One of my favorite things about Devo is the best Devo song ever was actually written by Weird Al.  And this is it.  And I think BFL took the advice in it a little too seriously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ

Is that damn Mac or Linux client anywhere near in the works yet?  I've basically quit playing because the constant disconnects on the web client make it a total waste of time to play.

Nope.

No sympathy whatsoever.  No scorn, either, though.

It is what it is.

LOL WUT.

Seriously, the "scammer" tag is just for people who piss off the idiots who "moderate" (if you can call what these idiots do moderation) these boards. 

Otherwise, you can steal and lie and cheat all you like.  You will not get a scammer tag.  Does Inaba have a scammer tag?  Can you think of a bigger lying thief on this board?

Yeah, but I suck at heads up except LHE and LO8.  And most of the players who currently play those games at any level worth playing are also really good, so unless I can find total idiots, the rake is going to eat any potential profit.  Also, heads-up is kind of stressful and requires actually paying attention. 

Seriously, I don't think anyone here even thinks he's gay.  He's just repulsive and will literally do anything to scam.

At least of any gay guys I've ever known, not showering for over a year is completely incompatible with that lifestyle.

Neat!  How long did it take to generate that?  I'd play pretty much anything, it's really up to you, but give details at least 48 hours in advance.  My only request is that actually participating not require me to do anything overly complicated above my levels of mathematical ability.  Consider teaching me any more math than I already know to be something like trying to explain quantum physics to a goat.

Flawed analogy or not, delivery time was a material term in the contract between the parties.  The value of the item is and remains directly tied to delivery date, and they lied about the delivery date, claiming two or three weeks for damn near a year straight.  People would not have signed up to preorder if BFL had told the truth about delivery time, which is apparently that they will deliver the bare minimum necessary to prevent a flood of refund demands, whenever the hell they feel like it.

Nobody forced BFL to make delivery time claims that were, at the absolute best, unrealistic.  They specifically made those claims of delivery date in order to attract customers and put money in their own pockets.  People who fell for those claims got suckered.  They would have been mining for months had they purchased Avalon instead.

Now, we can sit around and argue that the relatively sophisticated customer base ASIC miners have simply could not have realistically believed these delivery date claims.  In retrospect, they should have obviously been bullshit even at the time to anyone with any sense.  I'm not defending the intelligence of people who committed any significant amount of money to preorders from BFL, especially since them acting like a bunch of noxious assclowns is not exactly anything new, and I really have to question the judgment of anyone who EVER thought this bunch of losers looked legit.

Josh Zerlan has done for PR what Atilla the Hun did for good table manners.

But still, people got at least partly ripped off.  Putting myself in the shoes of someone who put down money on these things, I probably wouldn't sue if I got my rig and broke even, made a slight profit, or only lost a little.  I'd just chalk it up as a life lesson and move on.  Even if I set up practice as a lawyer suing over shit like this, that's probably what I'd advise, though I'd gladly roll the dice on a suit in one of the states where a really juicy Consumer Fraud Act (like Jersey has) allows for something like triple damages.  In some jurisdictions, fee shifting is mandatory for the successful plaintiff.  That means even if the client wins $100, the attorney gets paid whatever ridiculous hourly is considered "reasonable" in the state.  Note:  "reasonable" is a word that has a specific legal meaning, and the meaning is usually something like "batshit insane" in normal people language.

Frankly, though, I'd want to see what BFL actually owns before doing anything like that.  I'd be amazed if this entity is even solvent.  Their trickle of deliveries, constant desperate attempts to raise new cash, and utterly shady cast of characters, including career criminals like Sonny, strongly suggest a corporation that exists solely as an alter ego of some kind, and is solely incorporated in an attempt to keep any assets these clowns have safe from judgment.  You'd probably have to do something like "pierce the corporate veil" (Google it) to get any money, and unless it was a lot, it would be completely not worth it.

But the idea this isn't a scam simply because they didn't explicitly advertise you'll get some fixed percentage of the hashrate of the whole network is utter bullshit.  They made claims they didn't have to make about delivery date that are obvious lies and they had to know they were lies at the time.  They solely made these claims to get other people's money.  Those people entrusted their money to these scumbags, choosing them over other operations that. . .well. . .were making at least slightly less false claims about delivery date (this is where a lawsuit runs into trouble because almost all the others were making bullshit claims and BFL just ended up the World Champion of Bullshit).  

