Archive for Poker News

SharkScope introduces new feature: Collusion Detection

Welcome Scopers to our Newest Innovation

Have you ever played in a tournament and wondered if two of your opponents were working together in some way? Have you ever looked at the performance profile of a heads-up player and think their record was too perfect to be possible? SharkScope has developed a sophisticated collusion detection tool that can help answer such questions.

 
Many of us think that there’s collusion in Online Poker, and in a few cases collusion is real. Fortunately, the security departments of online sites closely monitor for collusion, ridding us of the cheaters when they are found. Now, with SharkScope Collusion Detection, you can do some sleuthing of your own when you come into contact with suspicious behavior.
 
What is Collusion?
 

SharkScope defines “collusion” as the cooperation between players in online poker tournaments using communication and information-sharing outside the boundaries of normal online poker.   By communicating privately and sharing cards, two players can gain an unfair advantage over other competitors—this type of collusion is called team play. Another type of collusion is chip dumping, where one player purposely loses chips to another player.  Two players might engage in chip dumping, for example, if one person owns both accounts and wants to collect extra bonus rewards by opening more accounts and then consolidating money back into one account.

How SharkScope Detects Collusion

By examining the pair-wise performance characteristics of tournament participants when playing together vs. playing apart, we’re able to detect outlying results showing significant performance improvement when certain pairs play together–far beyond what would be expected by chance. It is important to note that we identify suspects for collusive play using indirect data—we can observe how much better players do when playing with specific individuals, but we can’t catch them “red-handed’; we have no way of knowing how the players may be communicating together and what information they may or may not be sharing.

Detecting Collusion Using the SharkScope Wedsite

For SharkScope subscribers, the process is simple. When accessing the results of a single-table tournament, a Detect Collusion button option appears. Clicking activates a process that finds possible collusion suspects and, if found, the option to report them. Once reported you’ll get a confirmation email, and we’ll then investigate the collusion claim and forward the relevant details to the poker site if it checks out.

 

* There was no collusion detected in the above example.

Try it for yourself and feel more secure with SharkScope’s newest feature!

**As of now this service is limited to Gold subscribers and above. The cost for using the service is 10 searches.

Thank You

The SharkScope Team, offering the world’s most accurate online poker data since 2004.

 

Playing the new generation online casino games

Playing the new generation online casino games is providing people with all sorts of new opportunities. It’s easy to just stick with a lot of the classics within the overall niche. People can play at the same online casinos, and they can play the exact same games while they’re there. However, many people have been doing this for decades now, and there is something intrinsically exciting about being able to play some of the new generations of games. Fortunately, it is going to be easy for most people to do this given the rate at which online casino gaming developers come out with new games.

 

People are often astounded by the rate at which technology turns over and new technology is introduced. At one point in time, people would see the exact same level of technology throughout their entire lives. Today, even young people can see several different generations of technology throughout the course of their very brief lifetimes. It’s difficult for people to be able to get bored in an environment like this. For the most part, this is just an environment that makes a lot of people feel like everything is moving at a fast rate. It might seem like playing the new generation online casino games is something that should have happened years from now for a lot of people. However, the novelty that they’re always going to find with online casino games really can allow people to find whole new levels of enjoyment here.

 

Websites like the vegas palms online casino will be able to offer people all of the latest games. They will be able to easily browse through the gaming catalog on websites like the vegas palms online casino in order to find some of the newest games listed there. In most cases, it is made obvious which games are the newer ones. People are going to be able to see which games are the ones that manage to epitomize this generation of online casino games.

 

This generation of online casino games is obviously distinguished by the fact that mobility is so important today. This was not the case years ago, even in the early days of the mobile age. However, many of the most modern games are going to be available on mobile devices as well as on traditional devices like desktops or laptops. The new games are going to be more technically proficient than many of the older ones, and people are going to notice that right away when it comes to the mechanics of the game and the graphics of the game. Going to the http://www.vegaspalms.ca/ casino is just a completely different experience in this the new era of online casino gaming.

 

This era is going to be briefer than a lot of people might think as well, given the rate of acceleration for technology. Playing the new generation online casino games is going to happen before people know it yet again, which should make people as excited as ever about the possibilities involved in this niche.

NetEnt Launches its Casino Games with PokerStars NJ

Swedish online casino software developer NetEnt has announced its latest deal on American soil. After introducing its games to New Jersey’s online casino market through last year’s deal with Caesars, it has now signed with PokerStars, the largest poker operator of the world. According to an announcement made through the developer’s website, it has reached a deal with Amaya Gaming, the Canadian owner of the PokerStars brand, to add desktop and mobile games to its poker lobby in New Jersey. This seems to be the perfect time to start looking for online video poker tips .

