The Party Network T&C shuffle (Long)

[Orpheus]

First, let me make it clear that this is not paranoid conspiracy theory thread. I'm just creating this thread as a one-stop discussion point for a loophole I reported some time ago, in a post that is now buried in the bowels of a forgotten thread. It seems to me that this issue will crop up rep[eatedly in the future, but that Party won't directly report it to the players because it might upset them, or might even be open to challenge. It could, however, be a plausible sounding justification for many types of actions, to their regulators behind closed doors.

I'm not freaking out. I intend to continue playing at Party for the foreseeable future, because it is fun and profitable for me. I simply feel that this "loophole" needs to be laid bare. I am not a lawyer, nor am I familiar with the laws of each of the possibly relevant jurisdictions, but I think the problem is clear in plain English.

A PARABLE (feel free to skip)
I feel the loophole needs a name, if we are to discuss it whenever it comes up. I'm sure some clever reader will come up with a better name, but for now, I call it the "Uranistani Law Problem" or simply "ULP!".

Imagine that you apply for an ultra-black secret agent job so secret that the application states that any misstatement on the form will be considered an attempt to infiltrate the organization, with a penalty up to and including secret executions. Naturally, this is one form you'll want to fill out withthe utmost care, but being the kind of dashing model of perfection that this job demands, you aren't worried.

Except... well there's an innocuous question halfway down the page, asking if you have ever broken any law of any of the Alliance nations that is punishable by execution. (unsurprisingly, being hush-hush, they don't tell you what Alliance they're talking about, or name its member nations)

"No problem," you think, "I have led an upstanding life at home, and I have never been abroad, so this can't possibly apply to me". A week later, you are facing a firing squad. You see, it turns out that Uranistan is a member nation, and their laws state that playing poker on any computer network that reaches into their country is an "immoral treason against the nation". They also consider viewing man-on-pig porn a crime against God, cross-dressing a crime against Nature, and wearing white after Labor day a crime against fashion -- all death penalty offenses-- and since God, Nature and Fashion are everywhere, their laws says their fatwah applies worldwide. As it turns out, these four proscribed actions are your major recreations.

That's the Uranistan Law Paradox. You didn't know what kind of alliance they were talking about, much less its membership -- and you certainly wouldn't know all the laws of all those nations. Yet you *did* agree that if you made a false statement, so -ULP!- you're dead!

The Real World: Party Network
Since PartyPoker acquired PokerNOW [to pick a landmark event], several Parety site actions have had various 2+2'ers up at arms over "unjustifiable acts". However a loophole in the T&C of a growing number of Party Network affiliates opens the door for any/all of them to enforce rules that you have never seen or heard of, with no prior warning.

As I noted in a long buried post. Provision aking to the ULP! occur in many PAerty affiliate T&C's. The example I cited was in the Empire T&C:

[ QUOTE ]

11. Shared Games, Table and Database Platform.
Company reserves the right to run and utilize shared games, table, server and database platform ("Shared Game/Table Platform") which enables players from EmpirePoker.com to play with players coming into the games, tables and tournaments from other sites and brands to the same Shared Game/Table Platform so that the players may be pooled into common games and/or tables regardless of which site or brand they may have entered from. In such event, you agree that you may be pooled into these common games and/or tables, at Company's sole discretion, and that to the extent that you breach the terms and conditions of one site or brand, Company may have you blocked, in part or full, from the entire system so that you may not play through any site or brand. Further your play patterns, personal data, depositing limits and history may be calculated and shared across the system to counter fraud, over-depositing and other matters, as Company shall decide in its sole discretion. [Emphasis mine]

[/ QUOTE ]
Note that they don't tell you the rules you have to follow. They don't even tell you the name of the "Shared Game/Table Platform", or list the other sites whose rules you must follow. Even the most diligent and responsible new poker player would have to do considerable independent research to find out what these unmentioned rules might be -- and they could never be sure they had a complete list. After all, Empire may not limit themselves to the Party Network, or PartyPoker might spin off a subsidiary (PureThinkingPoker.com) tomorrow, whose T&C bans playing under the influence of alcohol, drugs, women, or strong emotions, and mandates completion of a reading list of five top poker texts before playing on their site. And since they are on a network shared with Empire, EP can, at its sole discretion choose to ban you for not following this hidden law of another site--even if, that site doesn't advertise and has no members yet.

