Beware of pokerstars!

[PokingStars]

Pokerstars has a good name and a good reputation. They built it up by avoiding situations like the one you mention above. I seriously believe it's just a case of defamation.

[peteyweestro]

Everywhere you go people are forever calling Poker Stars cheaters and that the bad beats there are worse then anywhere else, but it's because they are so big and have so many players that umpteen million hands get dealt every day there so of course you will see way more bad beats then you would ever see playing live....inho they are on the up and up

[Smokeycasino]

I play a lot of sng's and the part that scares me is when about 2 or 6 players start saying hi to each other by name, it's funny when you start eliminating them one by one. They go "noooooo" and you bully.

One even admitted that she/he don't play for the money just to socialize.
I just put them on tilt by saying your buddy is next.

You will find them playing micro omaha h/l games
I guess these are the harmless ones.

Not the ones who discuss there hands on AIM/Chat.

[LinkinFart]

In some order.

1. "Pokerstars is full of cheaters"
Name me one poker site which isnt full of them. Pokerstars is probably experiencing bigger abuse because it has biggest player base.

2. "Just notify Pokerstars support and they will take care of this"
First, why do I have to pay them and then worry about something they should be taking care of.
Second, I did exactly that, report, and response I got from them was along these lines: "Result of the investigation is that players involved were indeed colluding. Since You didnt lose any money to them, in fact You won money from them, (they were that bad) we cannot give You any compensation. Also, our investigation showed that players in question did not collude with MALICIOUS intent (<<REALLY!?) so we will not ban them from our poker site but they will not be allowed to play same cash games together."
Third. At least Pokerstars responded in more appropriate manner. What about Merge network site where I reported, this was long time ago, not two players but entire ring of players colluding on stakes between NL10 to NL50. Response:"We didnt find anything unusual in behavior of mentioned players." They give me that answer after I spent few hours googling and found their own exclusive forum which they thought was private, only some 30 members, where they were making plans when will they play, at which stakes, marking potential targets, exchanging hand histories and stuff like that. Will it suffice to say that some of them used same nicknames on forum and poker site.

3. "People say Pokerstars is only badbeats but its because pokerstars have the biggest player base bla bla bla.... etc and other shill/spam/monkey see monkey do stuff."
First, RNG (shuffling) is not actively monitored by any independent institution as poker sites would like you to believe. Certificates issued are related to sufficient randomness so that players are not able to determine/crack shuffling algorithm, if you dont believe me read certificates, and even certifiers explicitly state that they have certified the RNG which was provided to them. Is RNG used by poker sites to deal cards exactly the one certified only poker sites know.
Second, license and licensing jurisdictions. There are bad and there are worse. Every license provider charges millions of dollars each poker site each year. What good does that do to a player? If you are dealing with Kahnawake gaming commission you might get something sorted out but behind the closed doors in most if not all the cases I heard about, and from first hand experience. I am yet to file a complaint to Isle of Man but I can tell You that Malta is s..t license and will react only in cases where sites have to rewrite the rules but will they close the site down NOO!, Gibraltar not that far away from Malta, geographically and by usefullnes. Costa rica, Curacao etc. are not even gambling licenses but online gaming licenses so no help from them either. Even less, from Malta and GRA you will get response hardly anything will get resolved, although GRA stalled me in the same manner as some rogue casino, something like TopGame support "We will get back to you" and then dont. Could not belive that was happening with GRA but its in the past now.
So you might be asking yourself why are they here if not to protect the players. Gambling licenses exist, AGAIN, for the benefit of gambling sites not players. It is illegal for banks to do any business with gambling sites that dont have some kind of license, even gaming license will do. Poker sites need gambling license for financial reasons not because someone will shut them down, they would have to move money around without letting the banks know it is from gambling (something like UIGEA and US citizens situation right now, btw I would like to see that US finally provide online gamblers with real monitoring over RNG`s).
Third, just because starting hands occurancies are within statistically right odds it doesnt mean that RNG is random. (Sooner or later shills pull this one out of their pocket).

I`m sure there was something else I wanted to mention on this topic but forgot.