Anyway, other than the really low-hanging fruit of sales to states with really consumer friendly fraud acts like I mentioned, they'll probably skate on this.  But it isn't legal.  And it isn't nice.  And they're a bunch of dicks.

I would not say this about Avalon or other ASIC sellers.  There's been a whole lot of bullshit going on and Avalon are not exactly a bunch of paladins.  But none of the others compounded their shipping delays with pissing in the face of the customers whose money they were sitting on by sending out a disgusting troll to basically have a scat orgy all over their face.  That's really why I want to see them razed to the ground, in a purely metaphorical sense of course.

Most of what BFL did is, while legally questionable, susceptible to a number of good defenses.  And isn't legally likely to be profitable to sue over, because a good defense lawyer could raise all kinds of defenses, none of which I'm going to mention.  It is no surprise to me that a career criminal like Sonny who doesn't want to end up back behind bars would go to a more subtle scam after his less subtle scam got him locked up with Bubba.

I don't have a horse in the race in terms of getting ripped off by them.  But they've given a horrible face to Bitcoin, and this pisses me off.  Any casual observer who had no previous opinion of Bitcoin and saw this would quite likely conclude that Bitcoin is a currency used by criminals, scammers and the scum of the Earth.  Frankly, that well describes the principals of BFL.  Scumbags.  I don't like that.

I find that amusing too that when a career criminal does something obviously scammy, there are so many brainwashed cultists lining up to defend him.  "Oh, I'm sure that convicted bank robber is going into that bank wearing a ski mask for a perfectly good reason THIS time!  He said so!"

Totally not a rigtard here, but I'd like to see a fair PLO being spread so I could play it.  I just don't play that game with nicks I don't recognize, and I usually don't.  Not sure how to deal with the collusion issue other than avoiding it.

My only suggestion is Jacks or Better.  That is, someone has to have at least a pair of jacks to open the action.  With this setup, it should be possible to verify.  Draw poker is also the best variant for this.  Without a draw, this is a game few people would play.

The simplest game where I can see this working is single draw no-limit lowball.  There's a chapter in Doyle Brunson's original Super/System about it, but it is basically an obsolete game.  It would have to be revived.

But absolutely nobody would want to play a five card poker game with just one round of betting.

The Dude: Walter, what is the point? Look, we all know who is at fault here, what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: Huh? No, what the fuck are you... I'm not... We're talking about unchecked aggression here, dude.
Donny: What the fuck is he talking about?
The Dude: My rug.
Walter Sobchak: Forget it, Donny, you're out of your element!
The Dude: Walter, the chinaman who peed on my rug, I can't go give him a bill, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

I think we're basically agreeing here.  Statistics don't really "prove" anything.  However, they've generally been good enough at keeping sites on the straight and narrow as far as PRNG goes, because a PRNG that was biased enough to make more rake would also (probably) produce cards visible to the player on showdown that, if collected in large enough numbers, would show bias.  While this is far from a gold standard, like provable fairness, when you can rule out the null hypothesis with something like 99.99% certainty, that's good enough for most purposes.

Similarly, the insider cheating accounts on Absolute/UB were exposed by statistical analysis.  Players were already suspicious of these accounts, but running the numbers showed they were winning something like six sigmas out.  I forget the exact amount, but a win rate like that was highly, highly unlikely.  

Provable fairness has the significant advantage that you can actually prove that any individual event was generated fairly, and actually have mathematical certainty to it.  Considering a lot of Bitcoin gambling is spread by operations that could easily just start cheating at any time, make a lot of money, then take a runner before they get caught, that kind of certainty is preferable.  It makes the defection strategy less profitable for less of a period of time.  I.e., the first big rigged wager is probably the last anyone will make.

Not remotely.  The best you can say about even the most extensive collection of hand data you get after the fact, as it is incomplete, is to say the data (that you actually have) are consistent or inconsistent with a fair deal to some degree of probability. 

I frankly don't like that shit.  It is stealing time and money from innocent people who have nothing to do with any of this.

Fun's fun, but enough's enough.  It's the scam artist who should be punished, not honest pizzerias who have done nothing to deserve being dragged into this bullshit.  Even chucking a water balloon full of rancid week-old piss into this scumbag's house would only punish the real perp.

Scammers who pay ad money to the slimeballs who run this site don't get scammer tags.  Scammer tags are for people who don't pay the proper bribes to the crooks in charge.

No, it isn't provably fair.  Nobody has actually figured out how to do that yet.  I know you're working on it, but if you succeed, you will be the first person to manage this feat.

