Oil hovers below $78 after US crude supplies jump Predicting an end to Roe v. Wade On the contrary, the contractors deal as they see fit, with those whom they employ, or of whom they purchase.I speak of what is in proof. A contractor came to Washington last winter, and received a draft of $180,000 on a specie-paying bank in New York. This he sold at ten per cent premium, and with the avails purchased funds in the West, with which he paid the producer, the farmer, the laborer. This is the operation of specie payments. It gives to the government hard money, to the rich contractor hard money; but to the producer and the laborer it gives paper, and bad paper only. And yet this system is recommended as specially favoring the poor man, rather than the rich, and credit is claimed for this administration as the poor mans friend. Let us look a little more nearly at this matter, and see whom, in truth, it does favor. Who are the rich in this country? There is very little hereditary wealth among us; and large capitalists are not numerous. Wishing some information that he had not obtained in relation to a surrender of the western posts by the British, he addressed a note to the secretary of state, asking permission to make that particular examination; to which he received the following answer:—- Thomas Jefferson presents his respectful compliments to Colonel Burr, and is sorry to inform him it has been concluded to be improper to communicate the correspondence of existing ministers.He hopes this will, with Colonel Burr, be his sufficient apology. In April, 1792, there was an election for governor of the State of New-York. By some it was supposed that Governor Clinton would decline being again considered a candidate. It was known that John Jay would be the candidate of the federal party. At that period Colonel Burr had warm personal friends in both parties, who were urging his pretensions. Among the most ardent was Judge Yates. In the latter part of February, 1792, he authorized his friends to state that he declined a nomination. The criminal is always a sophist; and finds in his own reason a special pleader to twist laws human and divine into a sanction of his crime.The rogue is so much in the habit of cheating, that he packs the cards even when playing at Patience with himself. –STEPHEN MONTAGUE. The only two acquaintances in this populous city whom Glendower possessed who were aware that in a former time he had known a better fortune were Wolfe and a person of far higher worldly estimation, of the name of Crauford. With the former the student had become acquainted by the favour of chance, which had for a short time made them lodgers in the same house.

So what exactly is the point of it? There are no links or any other sales pitch. It’s just gibberish. Why would someone send that?

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Strange Spam

No related posts.

Bill’s Poker Blog uses WordPress to manage the website. This new plugin, WPtouch reformats Bill’s Poker Blog in an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly way that should make the site much more enjoyable and easy to use for iPhone/iPod Touch users.

A picture is worth a thousands words . . .

This is what the site normally looks like using the iPhone.

It’s not really readable as-is. You have to zoom in and then you have to get the sizing just right or you’ll need to scroll left and right to be able to read it.

But with WPtouch what you’ll see looks more like this.

All of the content is presented in a format that iPhone users can easily read without zooming in. If you want to read one of the stories you just click on the title and WPtouch reformats the story so you can easily read it on the iPhone too.

You can read and leave comments just like you can normally so you get 100% of the functionality but targeted towards the iPhone.

So, my fellow iPhone users, rejoice.

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? iPhone Goodness on Bill’s Poker Blog

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Paul Nobles from Bluff takes a rather interesting look at the whole data mining brouhaha that’s been going on of late. I started to leave a comment on the Pokerati site but my response started to get a little unruly in terms of length so I thought I would just direct you there to read the original and then give some of my thoughts on the topic here.

First off, I think Paul hits the nail on the head. His analysis of the situation is very good. The reason I chose to respond is that I think there are some additional lines of thought that are worth exploring as well.

Okay, you read my blog, which means you’re probably too lazy to read the entire post over at Pokerati so I’ll summarize Paul’s post by saying:

TableRatings and similar companies are in violation of the T&C’s at many poker rooms by collecting table data and sometimes even hand histories. And although the poker sites say they are against it they haven’t done much to stop it (with the exception of Cake).

First off, having seen this issue via the operator’s perspective, it’s really a matter of priorities and whether or not you want to draw attention to the problem. In many ways it is similar to the problem rooms have with poker bots.

