Theft At The Tables
The clock strikes eleven, but you barely notice. After all, it’s a Saturday, and life is wonderful. You’re at home with friends, drinking beer, trading banters, and entering the tenth wing of your weekly tournament. You flop a flush draw, and fiddle with your ciggie as you wait for the next player to make his move. Does he have a better hand? You watch the dealer, calculate your opponents’ tells, and mentally covet the chips piled on the table. At that moment, the door flies open. Two masked men burst in, brandishing weapons. “Your money, quickly!” they shout, and suddenly, the chips you’ve been salivating over do not seem so important anymore.
But wait! That couldn’t possibly be you face to face with those robbers. You don’t play poker at home or at a friend’s house; you play poker online. What’s more, you don’t play with chips; you make sport bets using free poker bets. So, a robbery is out of the question - for you, anyway.
Those Big, Bad Phishermen
Or, is it? What many players do not realize is that poker robberies take place all the time - and not just in backdoor games, either. Whether you play online or off, you are a sitting duck; and web-based casinos share this predicament. They suffer from phishing attacks, like online banks and regular Internet users do. Players’ identities are obtained through emails claiming to be from the casino, but are actually from tricksters on a fishing expedition for account details. Once they have obtained the necessary information, they empty the account by gambling the victim’s money against themselves or their accessories. Over the years, these fraudsters have perfected their methods in such a way that they are now able to employ software agents, or bots, which enter poker rooms and beat all but the best players.
Possible Poker Police?
The good news is that experts are now taking measures to prevent these robberies from taking place. How? By coming up with software that monitors player performance. This software compiles what can only be called a gambler’s DNA, that is, a player’s typical behavior at the table - how often and how much he bets, for example, or what he does with his free casino bets. Then, the software keeps tabs on the game. Any deviation from a gambler’s DNA is flagged as suspicious; and the player may be kicked off the table or worse, blocked from the site. Present experimentation with the software resulted in an 80% accuracy, and experts are hopeful that these odds would increase the longer a player stays on the tables.
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