soundofsilence

I see a lot of comments questioning the ability of RIO to enforce a "no HUD" rule. It makes me wonder if (here in the US) with online poker legalization we'll see regulation of related bots similar to what has happened with online event ticket sales.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/04/bots-act-thats-ticket

There are now very serious disincentives to operating a bot to purchase event tickets, which has radically changed the use of bots. Sure, you can still hire an offshore developer to make one, but you're risking criminal penalties and assuming enormous financial risk to use one as a US player.

This wouldn't apply to international players, but presumably funds could be frozen and possibly seized from players who violate this rule in the TOS.

As far as the "no HUD" rule making it more difficult to detect cheating (a valid concern IMO), it seems that diligence on the part of RIO to investigate players with unrealistic win rates and/or suspicious playing patterns would really help identify cheating. It seems every time a cheat has been discovered they had astronomic win rates that could have been flagged.

Yes, you'd have to do this in a way that protects the hand histories of the best players, but that's already a potential risk that we've seen damage the daily fantasy industry.

Thanks, Phil, I'm sorry I was on mobile and somehow missed the part you quoted That makes sense.. Of course, in live play it can take a few rounds before a player starts to project an image, so that could be part of the implementation as well.

I love playing live but I don't get the opportunity very often. I'm hoping that online poker will be available in Illinois before too long. Although before Black Friday I had started to reduce my online play because of some of the "advantage" reasons you outlined. I just didn't have the time to invest to overcome what I sensed was an advantage enjoyed by those who had the time to take full advantage of a HUD.

After seeing your thoughtful approach to this topic, RIO will be the first site I deposit to. Thanks again.

Hi Phil, great post regarding HUDs. In your piece you say:

“When you play live poker, you can see the tight guy playing on his phone the whole time or the angry drunk guy ready to tilt off his chips.”

I feel this is relevance to dynamic avatars. The angry drunk guy is visible to the whole table; using the same logic a player's avatar should reflect his overall playing style against all players during that session and should display the same image to the whole table. Just like real poker.