All rooms agree that bots are bad for business but only insomuch as they are bad if people are aware of them. If your average players aren’t aware of poker bots you don’t want to be doing too much to draw attention to the fact that there was a problem to begin with.

This is also one of the reasons so few poker rooms took to sticking the knife into UltimateBet or Absolute during their cheating scandals. The vast, vast majority of players don’t read 2+2, PokerNews, or much other poker media other than poker television programming and such. Crowing that your site can be trusted while UltimateBet and Absolute cannot makes people aware of a problem that they might never had even suspected existed.

So, the average player out there doesn’t even know these data mining companies exist. Should you make too big of a deal about it and bring attention to something that you might not be able to prevent anyway? That’s the million dollar question.

Stuff like this will always be a game of cat and mouse as long as there is money to be made. As soon as any of the rooms makes a change the data collectors will counter. The only thing you can really do is make it too expensive for them to keep up and thus remove the financial motivation to offer such a service.

But, how big of a priority is this? How many customers does TableRatings actually have? How much is it really impacting the game? How noticeable is it to the average player? Will addressing the problem bring unwanted publicity that is more harmful than the actual problem?

These are the kinds of questions card rooms will ask themselves before invest resources in fixing the problem. Believe it or not, despite the massive amounts of money being made by online poker sites, most are woefully understaffed. They only have the ability to focus on a certain number of priorities and where an issue like this ranks for them will be a function of a combination of the personal philosophy of the decision maker and business realities.

Nobles does mention a possible solution of allowing players to change their screen names which is an idea that I know has been kicked around inside the online poker industry for years. The obvious argument against is that your high-raking players will move onto a site where they can maintain hand histories on other players.

Personally, I support frequent screen name changes. Lee Jones, formerly of PokerStars fame and now card room manager at Cake Poker (who, does allow screen name changes) came out in favor of this some time ago, if I’m remembering correctly.

The major problem with this solution though is that it would be very hard for most existing rooms to shoehorn into their existing software. First they have to build the ability in and then they have to rewrite portions of all of the backend tools. That’s actually not as simple as it sounds (if it did sound simple).

Many rooms don’t officially allow name changes as part of their policy but under extreme circumstances will permit a name change. I would guess that at a minimum they have a manual process in place to do it but they either don’t want to open it up to the public for fear of the repercussions or it’s not automated enough or reliable enough to do on any sort of massive scale (perhaps even as crude as opening up a second account and importing all the data and balances over).

There’s also the issue that this does make certain types of fraud easier to commit. Nobles downplays this risk but I think he underestimates the potential based on the argument others are making. Yes, the problems at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were internal issues but that does not mean that every poker room has state of the art collusion or fraud detection. UB and Absolute might have been the absolute (no pun intended) worst but look at what it took to catch those players who were OBVIOUSLY cheating.

Additionally, now you’re going to have players who say that they are absolutely positive that Player A is Player B because of some convoluted association they’ve connected together and thus based on their combined stats are cheaters. Poker rooms will end up facing regular accusations of fraud going on on their sites and since poker rooms tend to not release much in the way of details into their investigations it gives the tin-foil hat wearing crowd more ammunition to proclaim that online poker is rigged.

So again, you end up right back at the question of the priority of addressing the issue. Is it worth the costs? Does it create more problems than it solves? Is the company willing to skip features in the next release or two in order to implement a solution?

Each room will make their decision on a case by case basis but up until the last few weeks I’ve only ever heard it talked about as a philosophical debate within the industry. It’ll take a lot more pressure from players before this works its way into the spotlight.

photocred to NIOSH

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Online Poker and Data Mining

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There’s probably no single topic that divides the online poker industry more than rakeback [what is rakeback?].  Seriously, in many companies rakeback is a dirty word.  At one company I know it’s jokingly referred to as “The Unmentionable” by the poker staff because to even say the word rakeback generates a negative Pavlovian response within the organization.

Other sites publicly denounce rakeback but then offer promotions and/or bonuses that essentially amount to rakeback.  They might call it value, or commission, or fee but it’s still rewarding players for generating rake.

