The Bogus Five-Aces PokerStars Hand That Won't Die

Like cow mutilations or baby alligators swimming up out of the toilet to snap one's private parts, even poker has its own growing collection of urban legends. One of them is the supposed "five aces" hands in a tournament on Poker Stars, which pops up every few weeks and always manages to snag a few of the more gullible among us.

As the story goes, deep in a major tournament in 2006, the PokerStars.com Download software was either hacked or malfunctioned, with the result that five aces supposedly showed up in a hand.

Take this as gospel: It's a big fake, and the incident never happened.

This is a small version of the screenshot that supposedly shows the incident, though a full version of the image is available in the latest 2+2 thread to see the old tale resurface. The big image is recommended for visiting. Look at it closely and you can see it's clearly been doctored.



Fortunately, the response from Stars' research into the bogus claim is also widely known, and is usually posted soon after. That's occurred in the latest thread as well, and is added here just to save you the scrolling:

old stars reply...

T# 14705493 was the $10 + $1 Deep Stacks tournament held on 12th
November 2005. The top four players in this event were:

"gamblinfla"
"MiketheKid2"
"twiceasright"
"witzy2004"

The player "Big Devin" didn't take part in this tournament.

Next, you can see the observer "style12" in chat on the
table. "style12" is not a User ID on our database as of June 2006 --
he doesn't exist.

There are also two hands mentioned here. One is # 3044245011 and the
other # 3044243120. I've attached them both below so that you can see
the hands as they originally happened. As you can see, the chip
stacks are totally consistent from one hand to the next. Further
more, "Big Devin" didn't take part.

Finally, it is clearly demonstrable that the image has been edited.
Attached please find a closeup of several of the cards on the screen.
If you look closely, you'll see that the ace of clubs is one pixel too
high. The prankster that tried to run this hoax was not quite careful
enough with his editing and left this evidence behind.

I hope that this sets your mind at ease, but if you have further
queries, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Best regards,

Dan C
PokerStars Support Team


Cute, ain't it all?