Software Errors that resulted in extra ++EV situations at sites

[JAque]

As most of you remember, in one of the books from David Sklansky, he tells stories where the casinos made mistakes in odds or offered special deals that cost them a lot of money due to savvy gamblers as Dave.

Other than casino whoring, has anyone have a story about online sites where there was an obvious software error that cost the site money and required and immediate fix? I am not talking about abusing signup bonuses unless there was a software error of some kind.

I haven’t encounter any but I do not play in many different sites. It seems that any time there is a glitch or error in the software , it cost the player money but not the sites. However, it is hard to believe that they haven’t made mistakes to favor the player on a few occasions.

JAque

[B00T]

One casino site I used to play on had an absolutely horrible Pai Gow programming. I think the site was Interbet.

The house basically had no idea how it was setting its hands. A copy hand was considered a "tie" and was a push not a loss for the player. The hand setting was atrocious besides the actual rules errors. If there were 2 pair and a non ace, the 2 pair would be kept together and the 2 card hand would be 9-6. Basically with a halfway decent understanding of the game the odds were easily in the players favor. I remember paying for an entire semester at college about 2 years ago, just abusing their flawed programming of Pai Gow Poker.

[PapaSan]

I was lucky enough to find 2 glitches one of them still works.
At one site there was stricly holdem games no omaha or stud and no tourneys, when they introduced omaha hilo if the pot was split 3 ways, 2 guys with low 1 with high or 2 with high 1 with low it was split 50/50/50. The extra money coming from the house it only lasted about a week but surprisingly few people noticed.
The other glitch still works , i was downloading 6 or 7 songs on kazaa and was starting to lag out while playing poker. I left my table and registered for a 20$ multi tourney and a 30$ sitngo, the money was never taken from my account and i didnt see my name on the list. I unregistered from the sitngo and 30$ was credited to my account.Same thing happened to me a few months later and again last weeek.

[Baulucky]

Although not software, but procedural errors, are common in some Caribbean boat cruises. The BJ dealers consistently flash the bottom card before offering a cut. With some practice one can learn to make very exact cuts to place the flashed card at an exact distance from the top (about 25 is ok). When the card happens to be an A or T, this gives a gargantuan advantage to a team of 2 or 3 playing at the table. The strategy can't be related to counting cards or shuffle tracking, but they catch on after a while.

A crash course in basic card magic tricks is reccomended.

[cardcounter0]

Most sites don't allow a dead button, so if the guy two to your right leaves at the right time, you end up playing an orbit by posting only a small blind.

[jasonHoldEm]

Unrelated to gambling...

Back in the day when those "pay to surf" programs were popular there was one site (I think it was called beenz I don't remember it's been so long) that allowed you to play video games to try and win extra points. Ideally what the site was trying to do was to have members spend their points on the game rather than cashing them in (you had to spend a small number of points to play the game and only if you set a certain high score did you win any points back).

The game that had the glitch was a game very similar to the old atari game asteroids (I am an asteroids god). Naturally this was rigged in such a way that to get a score high enough to qualify for points you had to play at a very high level of difficulty (lots of fast moving asteroids, alien ships, etc). What they failed to realize is that the speed of the game (and therefore the difficulty) was determined by the processing speed of the computer you were playing...log onto their website with an older computer and presto, you have an instant cash machine (you just had to sit and play asteroids for hours upon hours, so instant is relative I guess).

I ended up taking them for a couple grand before they changed the payout structure (instead of having to hit a certain number you had to place on a leaderboard that was refreshed daily so after I set all the high scores it became progressively harder and harder to make any money). After that it was no longer cost effective (I went from making $20-25 an hour to making about $5), but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. When I was a kid I always dreamed of playing video games for a living and for about a month or so in college I got to live my dream. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

J

[BradleyT]

I've cheated many MMORPGs and have cashed in over $30,000 from it. Almost every MMORPG has some sort of exploit in it, I can't see how this casino software is any more cheat proof - especially since it's all windows based.

However I think cheating a casino would be much more "punishable" in one way or another than cheating an online game.

[gabyyyyy]

[ QUOTE ]
Other than casino whoring, has anyone have a story about online sites where there was an obvious software error that cost the site money and required and immediate fix? I am not talking about abusing signup bonuses unless there was a software error of some kind.

I haven’t encounter any but I do not play in many different sites. It seems that any time there is a glitch or error in the software , it cost the player money but not the sites. However, it is hard to believe that they haven’t made mistakes to favor the player on a few occasions.

JAque


[/ QUOTE ]

What kind of retarded question is this?

[BradleyT]

It's not retarded. He means things like this:
http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/party_menu.gif

That my real party client.

That menu is an actual menu inside partypoker.exe, I just moved it from it's stand alone spot onto the main client window. None of the options do anything though. However it wouldn't suprise me if there was a way to hack the client to get them to work. Hopefully party is smart enough to do an administrative check on the server before running any of those menu commands.

But as far as reverse engineering goes, I know squat - I'm just a web programmer.

[Baulucky]

MMMMM!!!

[Baulucky]

MMORPGs ?? Wtf is a MMORPG?

[BradleyT]

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

Everquest, Ultima Online, ShadowBane, Dark Age of Camelot, etc..

[Baulucky]

Wow. I didn't think so much $ was available in those things.

Good for you.

[Chief911]

Oh, everquest was a gold mind. I ran a tidy little business that made over 150k. Was running at around 300/hour buying and selling characters, as well as being the first person to figure out the true lodizal (You'll know if you played EQ) spawn down to the second, combined with a maxed out warrior and shaman. Oh the joy of computer games.