And lastly you have the rooms that use rakeback aggressively to acquire and retain players.   For them it’s a tool they use in order to compete against better-funded poker rooms that can buy up all the media in a market and shut them out of traditional marketing channels.

The affiliates are also in a similar battle over rakeback.  Traditional affiliates detest rakeback.  They spend a lot of money creating valuable content that they might not otherwise be able to produce if they had to give the lion’s share of their affiliate fees back to the players.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the rakeback affiliates who don’t mind working on slim margins because they can still make money on the sheer volume of players.  Also most rakeback affiliates don’t create expensive content (tournament coverage, actual journalists, etc) so they operate with far less overhead than the traditional affiliates.

Who are we forgetting here?  Oh yes, the players.  The players are a little less divided.  Either they know about rakeback and love it or they have no idea what it is and probably don’t even care.

Can’t we all just get along?

In reality, almost everyone has a valid argument.  The problem is that the online poker industry hasn’t really grasped the fact that one size doesn’t fit all.

A rakeback affiliate and a traditional affiliate provide two completely different types of functions.  A large poker news site is likely to have tons of content that rates highly in search engines and will attract newer players when they search for certain keywords or follow a link sent to them by a friend.  Yes, hardcore poker players also use their content but most don’t click on the affiliate links.

But the rakeback affiliate is also providing a function.  The rakeback affiliate is catering to a more sophisticated poker player.  The rakeback affiliate aggregates valuable (higher raking) players and provides them with customer support, specialized promotions (rake races, etc), and serves as a single interface for the poker room.

So on one side you have the traditional affiliate who can send a large volume of players but the traditional affiliate normally doesn’t even know who they are nor do they tend to have any sort of ongoing relationship with them.  On the other side you have the rakeback affiliate who sends fewer players but knows all of the players they send (to the degree that they have their contact info and pay them every month) and maintain an ongoing relationship with them.

Unfortunately, most poker rooms offer only one model of compensation.  Send us players and we give you a cut of the rake.

And the poker rooms are stuck in the middle.  They don’t want to anger their traditional affiliates by condoning rakeback but they don’t want to lose their best customers to competitors that do allow it.

And because there is no simple answer, poker rooms either take a hostile stance, shamelessly offer rakeback to anybody who asks, or try a middle ground that ends up being so convoluted that even David Sklansky can’t work out the math of how their system works.

So what’s the answer?

I’m not sure I have an answer.  I have some thoughts but not necessarily an answer that will work across the board.   It’s a difficult problem because you have to raise the switching cost for the players while still keeping the affiliates happy.

One of the other major problems comes out of the fact that most of the existing affiliate models originated from a different era and are outdated in today’s current landscape.  The affiliate model was devised at a time when the US was essentially the only market, rakeback was unheard of, the poker player community was rather immature and unorganized, and most sites didn’t have the capital to conduct large media campaigns.

All of those parameters have changed since the inception of affiliate programs but the poker rooms have yet to evolve.  If anything they find themselves being in the uncomfortable position of providing a commodity service.

With online poker rooms receiving anywhere from 20% – 50% of their new sign-ups from affiliates and the old 80/20 rule whereby a small percentage of affiliates send the majority of the traffic, the online poker sites really don’t have the leverage to change things on their own.

But by the same token, the traditional affiliates are going to have to come to grips with the fact that a player who they sent to XYZ Poker two years ago when he was a newbie to poker who is now 18 tabling small stakes games and raking $15,000 a month wants some of that rake back.  If the affiliate doesn’t cut him a rakeback deal then he’ll quit playing on the site and go to one where a rakeback affiliate will give him a deal.  So they can either have 5% of $15,000 or 100% of $0.

To be fair, many affiliates have seen the writing on the wall and are making just such a change to their business model.  Many of the coaching sites and educational sites require that you link up your account with them with your account on the poker room so they can track your progress and pay you out bonuses and such.  Some of those sites have either already implemented or have discussed offering incremental rakeback whereby players start off with zero rakeback and either as a function of time or MGR are offered a higher and higher percentage.