I'm not saying that Party has malicious intent, but their lawyers would be shoddy indeed to not be aware of it, and many companies would consider it only prudent to secure every possible advantage.

A Current Example
Since I don't want to re-open old wounds, let me cite an example from todays front page.

In just the past two months, PartyPoker has collaborated with the authors of PokerTracker to ACTIVELY HELP PT come out with a PT program for Omaha, which didn't even exist until March, and was in free beta until a few weeks ago. Soon after this collaboration, however, they acquired PokerNOW, and a few weeks after that, PokerNOW's T&C suddenly included a more strongly worded "cheating software" provision than any Party site had previously used.

[ QUOTE ]
7. Anti-Cheating Software.
We are committed to detecting and preventing software programs which are designed to enable any artificial intelligence ("AI Software") to play on our site such as, but not limited to, odds-calculators, hand-strength calculators, opponent-profiling or anything else that enables you to have an unfair advantage using such software. You acknowledge that the Company will take measures to detect and prevent the use of such programs and AI Software using methods including but not limited to screen scraping or reading the list of currently running programs on a player’s computer and you agree not to use any AI Software and/or any such programs."

[/ QUOTE ]

Many people contacted PokerNOW, asking if Poker Tracker was allowable. Several were explicitly told "yes". Others contacted their favorite Party affiliate, and got the same answer.

That was just a few weeks ago, but today, we're hearing that they've done an unannounced about-face: it ISN'T okay with PokerNOW -- and that means that many other Party affiliates, that have recently added provisions like Empire's, can at their own private discretion perople who asked for, and got, specific approval for the programs they used.

Sure, WE know about it now -those of us who read 2+2 today, anyway- but the community of people using PT (and countless other programs relating to online poker play) reaches far beyond 2+2, and NONE of the sites have yet made a public announcement to their player pool that their view of PT has changed or issued any list of currently (dis)allowed software. They have issued warnings to players they've "caught", and won't reply when asked exactly what program triggered the warning.

Who knows when warnings will be replaced by enforcement? And when it does, any other Party site can -selectively, at their discretion- use the PokerNOW policy to ban anyone they don't like. Remember, we never found any hard criterion for the Emprire bannings. Some people were banned while others, doing the same easily traceable activities, weren't. It's just as easy -easier, really- for a computer to scan a database of transactions and return ALL matching players instead of just a random sampling. This selective banning is worrisome.

Think you're safe, because you don't do anything 'fancy'? Some months ago, some 2+2'ers posted evidence that NOTEPAD, WORDPAD, MS-WORD and CALCULATOR were among the programs being flagged by Party's servers. Specifically, lines like the following were found in packets being sent back to various Party servers:

INFO.POKER_BOT=Inspector,Notepad,Calculator,Wordpa d
INFO.PBDL=pokercalc.com,texasholdem-poker.com,twodimes.net
INFO.PBKPL=WINWORD.EXE

You can be as optimistic as you wish (I am), but surely Party knew in advance that several of these programs are quite common and generally innocuous. Personally, though I can understand a possible motivation for reporting that a player has visited some of the sites listed above (they may have poker tools, among their more innocuous offerings) I think there is a general concensus that reporting the websites I visit is not just edging the line into spyware, it's leaping the line and mooning us from the other side. Will 2+2 (or more likely, BW) be the next flag for an "undesirable advantage player"? Hasn't the international computing community solidly decided that a program that silently reports what other websites you visit is wrong, even if it can arguably be defended by some line in the T&C, and even if a company really, really wants to know "for a good reason"?

Taking a break while writins a term paper, memo or grocery list in Notepad or Word. Doing math in Calculator? Cheater! We've seen the support responses: "We won't listen to any explanations. The decision is irreversible. Goodbye."

