Paradise responded about WINHOLDEM**

[JAque]

Posted in RGP . The response also includes an answer about a picture of program showing all the players cards in a play money table.

enjoy

JAque


*****************************************

Dear xxx -

Thanks for your email. After examaning the gif file that you attached, I
can tell you that it is someone playing a joke. The hand number and the
IDs on this picture are from early 2001. It's clearly someone just trying
a little prank.

As for your concerns about the bot that is being posted about (winholdem),
we're familiar with the product you mention, and we've got a method in
place to detect it (it's quite easily detectable). Anyone detected to be
using this product has their account closed by us.

What's more concerning about this particular product, is the likely
intended use of it; it basically installs a trojan horse on the computer
of those that download it, likely allowing the provider of the product to
see the hole cards of the person using it. Which makes sense, being the
winholdem.net product is free (nothing is for free!).

He's clearly got an ulterior motive than to simply provide the general
public a complimentary cheat service.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Best Regards,

Craig
Paradise Poker Support

www.ParadisePoker.com (http://www.ParadisePoker.com)

[bigpooch]

Thanks for posting this! Maybe Mat will erase that
ridiculously long thread about WINHOLDEM!

[JAque]

For the people in here that have accounts in multiple casinos, don't you think is a good idea to send this response to them and ask if they are planning to take measures to detect and close the accounts of players using it? /images/graemlins/shocked.gif

thanks

JAque

[Adde]

For the people in here that have accounts in multiple casinos, don't you think is a good idea to send this response to them and ask if they are planning to take measures to detect and close the accounts of players using it?

Exactly my thought. Also, the poker sites should work together on this, share their knowledge how to detect the bot, etc.

Maybe someone with excelent writing skills could set the stone rolling. Lori?

[Lori]

I did mail the three sites with the real name of the guy and my reasons for believing he was running a bot.

The replies were all of the "Thanks, we are forwarding to management" variety, apart from Party who told me they don't have bots, only props.

The email and replies are lying around this forum someplace.

Lori

[_And1_]

haha, i love that party response you posted earlier, so obvious they dont understand any of it.. hahaha

[MMMMMM]

"Exactly my thought. Also, the poker sites should work together on this, share their knowledge how to detect the bot, etc."

On a related note, I used to play a lot of DiabloII. There were many various hacks and cheats, and Blizzard (the parent comapny) sometimes banned accounts for things such as duping of virtual items. They could detect such activities due to the way the cheat programs interwacted with the server (though until they learned of a specific exploit, the exploit was often abused severely until they discovered it and put countermeasures in place).

One especially common cheat was/is called Maphack. I remember for a couple years people were saying Blizzard could never detect it because it was just a client-side program, that they were programmers themselves and there was NO WAY Blizz could ever detect it. However that much later proved to be false when Blizzard later showed that they could indeed detect it.

Now here is Paradise saying they can easily detect WinHoldEm. Great. I am just wondering why gambling sites have not been more widely hacked or more cheat programs have not been developed given what I saw with tremendous cheating going on on Battle.net. However I read that Everquest (another virtual-reality role-playing game) is basically cheat-free. I don't know much about the technicals of anything like that so I am just mentioning this by way of interest and in case you or anyone cares to comment or elaborate further. I suspect in the future there will be more cheat or bot programs for poker and that the best poker sites will detect what people previously though was undetectable and people will lose more accounts.

By the way I think online poker is largely honest (with the exception of a handful colluders of course) but I do wonder about the future of bots, hacks and cheats of any kind.

[MrDannimal]

One of the reasons that Poker/Everquest (and the like) are less prone to cheats/hacks is that:

In poker's case, the data is encrypted (every bot talked about here has used screen scraping, which is a huge pain in the ass) making it not worth the time for average Joe Hacker.

In EQ/MMORPG cases, there some data encryption, but the big thing is that all character data is stored on the server. With DII, that isn't the case. Well, it is now with the "closed" BNet and ladder characters. But the item duping tricks exploited bugs in the program.

The reason that there are more DII bugs and slower fixes is because with EQ and the like, there's ongoing revenue coming in from monthly subscriptions to pay for people to work on the code. Battle.net is free, so there's far less $$ to support it.