
Multi-tabling poker player plays 120 tables at a time, verified human - LiveTheDream
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=19301227&postcount=27
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alexophile
I think the important takeaway here is that there's someone in the world who's
job it is to verify that high-performing entities are indeed human...

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ahi
I think Gibson named them the Turing Police.

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mynameishere
"The Goldman Sachs trader was observed issuing upwards of 60,000 false bids on
1000 different securities each, entirely within a 1 second timeframe, and was
able to lift his hands from the console and hold a conversation with our SEC
representative while working his many 'tables'..."

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jrockway
These artificial limitations do not exist in the real world. Let a computer do
the hard stuff so that you have time to enjoy your 4.5 million dollar condo!

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pak
Now that's something to put on your resume/t-shirt: "I was verified to be
human by PokerStars.net"

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jhamburger
I had this happen back in my pokerstars days, a captcha pops up with a limited
amount of time to complete it. However I was playing "only" 16 tables at the
time.

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jules
Did you read the post? They went to the guys house...having completed a
CAPTCHA is not that impressive on your resume.

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jhamburger
Well I was still "verified as human by Pokerstars" so I'm qualified for the
t-shirt

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Roedou
I passed the CAPTCHA when I signed up. Do I get one as well?

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jiganti
I've been on 2+2 for the better part of a decade and can tell you the online
poker community has far more pressing concerns than 'bots' that hope to eek
out a few dollars an hour playing a large amount of tables. [1]

It's certainly an impressive feat to be able to play 120 tables at a time, but
naturally the more tables you play the less attention you are able to give to
what's going on. As online poker sites give you a time bank of around 30
seconds, if you are playing more than 20 or so tables you don't really have
time to consider more than your hole cards, the board, and the effective chip
stack (whichever person has the lower amount of chips, applicable in "no
limit" games). To play 120 tables and make a profit is only possible at the
absolute lowest levels, when you're making decisions in less than a few
seconds, and only considering the cards in your own hand. Even then, I can't
imagine doing this successfully.

A common criticism in the poker community about people who play a lot of
tables (anywhere from 6-12 tables is pretty standard for most professional
online players, less than 6 shows a pretty remarkable discipline actually,
excluding those who play heads up poker in which 2-4 tables is more common) is
that these people don't have time to consider their decisions, and therefore
won't improve. If they have a set decision they do in every type of situation,
they won't get any better by failing to explore the value of each of their
options. Further, the nature of online poker is such that the games have been
getting increasingly tough each year, and failing to improve will likely turn
you into a break even player.

The problem is that almost every competitive online poker player signs up for
what is called "rakeback" from sites like <http://rakemonkey.com> and
<http://raketherake.com>. In short, these types of sites have deals with the
poker sites that allow players to get a percentage (usually 27%-30%) of their
rake back (the few dollars from each pot that the site takes as profit). So
playing 16 tables at a time becomes very appealing to the guy trying to grind
out a living playing the $1/$2 no limit games, as he can easily make $5,000
from rakeback alone.

My theory is that as a player's poker career progresses (and he ages) he
becomes more risk averse, and so rakeback becomes that much more appealing. By
the time I turned 18 I was playing some of the larger stakes games online as
the money meant little to me (purely out of ignorance to the value of a
dollar) so I wasn't afraid to try to climb the limits as far as I could. As
little as 18 months later I had dropped down limits after a number of high
stakes shots ended badly, and afterwards while grinding the mid-stakes games,
I loved my rakeback.

[1] [http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-
gossip/ultim...](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-
gossip/ultimatebet-scandal-sticky-251207/)

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rms
Why don't more poker players start rakeback sites?

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jiganti
It's a market where people spend a lot of money on search engine optimization,
but the best asset to starting a rakeback site is being affiliated with high-
volume pros who are willing to sign up for a few sites under your rakeback
site. An insider's tip on rakeback SEO- the people who are using Google to
find rakeback sites generally aren't experienced players, and won't make you
as much money as you might hope. (Of course the ideal situation is that you
sign up a few hundred inexperienced players and after a year or two a dozen or
so have developed their game to the point where they are making you more than
all your original sign ups combined)

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Tichy
It sounds almost as if they were still trying to establish that he is not a
bot when they were seeing him in the flesh :-)

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StavrosK
Well, I don't think a bot became sentient and decided to make some money on
online poker. Usually there are people writing the bots, and the poker site
has to make sure they aren't _using_ them, not that the people _aren't_ bots.

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Tichy
I understood that, I just found sentences like "The player was able to
verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play."
amusing. As if him being unable to chat might have indicated failure of the
Turing test.

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LiveTheDream
The conversation test may have been to establish the the player wasn't blindly
following instructions from a robot. Holding a conversation with the
investigators would at least make it difficult to follow surreptitious advice.

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Luc
"In the end, rs03rs03 averages 120 tables at once when at full speed, playing
about 100,000 hands over the course of about 55,800 seconds. That's about 1.8
hands per second (slightly more actions, though, since some hands are multi-
decision)."

Can anyone speculate what strategy might allow him to play 1.8 hands per
second on average?

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jiganti
First of all, he was playing tournaments with a buyin of $1 maximum- likely
less. So he can get away with playing a very simple strategy.

He was certainly not making standard raises, I imagine he was playing a "push-
fold" strategy from the start, meaning he either went all-in or folded on his
initial turn to act. His range for this strategy probably included TT, JJ, QQ,
KK, AA, AK, AQ and maybe a few more hands later on in the tournaments.