SOLUTION
Why are you even bothering with online poker, you might as well go to online casino. Its the same thing, maybe some people have a fetish on outwitting bots which are admittedly used by some poker networks/sites (AGAIN, READ TERMS although that doesnt help in case of network where one smaller skin is deploying bots to entire network and bigger sites pretend that they dont have anything to do with it) or bots used by individuals. In any case BOTS are becoming dominant if they arent already.
Do you really think that Full Tilt has suddenly found some new technique for spotting bots on their site, recent case where few thousand bots have been banned, or they allowed them to play and generate rake for years knowing that they can confiscate funds at any time? Wasnt the real reason for this that bots outnumbered real players on Full Tilt? I believe so.
Back to solution, what did I do? I am winning player in both online and live poker game but I stopped playing online. I have a live poker game available everyday 15 minutes walking distance from where I live with limits starting at $0.25/$0.50. Do I win? Not always but I am in bigger positive than online and field is not that much "fishier", if at all.
I still have loyalty points and some small amounts scattered around on few sites, leftovers which I use when weather is bad or I dont have much time to play live game and poker sites sometimes remember me and treat me with gift. Stop playing online poker for even almost significant amounts of money. Some must win online so that believers can point at them and say it is not rigged.(another proof shills like to mention). If you mean winning like, just from my head, winner of one Sunday brawl or $250K on Full Tilt, which lost more than he won in that tourney just on Full Tilt.

[Diane]

I have been playing poker online for years going back to the first poker room Planet Poker.

My advice is to only play the large tourneys where it is very difficult for any group of players to stack the deck against you or "Heads Up" games. Avoid the S&G unless 90 to 180 players.

With the random seating of tournaments that are larger in size, you get the greatest protection.

IMO

Diane

[wolffs21]

Pokerstars one of the best poker site on the net

[newsomeclary]

I don't think Poker Stars is rigged. Poker Stars is among the top most running poker rooms available online like FullTilt Poker, Party Poker, Carbon Poker, Titan Poker and Absolute Poker. So it would be very hard to say Poker Stars is rigged.
Poker Stars is providing good poker services to the poker players both in free gaming and real money gaming same as FullTilt Poker. So it is hard to believe that Poker Stars is rigged.

[3mptyseat]

In any case BOTS are becoming dominant if they arent already.

I don't know what u mean by dominant, but I play poker on a daily basis, and I see quite the opposite. I do find there are some problems with the bots, but not because they are winning entities.

Check out this link for starters... http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...-ap-ub-843714/

Here''s a snippet from it:

Re: Very suspicious similarities of 4 half-stackers on AP/UB
I've played against all these players/bots in the UB/AP $0.05/$0.10 full ring games. Also noticed the they are all from Coquitlam. Just figured they are a bot ring, that doesn't really do very well. Main problem is that they are boring to play against.

And now to the point I have:

ok in retrospect, I rescind everything Ive said. I don't want AP to bust these guys, and the guys who created this bot are definitely on our side.
They...
1. Keep more tables running cuz of the bots
2. Are so profitable to play against its silly. They will fold ~85% of their opens to 3bets REGARDLESS OF BET SIZE! Same goes for their blinds. Basically I click the raise button everytime they have money in front of them and they rarely RARELY continue.

Seriously, please don't complain about these guys. If I could play at a table full of them I'd be a 100ptbb/100 winner, I'm dead serious.

The only detrement I can think of besides the sheer boredom that entails playing these morons, is that they are collecting a lot of rake and hence, also qualifying for many of the rake race events and prizes.

IMHO; Dominantly annoying and silly, yes.

But seldom do you see a bot which is profitable without rakeback...

[3mptyseat]

When asked to opine on the topic, I would agree that merge is shady...

But without some sort of screen shots and/or data, this is just conspiracy theory 101:

What about Merge network site where I reported, this was long time ago, not two players but entire ring of players colluding on stakes between NL10 to NL50. Response:"We didnt find anything unusual in behavior of mentioned players." They give me that answer after I spent few hours googling and found their own exclusive forum which they thought was private, only some 30 members, where they were making plans when will they play, at which stakes, marking potential targets, exchanging hand histories and stuff like that. Will it suffice to say that some of them used same nicknames on forum and poker site.

show this forum some proof, and a number of the webmasters could post warnings about the network to their audience. With out the empirical data, I agree, but so what?