That does seem to be the model that makes the most sense as both an affiliate and the poker room spend most of their money trying to acquire players.  Once the player is in the door the longer they remain a customer the more profitable they become.

So where does that leave blogs, news sites, and everybody else who doesn’t have a one on one relationship with their players?

Well, as I mentioned, the 80/20 (probably more like 90/10 in most cases) rule is in effect when it comes to affiliates.  The overwhelming majority of affiliates simply don’t send enough players.  From a business perspective it would make sense if they ended MGR deals for any affiliate not generating X number of signups per month and then putting in some stringent rules that took any incentives out of trying to scam the room on the CPA deals.

As for the upper 10% or 20%, I think the poker rooms should just buy them out.  I know that sounds crazy but over the long run it would likely be cheaper than paying them out as affiliates.  I mean, listen, I see a lot of these affiliates around Gibraltar, Malta, and at conferences and many of them are doing quite well.  If there’s that much money in the value chain then as long as you can buy the company for a reasonable price then it’s a good investment.

Another alternative would be for the poker rooms to force a rakeback scheme on the traditional affiliates either by policy or via offering so many bonuses that went against MGR that the net effect was the same for the player and the affiliate.

I know some larger affiliates who read that might gasp a bit but as rakeback becomes more widespread within the poker world the players are going to force their hand eventually anyway.  When player attrition rates (churn) start increasing most affiliates are going to have to make a choice between making up for that by pumping more new customers through the door or conceding that they have to split some of the profits with the players.

Well, technically, there’s another option which is for the affiliates to hit the poker rooms up for a larger percentage to compensate them for the higher churn rates but sooner or later they’ll reach a point where the poker rooms can’t pay them a large enough percentage to compensate them for the churn losses.  Plus there’s the fact that the poker room will likely take note of the lifetime value of the players being sent and put their own throttle on how much they are willing to pay for similar caliber players.

Like I said earlier, there aren’t any easy answers.  The industry is maturing and like it or not rakeback will likely be here with us for awhile.  Love it or hate it players are going to increasingly demand rakeback.  It should be interesting to see how the industry responds.

photocred to adam*b

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? The Online Poker Industry’s Love Hate Relationship With Rakeback

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FullTilt Rake Race: Apr 21 – 30, $7000 Prize Pool 50 Places Paid!

Cake Poker $21,000 in cash prizes: Apr 21 – 30, $6000 Prize Pool 50 Placed Paid!

Only catch is that these are for new or existing Rakeback Report players. But if you don’t already have a rakeback account at either site . . . why not? Look for both rake races under “Races and Rolls“

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Rake Races on Cake and Full Tilt Poker

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If you’re reading this via RSS or email delivery pop on over to the website and check out the redesign. Actually, it’s a bit more than a redesign as I also changed hosting providers and a ton of other things.

As you may note, I went with a professionally designed theme (i.e. it cost money) called Thesis. I know that there are a ton of free themes out there and I could have certainly coded my own should I had the time and inclination but for $164 (for the multiple blog option – only $87 for the single blog version) I got a well thought out and very easy to administrate theme. From a time vs. cost perspective, it was an easy choice as even the free themes often require a lot of customization and if you want two columns instead of three then you’re in the code mucking around anyway. And then if WordPress releases an update that breaks the theme you can’t just download the newest version of the theme and install it because you have to go back in and put all of your hacks into the new theme.

Thesis operates on a completely different philosophy. You can configure the hell out of it via the control panel. You can change it from a 2 to 3 column layout with a click of a button. You can change column widths, add widgets, and make all sorts of changes all without touching a line of code.

Better yet, when you do touch code you don’t touch the theme code. All of your customizations go into special files which Thesis reads and then gives priority to over its own instructions. For instance, you can tell it that before the first item in the second column to insert a snippet of code. Your customization is then completely isolated to your own custom code files which allows you to do an upgrade to Thesis without overwriting all of your changes.

The API for Thesis is very easy to learn and very intuitive. You can combine the Thesis hooks with WordPress hooks to do some very cool stuff.

