operation of an online gambling site.)

The success of the “cheater” software scam can be credited to a situation that occurred early in the history of internet poker. An online site, quite proud of their Random Number Generator, RNG, actually posted it online for everyone to review. Then, a group of crypto analysts from NSA developed a methodology that could result in predicting unseen cards with some degree of success. The theory involved running every possible combination in order to “spoof” the RNG seed. Then the software would use the seed to predict future hands.

In the past it was believed that the required computer power would be prohibitive to any such attempt, but the RNG software vendor had not taken into account the recent computer advances which had made a substantial increase in the power of personal computers. Even then, it was never absolutely accurate, but its reliability was high enough to provide a significant "edge". I’ve seen no evidence that it actually occurred but it was a very real possibility. All the reporting used the word “predict” instead of “spoof” and the speculation became rampant and somewhat believable.

Well needless to say, the quality, of RNGs, became the priority and have improved substantially over the last few years. Some sites use hardware others use multiple “seeds,” that increase the randomness exponentially. With the enough computer power these seed numbers might be spoofed too, but right now that type of computer power is not readily available. It is simply a case of the RNGs keeping the number of permutations too large for the available computing power. Once available computer power increases to appropriate levels these RNGs will be vulnerable to spoofing also.

Many online poker players seem to believe that the live casino shuffle is more random than an online shuffle, but in many cases this is far from true. Some marginal dealers develop habits that cause the cards to come out in other than a random fashion. It is usually caused by: How they pick the showdown hands, how they put the cards back into the deck and no or a poor scramble. When they get careless you can see the showdown hands put out immediately in order during the next hand. Sometimes, it caused by learned habits they picked up at a dealers’ school. More than once I have surprised a dealer by telling them which school they attended to learn to deal poker.

A second major non-random situation you see in live games is the use of the plastic cards. When a card room cleans up a used deck and then re-makes it for later use, they place separate the suits and place them in the box with two suits face down and two suits face up with the Ace of Spades on top. The deck is then stored. After a period of time the Ace of Spades develops a discernable warp that actually distorts the shape of the deck and causes the Ace to be cut to the top of the deck or more importantly second from the top. The result is that the Ace is often dealt to the first player. In Seven Card Stud this is another good reason to sit in the One Seat.

Finally in home games and poker clubs where the cards are dealt by the players the possibility that a deck is not totally random is even worse, either by incompetence or design. So the next time you run into someone complaining about a Random Number Generator, take it with a grain of salt. The shuffle at an online poker room is probably the best you will ever get.

Good luck.

JB