Paradise Blackjack had a "tell"

[theghost]

http://haacked.com/archive/2005/08/29/9748.aspx

Online Games Are Written By Humans

Remember that online games are written by humans and thus are subject to the bugs and flaws that humans are so good at introducing.

This was made quite evident by an article for the current issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that a former coworker of mine wrote. It's an interesting read and I encourage you to check it out, though it is only in print on dead trees.

In this article he describes a flaw that became apparent to him within a newly released BlackJack game on the Paradise Poker website. In BlackJack, when the dealer is showing an ace, the dealer offers the players the option to purchase insurance. This is a way for the players to pay to cut their losses should the dealer have ten (10, Jack, Queen, or King) in the hole.

On this particular online game, he noticed that when the dealer did have a pocket ten, there would be a noticeable pause before he was prompted with the Insurance request. When there wasn't a pocket ten, the prompt appeared immediately.

After doing some quick calculations, he realized this bit of information gave him an edge over the house. He ended up playing the next seven hours exploiting this bug and made a nice chunk of change during that time.

Obviously I don't know what caused the flaw in the game, but my guess is that there was some calculation the system needed to make to determine whether or not to offer insurance. That calculation may have taken more time to perform in the situation the dealer had a ten.

Let's pretend I am right (not a huge stretch as I am always right) and think about that for a sec. The code itself may have been completely correct in the sense that it did what it was supposed to do. It was the amount of time the code needed to execute that ended up being the tell. No different than when a poker player twitches when holding a great hand.

The fix may have been to change the execution profile of the code so that it made the same pause no matter what was in the hole. Talk about a challenge for game developers. Not only does the code need to be bug free in syntax and semantics, but they now need to worry about the execution profile for their games.

Who knows if there are several other timing flaws like this in other games. It didn't even require my friend to hack into anything. He simply observed the timing disparity. Now imagine if he was running a timing program specifically designed to look for other timing flaws. Something that would notice discrepancies down to the millisecond.