I think they are permitting themselves a very broad license, and I don't think that the spotty broad-brush strategies suggested by a great deal of evidence in other threads is good for Party itself.

As I said, I'm not panicking, or threatening to leave Party, but I really don't care for some of these trends, and I do note that we have a narrow window of opportunity (before the IPO) when public pressure and negative publicity can have a special impact.

What Can We Do?
Dang if I know. Suggestions? Plans? Schemes and plots?

But please - no conspiracies! Let's limit ourselves to reasoned, substantiated points where possible.

[smoore]

Yeah, that loophole is ugly from a consumer rights perspective. I'd hate to get my empire account frozen because something on the party TOC (which I would never have occasion to read) changed.

Looking for winword and calc.exe are just flags because those are common "spoofed" names of programs... you can be relatively certain that your windows web server has been cracked *again* when you find winword.exe running on it [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

it's really no wonder that the poker sites only want to write windows software; it's what "everyone" uses, it's quick and dirty and you have all this CONTROL over the end user's machine.

As a privacy solution, I would suggest people run any and all poker software in a VMWare virtual machine. Don't use that VM to do anything else. As far as they could tell, you never did anything but log onto their poker site. This won't help people that want to hide pokertracker/playerview. It would not be *too* hard to write a bot that ran in the native environment and scraped the VM's screen, then sent mouse events back into it... some intuitive hacker is probably doing it RIGHT NOW.... <cue ominous music>

[KKbluff]

Would you like to elaborate on what a VMWare virtual machine is for those of us that are wondering?

[mackthefork]

Excellent post.

Mack

[Exsubmariner]

Thank you for posting that. It is very well articulated and reflects thoughts I have had. I think it comes down to a very simple principle in the end. That is, the market. Party is not the only game in town. If Party's policies toward me as a player become too restricting, I will stop playing there and take may 5K/month in rake to another site that openly sanctions rakeback affiliates. These policies are going to hit them in the pocket book and I don't think they understand how bad.
Image, for example, how this new thing about not being able to withdraw in the 15 days prior to a bonus offering is going to affect them. They have already given players an incentive to deposit and withdraw frequently to maintain their status in the players club. So, lets imagine a player is doing so and then bam, finds out that suddenly he is unable to take advantage of the reload bonus, which could happen twice a month without notice. What's he going to do, stop churning his account and only play for the reload bonus. Well, they are going to spot that and ban his a$$. There went an active customer paying rake. They have lost any revenue they hope to generate by enticing him to play for bonus money and any revenue he generated by keeping his account active. They have also lost any revenue they have when he tells his buddies on the chat boards what happened to him at party and they all decide Pokerstars is better...at least they haven't written their policies in such a way as to put themselves into an adversarial position with their customers.
One thing is beginning to shine through in all this, if you win, party doesn't want you to play there. They don't care that you generate $1000's a month in rake. They don't want you taking money out of their site. They don't want you to be eligible for bonus money, they don't want you to get rakeback, they want you to stop helping them be profitable.
This company is going to go down in flames.
I don't care how much they advertise, their software is crap, their support is crap, the player rewards program is crap, there are many other sites that are more player friendly. A fish might start out at Party, but eventually they are going to have to deal with customer service and that is going to motivate them to go elsewhere...maybe that site that has the poker articles and how to's on it's home page, hey, they want to help him win (even though he proabably won't and never will)....
The first reload I can't take advantage of, I close my account. That's the only reason I keep my account active there. There are better games out there.
Sorry for the innane psychobabble rant. I'm getting pretty tired of their crap.
X

[maddog2030]

VMware is an emulator for an entire computer. It basically lets your run a computer inside your computer. You can run Windows 95 in Windows XP, or any other operating system for that matter.

You can use this for a variety of reasons like running multiple operating systems simultaneously, security, operating system development, etc. It's also - hypothetically - very useful if you want to setup a "clean computer" when signing up for various skins.

[MicroBob]

[ QUOTE ]
if you win, party doesn't want you to play there.