So far, I’ve been very happy with the new Thesis theme. If you’re interested in finding out about Thesis you can check out the website here.

photocred goes to galfred

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Some Upgrades to Bill’s Poker Blog

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As much as it pissed me off, at least I kinda-sorta know enough Spanish to be able to find the language preferences and change them. Other languages aren’t so easy. When I arrived in Thailand everything Google was in Thai. Unless you can read Thai script (so far I know 3 consonants and 1 vowel out of 44 consonants and 15 vowels – Man would I be screwed on Thai Wheel of Fortune) your only way of changing your settings is to click on stuff until you see a page that resembles the preferences page you might remember setting up in English at some point in the past and then changing the language to something random. If you’re lucky the random language you selected wasn’t Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese or some other language that doesn’t use Roman characters and you can make a rough guess at which one says “English.”

Here’s a clue Google . . . quit geotargeting my IP address and look at the damn browser settings. Last time I checked my log files the browser sent over its version which includes the language the browser is in. In this case en-US for US English. Which seems to be a better indicator in terms of what language I would prefer to view your website in; what part of the world someone logs in from or the language settings in their browser? Not everybody who access the internet from Thailand can read and write Thai but I’m willing to bet 99.9999% of the people with their browser language options set to Thai can read and write Thai.

Yesterday I arrived in Sweden and this is what Google changed my homepage to:

Notice that even in the URL it says that this is the en-US version yet Google decided it knows what languages I speak better than I do and decided to serve me up the Swedish version of their homepage.

STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Wise Up Google

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Nat Arem first picked up on the fact that online poker affiliated sites were getting pretty harshly penalized for either buying or selling links. I am guilty of having sold links. But I never considered myself a Google criminal. Sure I let someone buy a text ad in my sidebar but it was clearly labelled and I really didn’t think it was too far different than selling a graphic banner ad. Seriously, I didn’t really feel I was in the business of scamming Google. I simply was monetizing my website.

But what Google wants is for those ads to have rel=nofollow in the link code so that the Google search engine knows not to follow the link. The origin of this link attribute is from when blogs were being spammed in their comments with links to everything from gambling sites to penis enlargement offers. Almost overnight, blogs were getting slammed with thousands of bogus comments. The more popular your blog was the more spam it would get. Google created this tag as a way to remove the incentive for spammers to spam blogs. If Google wasn’t going to follow the links anyway then why even bother?

But a funny thing happened. The blog spammers continued to spam and Google started using the nofollow attribute in a way completely different from how it was originally marketed. To say that the nofollow tag has been a failure in terms of what its original goal was would be an understatement. I still get thousands of auto-generated comments that I have to filter out.

In a way, the shift in how they use the nofollow attribute is a testament to Google’s own failure to properly index the internet. They basically said that instead of improving their ranking algorithm to be able to tell the difference between advertising and content they would simply force website owners to use this tag attribute that they created to stop comment spam to tell Google what’s paid for and what isn’t.

It’s almost humorous in a way that Google created a ranking system based on how many incoming links a site receives but didn’t think about the implications and incentives this would create. If you really think about it Google created comment spam. People spam blogs in the hopes that more links to their site will make them more popular. Then Google comes up with this nofollow tag which fails miserably and so then Google retaliates against an incentive system that Google itself created and starts to penalize people who sell or buy these links.

But again, what incentive does that create? Now I’m scared to link to anybody without the nofollow attribute for fear that Google might classify the link as paid for and punish me. Wikipedia, which Google clearly considers god on all topics and ranks first if they have anything even remotely connected to the subject of the search, put nofollow on all of their outbound links. So, if the top authority on a topic links to your content as a source of information for their content you get zero Google love. Isn’t that the antithesis of what Google’s whole links infer credibility scoring algorithm was supposed to accomplish?

Google has some very, very smart people working for them but none of them seem to have passed Econ 101 where they teach the law of unintended consequences. Every time Google rewards a certain type of behaviour people are going to do what Google rewards. And yes, unsavoury people are going to try to scam the system. That’s just a fact of life and Google needs to understand that and stop trying to penalize people who react to the incentives that they themselves create.