Next...Poker! When are my AA gonna spawn?

Nick

[Sponger15SB]

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, everquest was a gold mind.

[/ QUOTE ]

mmm a gold mind, maybe goldmember would be interested?

anyways a few times (3x for like $22 a piece) on pacific poker i've gotten free SNGs without them taking money out of my accout, but that is like a minor glitch compared to all the horrible software bugs.

[moondogg]

[ QUOTE ]
That menu is an actual menu inside partypoker.exe, I just moved it from it's stand alone spot onto the main client window.

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. Out of pure "curiosity", exactly how did you make it show up?

[Baulucky]

Any current games?.

Why/when/how did they shut the others down?. i.e.: Did you manage to cash out?. Did they ask you to give the $ back?.

Very interesting comments.

Also: What was the "source" of the $ you were making?. Other players or the playing site?.

[gabyyyyy]

Bradley, you outdid yourself on this one.

Nice job! /images/graemlins/grin.gif

For all who did not realize, the image brad showed was edited. It ain't real.

[skaboomizzy]

Somehow a 800+ chip pot I won in a PacificPoker SNG got awarded to me twice. Nobody said anything in chat despite the fact that the combined stack sizes were now 800+ more than they should have been.

[BradleyT]

[ QUOTE ]
Bradley, you outdid yourself on this one.

Nice job! /images/graemlins/grin.gif

For all who did not realize, the image brad showed was edited. It ain't real.

[/ QUOTE ]

Why would I do that? The only reason it looks bad is because the original jpg was huge.

Image 1 (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/pp_vs1.gif) - Here is that menu item loaded into visual studio.net


Image 2 (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/pp_vs2.gif) - Here is a listing of all available items to "browse" through.

Image 3 (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/pp_vs3.gif) - Here is me removing other PP menu items from the client.

Image 4 (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/pp_vs4.gif) - Removing a few more items.

Image 5 (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/pp_vs1.jpg) - Here is an uncompressed JPG (400K). Note that even though I removed the News & Events menu it still appears. No idea why that one does it.

Walk-thru of modifying PP (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/index.aspx) I posted this quite a while back. I show the steps in modifying the PP tournament results window so that your only option to click is yes.

Still think I'm trying to pull one over???

[moondogg]

Nice. I forgot VS let you modify the resource file. We used to fool around with competitor's products by changing the string table.
I thought you meant the menu already existing in the program. If so, there would probably be a Windows message ID associated with it, and spoofing those is pretty easy.

Anywho, I'm suprised nobody has cracked open any poker software and released "enhancements" to mess with it.

At the very least you could probably make a few $$$ on a Party "customizer" (colors, images, icons etc). A few hours work, you should be able to make Party visibly identical to Empire.

[BradleyT]

The menu does already exist inside partypoker.exe. All I did was drag and drop it onto the main party menu.

What I've been trying to do lately is to get a smaller party window. I've gotten it to allow you to resize the border Image (http://www.bradleyt.com/poker/party_mod.jpg) but the contents inside don't contract and expand when the window border is resized. I also changed the appearance of the checkbox controls down in the lower left but the buttons are too big IMO.

[CORed]

I wonder if this is a menu that is available to site administrators. If Party's software is designed even close to right (which is questionable), other players hole cards and cards not yet dealt shouldn't be sent to the client of a regular player, but maybe with a priveleged account, the information is available.

[Fraubump]

As a prop for ACR a couple of years ago I was also de facto a beta tester.

One abusable glitch there for a while was that in stud games, if you timed out when it was your turn to post the bring-in, you didn't post it and the pot was played with just the antes.

Also, in Holdem if you sat down in just the right spot relative to the button/blinds (I think it was one seat to the left of the button, where all programs I know skip you until you're in the cutoff seat) you got dealt a hand without having posted any blinds.

Sometimes the button didn't move and the same people paid the blinds again, which was neutral ev, as sometimes it was you and sometimes it wasn't.

I have had one off errors in my favor elsewhere: at Peach Casino, they failed to credit me with the deposit match bonus when I first deposited, so then they did it manually and I discovered they had failed to attach any wagering requirement to the bonus.

And Paradise once added $1500 extra dollars to the pot in a .02/04 game where I hit a runner runner 2 pair. Oh wait, that was just a miracle, not a glitch.

[Thythe]

One most recent glitch was the the Sands of the Carribean monthly $100 bonus was supposed to be play 25X before it released it, but it was releasing it after 8X. This went on for 3 months or so and is now fixed. There's a similar current glitch going on, but I won't name it here for fear of it being fixed. PM me if you want to know (it's not that spectacular and has to do with Crypto casino WR)

[dink]

one I found at players vegas casino and gold betting casino is

That once you got your bonus (after 15x playthrough), you then withdraw any money above the bonus. Leaving only your bonus $$$ in the a/c.

To now withdraw the bonus $$$ you need to play them through 15x

EXCEPT
once you bet $$$ your bonus amount goes down and if you work it back up to the original level the bonus amount of you balance stays at the lower level.

for example
when I had $100 of bonus $$$ in my a/c it got down to $80, i made a $20 bet, which I won , then I worked it up to $120, I could withdraw $60, which I did.

Once the money hit my a/c I went back, having $60 of bonus money in my a/c.

I bet $20 and got a blackjack, straight away I withdrew $50 from my a/c leaving $40.

after getting the $$$ I went back, $40 in my a/c (all bonus money) lost the first $20 bet won the 2nd $20, withdrew the $40.

Presto got all the bonus money + some without meeting the wagering reuirements.

special note - you do first have to play through 15x to release the bonus dollars.

Dink
lets hope they don't read this and change their software