[/ QUOTE ]


i disagree.

But I met many conspiracy-theorist 'you can just tell the deal is rigged to help the fish' types on the PPM cruise who think the same thing.

"If you win too much they will change the cards to get their money back (or re-distribute it to the fish or whatever.)"


Of course, they could just do whatever they like and don't have to resort to these measures.

They could even make software so bad that I time-out too much or simply not offer me bonuses that they offer othr players or even just cause my buttons to disappear mid-hand when I try to use the 'search' feature mid-hand.

Uh-oh...maybe this conspiracy-stuff isn't so paranoid afterall!!


Seriously....I don't study the T&C's of every site, etc. But I highly suspect that it's not just limited to party/skins to have language of "If you break the rules we can take action" without telling you what ALL of those rules exactly are.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was semi-similar vagueness in the Stars, UB, Absolute and other sites' T&C's.

Someone can feel free to read through all these T&C's and prove me right or wrong if they like. I'm certainly not going to bother doing that though.


Regarding p-tracker and GT+ and PV.
Until they say something otherwise more specifically I'm going to assume that everything is okay regarding using these products.
If they specifically tell me to stop using GT+ then I will do so (and will be more likely to play other sites of course).

If they decide to just close my account, keep my money and call me a cheater without giving me any warning then that's up to them. But they could do this whenever they like regardless of whether I actually am doing any cheating or not.

I already have a personal policy of not keeping more money in my account than I would be REALLY bothered about losing if the site just decided to close-up shop and run-away with everyone's money (or if it got hacked somehow by eastern Russians or if the site accused me of colluding with some player I don't even remember playing against).

So the idea that they can keep my money and call me a cheater whenever they like is simply not a new concept for me and, for that reason, I don't do anything that I'm TOO uncomfortable with.

I'm bouncing a lot of money (at least it's 'a lot' to me) all over the place in cyber-space from site-a to neteller to site-b back to neteller into my bank-account, etc etc.

To have that all that money floating around on the internet back and forth like that and to then think it is all 100% safe would be REALLY foolish. There's ALWAYS going to be SOME risk involved. but I'm comfortable with that risk compared with the amount of money I'm keeping there.

[Exsubmariner]

I think that you took me a little out of context, Bob.
To clarify my thoughts a little....
There have been policies put in place to discourage rakeback. This was executed in such a way as to manifest itself in what was essentially a hostile takeover of one of their affiliates. There have been policies put in place to discourage people from taking advantage of Empire's reload bonues'. This was manifested in closing players accounts at Empire poker. There was a new policy that you could not withdraw during a reload period b4 making a qualifying deposit. That didn't work out too well because I have too much money to care, so now, there is a policy that I can't withdraw in the prior 15 days to the unannounced reload period.
I don't think it's rigged.
I think they are greedy.
It is becoming clear to me that Party's policy toward me as a player is taking the shape of me giving them as much as they want (they charge higher rake at lower limits than any other site), and them giving me as little as possible. I do not exist in the online poker universe to serve the greed of an ex-whore.
Practically the only benefit they offer me at this moment is the biggest player pool and that benefit is becoming marginalized as I move up in limits. I don't necessarily think it's the fishiest player pool anymore.
I can forsee that for myself and hundreds like me, the extent of my business with the IGM network is going through be done through a rakeback affiliate of a site like Eurobet, where they have to share the revenue and cannot enforce their policies through the use of brute force because of the sportsbook and casino business (given the present state of affairs).
I can see them alienating the fish with their policies as well. Just because someone is a losing poker player doesn't mean they can't figure out there are better player programs and nicer looking software out there....
There, I did it again, I wrote a long psychobabble rant.
Did I say I'm getting tired of their crap?
X
P.S. when I finally close my account on Potty Poker, I'm going to post the letter I send them and their response. This should provide for some entertainment.

[Mempho]

If they get truly arrogant...they will lose it all.

Remember Paradise????

[Exsubmariner]

Actually,
I don't remember Paradise. Can you please elaborate for this newbie?
X