Poker players try to read the faces of their opponents - now software is about to do something similar in a bid to stem fraud against poker websites.
Like online banks, web-based casinos suffer phishing attacks: players' identities are stolen through emails purporting to be from the casino but actually from fraudsters trying to obtain account details. If successful, they then empty the account by losing the victim's money gambling against themselves or accomplices. Other crooks use software agents, or bots, which play automatically, often beating all but the best players.
To ensure a human, and the correct human at that, is playing, Roman Yampolskiy of the University at Buffalo in New York and his colleague Venu Govindaraju have written software that monitors how you play. It catalogues how often and how much a player tends to bet, increases the bet, bets everything, or folds - giving up altogether. This information is bundled up into a personalised measure - the player's "gambling DNA" - that can then be used to confirm their identity. Any deviation from that behaviour is flagged up as suspicious. After just an hour of play, Yampolskiy says, the software can authenticate players with 80 per cent accuracy - and that gets better the longer they play.
While such a scheme could protect rank-and-file players, Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group in Edmonton, Canada, doubts it would work with the best ones. "If you are predictable, you can be exploited," he says. "Strong players try not to be predictable."
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Have your say
100% Accurate
Sun Mar 02 13:09:50 GMT 2008 by Eric Kvaalen
What does it mean, to "authenticate players with 80% accuracy"? That 80% of the time when the player is authentic, it says the player is authentic? I can write a "program" that always says the player is authentic!
100% Accurate
Sun Mar 02 23:17:45 GMT 2008 by Bob Or Tom
Eric,
To authenticate someone is to prove that their claim of identity is valid. So in the context of the article, it is shown that in online poker rooms it is possible to tell if the person currently playing under user name Bob is actually Bob or an evil hacker, named Tom, who stole Bobâs user name and password and trying to steal Bobâs money. Your program would be completely useless as it would authenticate all the hackers masquerading as legitimate players as the original users
Online Poker
Wed Mar 05 15:02:35 GMT 2008 by Orlando Salazar
Good poker players are not unpredictable, they are unexploitable. They never have an exact hand for an exact betting pattern. They have a range of hands, balanced by profit optimized frequencies.
Accuracy
Mon Mar 10 18:41:59 GMT 2008 by Willard Simone
This is kind of humorous. Players generally do tend to have specific ranges and betting patterns, but there are so many variables that induce a player to act completely out of character in certain situations. Ut oh, that guy just pushed 72o because he's on tilt, he must be a fraud.
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