[spearmaster]

Originally Posted by thelawnet

I can see that in this casino a casino might choose to make a quick denial that there was anything wrong, and that's not necessarily indicative of guilt, merely undue haste and poor behaviour in making a statement not backed by the appropriate actions to confirm its veracity.

HOWEVER, the fact remains that given that the problem entered the software for whatever reason (and of course we cannot say for sure what the intent was), it was identified and removed from the software in the short period between it being publicly proven that English Harbour's video poker was ripping off the players and their statement being issued.

Quick denial would be accurate. Poorly-thought out denial would also be accurate.

I didn't go back and check to see if this denial came after they fixed the bug or not, I will assume you were right. But it is also possible that a denial was prepared based on some test - perhaps even an incorrect test - and sent for delivery before the actual bug was discovered.

Example: "Dewey Wins!" For non-Americans, or those of you who haven't dug that deep into American history, the New York Post printed and delivered an edition with this headline referring to the winner of the 1948 presidential election - or at least who they thought had won. Unfortunately for them, Harry Truman won the election and served as President.

Shit happens. I am not going to make any excuses for EH or why they even made that statement - but it happened, and we all knew it couldn't be true, and if they had wanted to cover that up they would not have gone so far as to have an audit done, with the result that they admitted an error and refunded bets at 120%...

The fact they fixed the code so it played fair, something they MUST have known they had done, and immediately after that code was fixed issued a statement saying nothing was wrong does not look good to me.

Sure you or they can claim that the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing: that someone had found out it was broken (and that's assuming we actually believe that somehow the code could accidentally come to shortchange the player in the first place) and quietly fixed it, while at exactly the same time this was being fixed, the PR/legal/fairplay department issued a pseudo-mathematical statement saying there was nothing wrong, while not knowing what the coders were doing.

Believe it or not, I am reasonably sure this is what happened. But again, that does not excuse EH.

So for us to accept that the first statement should just be ignored and is not an indicator of malfeasance, we have to accept the following postulates:

1. That English Harbour could cause a game based on a player card being lower than the dealer card to deal lower cards to the player more often than is random, by some coding error (i.e. not deliberately trying to cheat the player)
2. That the error having been introduced into a game that does not appear outwardly to have changed and in theory should not have had its internal code changed at all, someone would go back to that game, check the code, identify the problem, and fix the bug
3. That the bug fix would be scheduled to be deployed in the tiny period between the public proof of foul play and the English Harbour statement, and the even tinier period where English Harbour could have 'reviewed their game play'
4. That having "concluded our review of the game play and randomness for all Video Poker games" English Harbour had no idea that the 'bug' had just been fixed, even though they had just fixed it, and must have had code check in logs, etc.

I can't go into much detail here. I did know that a statement was to be released, I did not know what it contained (and was very unpleasantly surprised). I do know what they believed at the time, even though I told them that this was clearly an erroneous belief and that they had better make certain their mathematicians - NOT their lawyers - checked the statement before it was issued.

Suffice it to say, I was probably more shocked than the rest of you when that first statement was issued, as you can ascertain from my response at the time.

After my reply, I went to bed - and when I woke up the next morning, I discovered that a full audit would be taking place because it was essential to get the facts. By this time, however, the problem had been fixed.

So yes, I basically believe that your 4 postulates are correct. It does not take long for a bug to be fixed if you are the coder - and of course it does not take long for you to change code back to what it was if you were the coder. Time is not an issue in modifying small pieces of code, though discovering the problem may take a bit more time if it was not deliberate.

Sure if you think all that's plausible, but to me given the circumstances, I don't think that it makes sense to take what they say at face value. There is prima facie evidence of cheating, and that should be enough to make any statement coming from them suspicious at best.

Prima facie evidence of a non-random game, if you don't mind. But I certainly wouldn't blame you or anyone else if you were suspicious of the statements... I was sure as hell suspicious of that first statement myself...

And we still haven't heard why this 'bug' didn't seem to affect Hot Pepper and Fire and Ice casinos.

We'll try to get to the bottom of that. But as you know, EH is the main client of Odds On, and sometimes they get stuff in advance. And sometimes they get stuff that other operators don't get.

None of the other software manufacturers are any different - nothing is instantly deployed at all operations at the same time precisely because they must be sure there are not any unusual problems - and even then problems do slip by - again, at any software manufacturer. I've personally spotted and reported problems with MGS software way back in 2000 and 2001 - mind you, they were rules-based problems (place bets not off by default on come-out roll, aces not being counted as high card in pai gow poker) - and to be honest these were just small slip-ups or different interpretations of the rules. Even MGS autoplay didn't always use correct strategy for their games.

Shit happens. Just let us figure out what the hell went wrong in this particular case - I must say I'm not all that hopeful but again, as a moderator, and for that matter as a middleman, it is incumbent on me to give every side a fair hearing.