So yes, I was a criminal in Google’s eyes. I sold a couple of links for what was basically enough to pay my hosting bill and buy a beer. For that Google decided to cut my traffic in half despite the fact that I’m what many consider to be an authoritative site. My – completely unpaid – backlinks number in the thousands and even PokerStars sends their customers to my site to read my arguments on why online poker is not rigged.

Meanwhile link buying and selling continues. In fact, since pulling the text ads I’ve been approached no less than four times by people wanting to purchase ads. And as others have recently noted, some of the biggest link buyers out there haven’t received any penalty at all.

So in the end, again, we’re left with another failed policy from Google. They’ve penalized authoritative sites and haven’t stopped any of the link buying and selling. Bravo Google!

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Google’s NoFollow Tag is a Joke

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I tend to break my passwords up into three groups:

* Very Secure
* Moderately Secure
* Throw Away

Very Secure is basically any account that involves money or might involve people being able to get at my money. For instance my online poker accounts would be considered Very Secure. I also consider my email account Very Secure because someone could request a password reminder from a Very Secure account be sent to my email address.

Moderately Secure would be accounts for message boards, websites, and other misc places where I frequently log in. I tend to classify any site where I trust the source as Moderately Secure. Yahoo’s My Yahoo, my AOL IM, and other accounts fall into that category.

Throw Aways are sites I do not know very well, don’t plan on having a long relationship with, or simply think might be a little dodgy.

I use three different methodologies to generate passwords for each. Someone who figures out a pattern in my Throw Aways won’t be able to figure out the pattern used for my Moderately Secure and Very Secure accounts. The best way to describe it is via an example.

Let’s say I use the following pattern to generate memorable passwords for each site:

Very Secure: I might pick a passage from a book or a famous quote and use the first letter of each word along with a date or memorable number. Let’s say that the phrase I select is:

If there wasn’t luck involved I would win every one.

Since I have to keep the password to about eight characters, I’ll just take the first four words which gives me:

itwl

Now I pick a number. A good way to randomize it a bit might be to incorporate the number of characters in the name of the site in the number. So, let’s say this is my Neteller account. There are eight characters in Neteller. So I take eight, plus, let’s say my favorite number (seven) and the 25th (Christmas). Now I have 4 numbers that I’ll mix into the four letters, which gives me:

i8t7w2l5

It’s rather random, customized for each site, and relatively difficult to guess. I might even go the extra step and mix it up even more by capitalizing either the consonants or vowels depending on the first letter of the site’s name. So if I were to employ that here, Neteller starts with a consonant so my password is now:

i8T7W2L5

At ABC Poker, my password would be:

I3t7w2l5

For Moderately Secure sites I might pick a different phrase and different numbers. I might also forego the capitalization or do just the opposite (capitalize vowels when the name begins with a consonant).

For Throw Away accounts I would just tend to use the first four letters of the site name combined with my birthday or some other easy to remember four-digit number.

The advantage of this is that the level of sophistication goes up as the risk of unauthorized account access goes up. Additionally, there’s a reduced risk that if someone gets my ABC Poker password that they’ll figure out my Neteller password. And the beauty is you could even write down your little pattern as a reminder in such a way that even if someone ran across it they wouldn’t necessarily be able to decipher it.

If I had to leave myself a note on my password scheme I might just write down:

If there wasn’t luck involved . . . 7 – Xmas

In the absence of any other information, it’s highly unlikely anybody would be able to reverse engineer your password for any site (unless they read this site and you didn’t change up my recommendations even just a little).

I might even just abbreviate it as:

Luck

Anyone who ran across my little note would have no clue.

I also use a tricky little trick to secure my credit and bank cards. With so many cards, I often forget the PIN so I use a labeler and put the PIN on the card. But instead of just putting the actual PIN on the card, I add a number to the PIN. Let’s say that my PIN number is:

4567

I add the same number to all my cards: 55

4567 + 55 = 4622.

