PrivacyProtection
From PokerAI
Staying private on the Internet, both you and your casino accounts, is of vital importance as to not allow malicious people to harass you.
Contents |
General protection
- Use different e-mail/usernames in poker rooms than the one you use for forums and websites
- Keep in mind that when you send e-mail from Outlook (and other) clients, your IP address as well as the local PC name is revealed to the receiver
- Casino clients collect various information about your PC and can detect if two players are connected from the same computer (this is relevant for multi-accounting)
- Use anonymizers even if you are confident that the website / forum you want to subscribe can be trusted. There are ways for ANY forum user to find out e.g. your IP address.
Posting in forums
User complaint from Frogbot forums:
| And BTW, one of YOU works for PokerStars. I haven't figured out who yet, but I vetted everyone I emailed. I didn't email anyone without signifcant posts. Long story short.....don't trust anyone, not even yourself.
To the best of my knowledge, I didn't reply to to anyone with less than 25 posts or that has been a member less than 3 months. Maybe I made a mistake, but I don't think so, or maybe that wasn't selective enough. Either way, one of you out there is an evil evil bastard. dude, wtf? I'm not paranoid, I received 2 emails at separate email accounts identifying me as fake screen name from the OPI forums from stretch mark removal. One of these emails I NEVER made public. They said they connected me by the IP I sent an email with to their fake poster here. So thanks for the input, but people are watching you. Heard of The Patriot Act? |
The moral of this story is - follow the recommendations above, and use an anonymizer because even users with many posts on a pokerbot forum may be working for a casino.
Sharing screenshots
Sharing screenshots is another way for people to find out your pokerbot username. Imagine the following scenario: You post screenshot, where all information is blacked out except stack sizes. There are 3 players remaining in an SNG tournament. Publishing that only, means:
- Anyone can locate the skin you are playing
- Say stack sizes can be in the range of 3000 chips (a fair approximation)
- Say stack sizes are multiple of 5 (i.e. StackSize % 5 == 0), fair approximation, as often stack sizes are actually just any integers
- So 3000/5 = 600 approximated possible different stack sizes of each player
- 600^3 = 216000000, so the probability of the screenshot you posted is less than 0.000000005%
- The amount of SNG games that fits to the setup (3 players remaining on the given casino/skin, with the given stack sizes) is much smaller than this number
All that basically allows the casino to easily locate the hand number exactly, and hence your username.
Furthermore, simple grep might be sufficient for any player to find your username, if he/she has the hand histories from the last weeks where this situation occurred. Similarly:
- One can do the same probability calculations if you post flop cards, bet sizes and others.
- If your bot always sits in one and the same chair (which is sometimes done in multi-accounting to avoid two players sitting at the same SNG table), one will know this chair and have additional hints to track your bot now, or later.
- Often, even if one did not have the hand histories, he can perform a Google search (now, or later, where his search is formed of the given stack sizes + skin identification information). There are many web sites that hold hand history databases, indexed in Google, or where people post hands and that makes locating the exact hand not too difficult.
