Security Highlights – How to Know You Are in Safe Hands?
The whistleblower MPN poker raised many an eyebrow with its report, but the takeaway from the whole story is that it spurred a discussion on what is a proper set of measures that could be taken in order to abolish the problem. We checked with the industry’s leading operators to see what their proven procedures for dealing with the problem are. We analysed the data and sifted it through our own experience so as to render it down to a bite-size piece of information. Here’s how to verify game integrity:
- Licence check – Ensure that you are serviced by a licensed and regulated operator.
- Software download – make sure you download the game client from the official website of your online poker provider.
- Security certificate – if you’re playing on a web platform, doublecheck its security certificate and onsite encryption protocol.
- Shuffling the deck – Information should be available on the genuineness of the Random Number Generator that is responsible for ‘shuffling the deck’
- Bot prevention – The operator is proactively monitoring all accounts and their playing patterns with a view of identifying bots.
Do your own research before joining a gambling platform and look for these signs. If you keep having second thoughts about certain sites, it’s high time you check the list of the top 10 best poker sites in the UK. It comes with a detailed explanation of the criteria we employ and what you can find on each platform.
Player – Poker Stats by the Numbers
So MPN Poker released a report with an optimistic undertone. Why optimistic, you might ask? As explained in MPN’s poker blog (when it was online) seizing €1,000, 000 is a pretty big deal for everyone that’s not the industry’s leader. This shows admirable diligence and persistence in dogging users with malicious intent. And make no mistake, there always are such individual, so kudos to MPN Poker for being frank about it. How did they come up with that number though? We summarised the main points about the poker player stats:
- In January 2019, 13.5% of Monthly Active Users were investigated as compared to 6.4% in January 2016
- January 2019 shows a proactive detection ratio of 100% compared to 97.1% in January 2016.
- In January 2019, Total refunds amount up to €1,507 as compared to €1,066 in January 2016.
The numbers are clearly indicative of tightened up security procedures. What’s more, the operator is more proactive in its approach towards finding misdoers. ‘That’s the very definition of ‘clamping down on crime’. Bot use is a tough cookie to crack but if more operators hang tough just like MPN poker, the future of online poker will look ever so promising.
What Game Integrity Means and why Poker Stats Matter?
In the wake of a transformational 2019, one of the global leaders – Party Poker – introduced new changes to its game platform somewhere around the middle of the year. The aim was to limit the use of somewhat unfair means of gaining insight into a player’s betting patterns. By the same virtue, HUDs (Heads-up Displays) were banned.
Pulling the thread even further, Party Poker also made it impossible for other players at the table to download your hand history. The latter is crucially important when you think about it because such data can easily be analysed by specialised software and used against a player. While it’s handy for a player to review their own hand history and poker stats, the flip side is that others can do the same if the information is out there, which brings us to the next point.
Party Poker informed its customers that they need to change their aliases so that any player-analyzing software won’t be of use anymore. This is a clever way to deal for good with the possibility of some software having your plays log or history.
What we have detailed here is relevant only in so far as the purview of online poker fair play norms are concerned. Draftkings game Integrity, for example, constitutes a wholly different set of measures since daily fantasy and online poker are poles apart.
Do You Play at a ‘Provably Fair’ Site?
The ‘provably fair’ concept is a parent topic that is directly related to all things gambling. By definition, provably fair gambling sites use algorithms which make it possible for users to verify that the outcome of each round is decided completely in random. With the advent of blockchain technology, we are going to see more and more of that approach as it’s a similar structure whereby the player can doublecheck whether the response of the system was genuine. It works the same way as encryption does.
At the end of each playing round, you are given a key which can be compared to something called ‘server seed’. The server seed is the encoded version of the outcome which is decided before each round. In other words, you can be sure that nothing has tampered with the outcome and it’s the outcome of truly random mathematical functions.
This is all the rage now in bitcoin casinos where slots can be played with cryptocurrency. The same mechanism would be a nice tip of the hat to players from the online poker community as well. After all, though the house isn’t winning directly from the hands you lose, you’d want to make sure that some players aren’t favoured by the system as compared to others.
When Will Other Poker Operators Put the Word Out?
The logical question comes to the fore, when will others follow into the footsteps of MPN Poker and make public the facts about how well they handle bot accounts. At first glance, there’s a lot of tap-dancing around the real questions going on in the industry. If you ask us, the time is still distant when this will become a common practice just like the regular audits that every licensed poker platform goes through.
Not to mention that some low-rank operators would even hush up stories like this when the topic is raised. There’s a lot of improvement in this regard though. As a whole, we think that operators are on a bit of a learning curve when it comes to disclosing information about their security procedures. This, however, is what players are looking for and it would be beneficial for both parties if it changes in the future.
