A Classic Catch-22: StopPokerCheaters.com

Digging through the overload of bad-beat and hand-history dross that marks most online poker wordage, I stumbled into an interesting link courtesy of Online Poker News. This one appeared for a few hours in the "Breaking News" flowing banner, located top-'n'-center on OPN's home page. But breaking in what way? Not only was the banner originally linking to the press release no longer there when I returned a few hours later to research the topic; the press release itself was nowhere to be found.

I lo-o-o-oves me a mystery. Hot diggity! Even though this is likely a case of just a dropped link over at OPN, it's interesting that it involved one of the most curious of recent poker news releases --- curious for an entirely separate reason.

Or maybe not. Maybe Online Poker News gave a little bit more thought to the meaning behind this mystery release, as we will here, and decided to pull the thing until more information could be determined.

The release involved an announcement from StopPokerCheaters.com, proclaiming the availability of a freeware program designed not only to block trojans purportedly incorporated within some sites' poker-client packages, but to offer all kinds of anti-cheating functionality for use on a few of the largest sites. "100% Protection from online Poker Cheaters!" the site proclaims. It then goes on to tout the ability of this freeware package's software to help "expose poker teams," track "pro's [SIC] who win Large % of games," and of course, to install a special firewall to prevent the online site's software from doing things other than it's supposed to. The site also says that "we monitor [read: data-mine] all the top online poker rooms..."

Well, not all top online poker rooms, by most definitions, though the sites included here as being monitored are Party, Pacific, Full Tilt and Empire. Whether the Empire inclusion is pre- or post-split with Party is unclear.

(As an aside, someday we'll explore the whole "Party Poker Trojan" situation in detail, but that's a topic for another post. Suffice it for now to say that if Party Poker is using a trojan at this time, it's on the mild end of such malignancies.)

The point of this whole post, to misquote the line from Ghostbusters, is, "Who you gonna trust?" On one side we have a publicly-traded company with a market valuation in the tens of billions, and on the other a self-publishing techie who may be doing this for... whatever reason?? As the site says (SIC warning intact): "Some of the best organized gangs and scam artisit in the world have started attacking online poker rooms using trojans and virus's. The industry is just moving to fast to keep up with this kind of effort."

And phishing attempts come in all shapes and forms, and the moon is indeed made of blue cheese. I think this truism is the likely explanation for the disapperance of the link from OPN. This software, pure or not, just needs further checking.

Given that any program that can detect and block trojans and other viruses must, by definition, have some sort of trojan/virus functionality itself, the last thing I'm going to do is install this guy's package, at least until it's been verified as legitimate by a reputable third party. "This guy," it turns out, is an Illinoisian named Larry Brunken, who does have some previous credits in the freeware and RSS/XML areas. He might also be the same Larry Brunken who won a brand new Phillips HDTV through an adult-site sponsored giveaway --- compound web searches being such a weird and enabling thing.

Ooops. Sorry about that, Larry.

There's a classic Catch-22 here: Think about all those hundreds of thousands of players in this site's database, and note that another function of this software is to store and re-display your own hole cards for reference. Now, what if the cheaters were the ones behind the software? (I'm not saying they are, I'm saying what if.) Why, they'd have access to your hole cards, could hunt you down at your tables as you play, and since this software is relaying information from a private database on the fly, it would block the screen names of the people accessing that information. In other words, this software opens you up to exactly the type of third-party access that its author is trying to get you paranoid about in the first place.

There's even a demo on the site, showing how one can set up the software's firewall and supercede the controls of a site such as Party; the "Poker BodyGuard" logo here is screen-grabbed from that portion of the demo.

It's not a bad site, visually, though the grammar found here is a notch worse than that found in, say, an '80s-vintage Konami arcade game. Dreadful, in other words. and some of the claims seem outlandish, such as this:

"Some programs allow one person to login to many accounts at a poker room without any trouble. These user WILL not be detected by the poker rooms but will be caught by PokerBodyGuard."

Exactly how, pray tell? What secrets of the world does our heart-of-gold Illinoisian possess that the combined resources of an online industry can't figure out?

I'm not saying that this software doesn't do what it says it does, with purity and cleanliness all around. I just know that this is something I won't be the first to try.

But let me know if you do. I've got to admit I'm curious.