Now when I pull out my card and look at the PIN I’ve put on the card, I just subtract my seed number and I have the correct PIN.

The reason I like this one is that it adds an extra security level to the card. Most ATM’s freeze the account and confiscate the card if you try the wrong PIN three times in a row. Whoever steals my ATM card and tries to use it will automatically try the wrong number thinking I’m a complete idiot. Hopefully, he’s stupid enough to try it three times and losing the card in the machine. :-)

Anybody else have any suggestions on security precautions you regularly take?

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Passwords and PINs

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The lesson for every online poker room is that a false positive can cost you dearly. The few dollars that are saved by employing a too aggressive a fraud program are easily eclipsed by the six or seven figure losses in goodwill.

Most poker rooms attempt to prevent cheating, bots, and other terms of service violations using automated detection schemes. Either in real time or nightly the casino is alerted to suspicious activity. For instance, chat spamming is a problem most casinos have measures to prevent. They don’t appreciate people coming on their site and pimping other poker sites in their table chat. Now, if they see a single user who has shot off 50 single line messages to 50 different tables that would be very suspicious. Some casinos might have the ability to monitor this in real time and might block the chat privileges of that user immediately. Others, less automated, casinos might generate a report that evening that their abuse department would review and decide whether or not to take action against the player.

If the casino has misidentified the abusive patterns, the data collection is flawed, or the casino has established too aggressive of a threshold then they run the risk of wrongly accusing players of misdeeds; a false positive.

Of course, online poker companies don’t have a monopoly on generating false positives. Email spam filtering has a similar challenge. If the filters are set too aggressively then innocent mail is marked as spam. If the filters are too passive, spam ends up in the user’s in-box. Generally, you want to err on the side of too passive but continuously refine your detection algorithms to become more accurate.

Probably the most difficult aspect of generating a quality algorithm is that not all data is of equal importance. For instance, going back to the email spam example, let’s examine a few pieces of information that a spam filter might look at to determine if a piece of email is spam.

HTML – Most spam is sent as HTML. Marketers like putting pictures, bolded phrases, and other formatting into their message in order to enjoy maximum impact.

Forged Headers – Along with the to, from, and subject lines of an email there are other pieces of information in the header of an email message that most software programs hide from the user. Many spammers will attempt to forge some of this header information by inserting false data in the hopes of bypassing more sophisticated spam filtering or to disguise the true source of the email

I could keep on going. There are literally hundreds of characteristics that spam detection software might look at. The point is that some of that information should weigh more heavily than other pieces of information. Forged email headers is a much more reliable indicator than is whether or not the email message has HTML in it. But, forged email headers by itself might not be strong enough indicator. There are legitimate reasons why a header might appear to be forged.

The way to address this problem is to use a scoring system. A forged header might be +50 and HTML might be +5. At some threshold number (perhaps +100) the software might be confident enough that the message is likely spam that it will label it as such. The real challenge is that the human beings who assign scores to each variable and set threshold levels can and do make mistakes.

That sounds like the problem the 2+2′ers mom ran into. She somehow tripped enough triggers to get herself labeled as a bot. Once the system labeled her, the human was reluctant to allow her to represent her claims to the contrary. And from what was said about the incident in the 2+2 thread, the criteria being used to label a user as a bot seemed a little hyper-aggressive. Unfortunately, since catching bots and writing bots which can evade being caught is a cat and mouse game, the casino isn’t likely to reveal enough about what set off the trigger to allow the accused to offer a possible explanation. Worse, that same attitude doesn’t allow the casino to better refine it’s detection by learning what the user was doing to trigger the false positive.

Image borrowed from Sometimes Thursday

Thanks for reading Bill's Poker Blog. You might want to check out his other sites: Poker Job Search is a resource for people who are looking to get started in the online poker industry. Rakeback Report Get the best rakeback deals from the biggest online poker sites. Learn how you can make a living playing poker. Flop the Nuts Poker gives you up to date info on live poker events Are you following me on Twitter? Why not? Poker Bots and Little Old Ladies

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