[LinkinFart]

First about bots. I`m still reading 2+2 to see whats going on in poker world so I`m familiar with that paticular incident at AP/UB and iPoker and Full Tilt. Just because there are cases where bots do get caught, and majority of those bots were caught by players not poker sites, and bots caught turn out to be slight winner or slight losers w/o rakeback and winners with rakeback, doesnt change the fact that those bots on Full Tilt and Cereus were the ones beign sold on that bot site. So, those are "comercial" bots. Would someone sell a bot that is making good profit from play only, add rakeback to that too? Would You do that? I dont think so. Once that bot is on the market poker sites can buy it and then look for ways to detect it automatically, by not selling it you would be protecting long term profit. This bot that is being sold is probably some downgraded version of the bot that person who coded that bot is probably still using releasing only inferior versions of it. Most likely more than slightly downgraded. How many bots can go undetected if they are set up to act like human, mentioned bathroom breakes, occassional "nh" in chat box and even tilt messages. Havent you notice since you play frequently that there was a massive number of players writing "nh" in chatbox frequently, some 4 or 5 years ago. Eventually it came to present situation where chat is not that filled with "nh".

About Merge, this was long time ago. Incident occurred 2 years ago, maybe more. At that time Merge was still not supported by any hand tracking software so I probably deleted hand histories Merge client stores, I think I did copied entire HH folder because of theirs stupid max 30 day limit, but most likely they are gone now because I performed manual clean up of my backup drive few months ago and I believe I removed bulk of raw HH folders including Merge ones. I`ll look for them but dont hold your hopes high, they might have surivived the clean up if they are somewhere where I wouldnt expect them to be. Now you wonder how could they exchange hand histories if HEM and PT didnt support this network. I really dont know the real reason for them not supporting Merge but it was not that complicated to write the code that will translate Merge histories, I dont know in which format they are being saved now but they were in xml format back then, into something compatible with PO, HEM or PT. I, myself began coding such converter but was so dissapointed with response that I stopped both playing on Merge and coding that converter. Before I started coding this I filed 2 or 3 requests/complaints to KGC asking them to force Merge make their histories compatible with one fo the tracking software but nothing changed over 3-4 months period and I started working on my own converter and it was even before that first hand converter appeared on the market, soon after HEM introduced Merge update. Soon after my report to their support, 3-4 days one week max, entire ring stopped playing so they most likely did get banned from one site at least if not entire network. Also, it was not that long after this that some site offered Merge hand converter.

I was trying just now to find is there something available on the net today about them, I remember one account screen name very clearly even today, but that forum is gone and person behind that screen name announced in Sep 2009 on some other localized forum that he will stop playing poker because of his girlfriend. His trail ends pretty much there and I forgot other names. Was he telling the truth or he just gave up his screenname which he used almost everywhere, I dont know. But they sure did collude when they were playing, no doubt about that.

about that quote you posted from 2+2.

2. Are so profitable to play against its silly. They will fold ~85% of their opens to 3bets REGARDLESS OF BET SIZE! Same goes for their blinds. Basically I click the raise button everytime they have money in front of them and they rarely RARELY continue.

Back in days when William Hill was on Cryptologic they used house bots to fill and start tables. They still do but, all of their bots on Crypto had screennames starting with "bot" so it was not hard to spot them. Those bots didnt fold small 3bets often in fact i dont think they folded any small bet, allins they called with good hands but they did call 3bets with wide range of hands, exploitable yes, but what was the problem then? Problem was that more than you would like to see those bots called with some really marginal hands and were catching backdoors like hell. Suited not connected, connected not suited. It seemed like system had memorized how much you won from bots and fixed the game in a way that bots didnt win or lose, you played with bots on break even basis over the long term, I repeat it seemed never did I put that in numbers. On FLHE tables those bots really excelled and were even harder to play against. They were changing tactics to loose if table got tight, tighten up if table got too loose. They would catching your CBETS as normal player would do and this was in 2006 or `07. I can only imagine how much did bots improve since then. If you really want to know I`ll look at my Moneybookers history to see when was the last withdrawal from them because I didnt play there since they were on Crypto.