article on online cheating, and question on ups and downs

[West]

Hi. I play daily single table tournaments on Empire Poker, which as I understand it, is part of Party Poker. Been playing for months now, and things had been going fairly well, until the last week and a half. Lately it seems like I'm on a roll now where 9 out of 10 horrible calls made against me pay off for the player making the horrible call.

Example, single table tourney on Empire, blinds up to 100/200, folded to me in SB, I raise to 600 with KQ..I had folded blinds to the guy next to me on numerous occasions, and had yet to raise him up from SB, but he calls me..flop misses me, but my gut said he didn't have anything and to make a play for it and go all in (flop was three low cards)...my opponent called my all in, though he still had a good amount of chips, and my all in was for over 1000 chips, with K7 offsuit (he had no part of the flop)...he then promptly hit a 7 on the river to win....

I'm starting to get paranoid. Because of this, I did a google search on being cheated in online poker, and ran across this link:

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/ent...cle.php/616221

It's old, and I don't understand it entirely, but I think I get the general gist of it. Anyone know if this is old news, taken care of now that it is years later? Or what? Am I probably just on a bad roll of luck, and that's the way the ball bounces? I'm curious if anyone out there who has been successful over the long term can relate some of their worst deviations over a short term period. Do you have bad months and good months, or more like just bad weeks and good weeks? I'm starting to lose it.

[West]

Forgot to mention about the example, this was with 4 players left in the tourney (top 3 cash). As many stupid plays as you will see in the earlier stages of tourneys, even the clowns tend to show a little sense once they are near the money. And in the above example, in my experience, even just about every clown would have folded as well. I was pretty much flabbergasted when he turned over his hand. This guy had not done anything reckless to that point as far as I could tell at all, which made it even more surprising.

[ewile]

The question you ask turns up in this forum very often (pretty much every week and sometimes several times a week). The concensus here seems to be that the online games are fair and that these types of bad runs are common and very normal.
You can search the archives and turn up alot of these previous discussions.

[MrBlue]

I read this same article a few months back after a friend doubt online play was fair. This type of attack is feasible. However if you merely expand the seed space like the article suggests to 64 bit, then it would make it very difficult for such an attack to succeed.

To rebut my friend's skeptical view of online poker, I merely pointed him to this http://www.paradisepoker.com/shuffling.html. Paradise uses 2016 bit seed whereas the article stated that they broke 32 bit seed. The increase does not make it linearly harder to break, but rather exponentially harder. You need some background in computer science and math theory but it's not out of the grasp of a typical 2+2er. Granted, Paradise is not Party Poker. Their staff may not be as well educated but I think they should at least understand basics of first year computer science theory taught a top tier school.

There are other ways to break the system. But as far as pattern mapping and brute force attacks like this, it's total bunk.

PS
I should add that unless we can examine the source code line by line, it's hard to tell for sure if there are vulnerabilities. Or even if they correctly implemented what they stated so eloquently in their explanation. A lot of times, it's designed by a senior engineer and shipped off to India where it is actually written. But we have no way of knowing other than to examine the hundreds of thousands of hands played to determine fairness. So far the consensus is the results are not skewed.