There have, in fact, been collusion gangs busted and kicked off Seals, specifically at the Pot-Limit Omaha tables.  Players caught them, and the site removed them, and divvied up the stolen money between the victims.

IIRC Jacks or Better draw poker was often played with a single joker that acted as a "bug." That is, it could fill out a straight or a flush, and was otherwise considered an ace.

AFAIK, there is no poker variant where all players get to see all cards of all opponents.  All variants of poker, at least that I have considered, are limited information games.  I may have failed to consider some variant.

Five card stud is the least information limited variant I know, because only one card is secret.

Bullshit.  Someone doesn't get to be a fucking bum on my tax dime.  This guy is nothing more than a fucking bum and a thief.  There are people who actually need disability money.  This piece of shit isn't one of them.  He's a scam artist.  He's directly taking money out of the pocket of an actually disabled person who needs it.

This is a feature that is often abused, which is why many sites don't have it.  Players deliberately disconnect to get protection.  It basically means they're considered "all in" and don't have to call any more bets, but could still win the hand.  Even though I get disconnected sometimes, I generally prefer that a disconnected player gets treated like anyone else, i.e., if they don't call a bet they get folded.


I disagree on that.  Precisely because of people like dooglus and others who don't post, but simply collect data, a rigged SD would produce skewed data that would basically scream "rigged."  The same is true of poker sites.  I am nowhere near the statistician that many poker players are, but even I had a couple million hands from Stars at one point and cranked it through SPSS a few times to figure things out.  Obviously, one of the things you want to check is "is it rigged?"  Even though others did it, I also did and found nothing, i.e., the data was consistent with the null hypothesis.

More usefully, I also did population analysis correlating things like VP$IP (percentage of the time the player puts money into the pot voluntarily) against profit with players I had lots of hands on, and unsurprisingly found that at a certain breakpoint, players were almost all losers or winners just based on that stat alone. 

In any event, any significant rigging would stand out like a sore thumb to people who analyze data like this as a hobby.  People like dooglus and probably others we don't see as often would be the canaries in the coal mine, and their analysis of the data could be replicated by others.


I'd consult either Hoyle, Scarne, or the original Super/System by Doyle Brunson on draw games.  The rules are actually pretty variable.  I'll just point out where I disagree with this set of rules, but I will note that this is merely my opinion and people have played draw differently.


In what used to be the most commonly played variant of five card draw, there was a jacks-or-better minimum to make the first bet.  Once someone did open (and they could be forced to keep their discards and "show their openers" later), anyone else could play regardless of their hand.

In antes only play, everyone would ante before the deal.  However, draw poker can be played with other structures.  Another common structure, especially after the popularity of holdem, is blind bets.  Another possibility (more commonly used in stud games) is an ante with a "come-in."  That is, everyone puts up an ante, but there is a full bet required to "come in" and actually play the hand.


It gets more complicated.  There is also a question of how much you can bet or raise.  In limit, there is a specific amount and all bets or raises have to be in that denomination.  For instance, you can bet $1, and the raise is to $2, and subsequent raises are to $3, $4, etc.  Sometimes the limit goes up on later streets, such as in limit holdem (my favorite game).  Then there's no-limit.  Any player can bet or raise any amount from the minimum allowed to their entire stack at any time (with a few exceptions for short-stack all-ins). 

Then there's pot-limit, which I'm sure people love to code.  In pot-limit, you can bet anything from the minimum to the entire contents of the pot, or raise what the pot is after you call the bet to you.  You probably shouldn't start with this, but pot-limit jacks-or-better was sort of the gold standard of draw games when they were still commonly played.  (If the strategy for this game actually interests you, I recommend the long out of print Winning With Game Theory by Nesmith Ankeny.  Good luck finding it.)


This is, I think, a good idea.  The actual solutions players have used with physical cards that have evolved over the centuries of card-playing are probably a good analogy for what would work online, especially to solve the same problem, i.e., a fair deal.


I'm not sure we're really jacking it.  It probably now deserves its own thread, but the example of poker is pretty much a subset of the provably fair problem.


I'll join you there, though I probably don't have much to say on the math issues where you are probably the expert.

I do have one suggestion, though.  I think five card stud would actually be a more approachable problem.  Seven card stud, which more people play (even though they're usually in their eighties) would be not much more difficult.

The reason five card stud is rarely played any more is that a skilled player almost invariably wins.