PokerStars has first announced its intention to add random number generator (RNG) online casino games to its poker lobby in 2014, rolling them out first in the Spanish variant of their service. It was not the intention of Rational Group at first, but all changed when Amaya took over the business. Amaya’s intentions were apparently to turn PokerStars into a global and complete gambling brand, which it has become today. In time, it has added RNG and live dealer casino games to its poker lobby, launched a sports betting operation under the Stars brand, and is preparing to launch its daily fantasy sports branch, StarsDraft, as soon as the legal status of the service is clarified in the US.

The service has returned to the United States – namely to New Jersey – after a hiatus of about a decade. PokerStars was finally re-launched in the US on the 21st of March, with a license to provide online casino and online poker services to the state’s residents. “We could not be more proud to bring PokerStars to New Jersey,” David Baazov, Chairman and CEO of Amaya Gaming said with the occasion of the launch. “Working with our partner, Resorts Casino Hotel, we look forward to providing the most exciting, innovative and secure gaming experience to New Jersey.”

Swedish developer NetEnt was perhaps the best choice for an online casino partner for Amaya. Aside from it being one of the leading developers in Europe, NetEnt is highly appreciated for its high quality games and the experience it offers its players. Its collection of over 100 video slot machines, table games and card games is used by thousands of online casinos already, and it has received numerous awards for its technology and design.

“We are really thrilled to be live with a selection of our award-winning desktop and mobile games through PokerStars in New Jersey,” Björn Krantz, Managing Director of NetEnt Americas LLC said. “I am confident that our portfolio offering will support their strategy to build sustainable long-term digital casino growth in New Jersey.”

 

 

Winamax Introduces the Hit & Run Satellite!

A very interesting twist on what I see as a “modified” Super Satellite.

Normally in a Super (a feeder tournament) there are seats to an upcoming event. This is a great way for players to pay less for an upcoming event by winning the feeder or for those with lesser bankrolls, the opportunity to play in an event that they wouldn’t normally shell out money for. Ok everything normal so far.

Most satellites of this kind pay out 10% of the field. So let’s use an example.

The tournament that you’re trying to get into costs 100 (no rake), just 100. So if the satellite pays 10%, then 1 out of every 10 players win a ticket to the upcoming tournament. Simple right.

To add to the example let’s say there are exactly 100 players that enter the event. The last 10 players, regardless of chip count would win the seat. Yes, even if you only have 1 chip left. This format benefits the survivor, not the guy who likes to amass a mountain of chips, because at the end, a large stack gets you an equal prize to a 1 chip stack. Still we’re on standard ground.

To make it even clearer, if the ticket cost 100, then every player has to pay 10 to enter. That means that for every 10 players it adds up to 100.

This is where normal ends and here’s the twist.

Twist 1:

To win a seat here at Winamax, you’ll need to amass 20% of the chips in play (1 out of 5 players), so let’s go to an example. There are 100 players all starting with 1000 in chips. That’s 100,000. So in order to win a seat you’ll need to amass 20% of the chips or 20,000 chips. Another way to put it is you’ll need 20 times your starting stack. 20X1000 = 20,000.

Twist 2:

Once you’ve reached the 20,000 in chips, your satellite is over. You’ve now won a seat and you’re removed from the tournament. Voiala, no further risk, you’ve done your job and won a seat.

Twist 3

You’re chips are then put back into play, being divided equally by the remaining number of players. In other words your chip count will automatically increase. Sweet if you’re a short stack. Not bad if you’re a big stack either, the added chips might just put you over the top and get a seat.

Twist 4

Play continues in the same format until all the seats are given away. So there’ll be more chips available everytime someone gets knocked IN so it should be easier to reach the chip count goal.

Twist 5

If there’s an overage, play continues with a winner take all format. Here’s the example: 104 players enter leaving 4 buy ins. Those 4 buy ins do not add up to a full seat. So there’d be 4 x 10 or 40 left over after all the seats are awarded. The remaining players then play a winner takes all format. So the last player standing wins the remaining money.

The more things that change the better it is to freshen up poker. This is a great twist and you’ll need to change your strategy in trying to win this Super Satellite twist.

Bravo Winamax on both Espresso and Hit & Run. We applaud your innovations.

Team Sharkscope

2015 Leaderboard Highlights

Happy New Year everyone, we hope it was a good and profitable year.

Our 2015 Leaderboards are now closed and this year we have all new names atop the 4 main leader boards!

Furkay (Russia) took top honors in the all important SNG profit category, topping out at just under 170 thousand dollars. Furkay crushed it by besting the second place finisher Jorj95 (Canada) by $20,000.

How do you beat someone who lives on the computer playing poker for hours on end and multi-tabling to boot? Simple all you have to do is be Leshiy588 from Belarus. He played 228,678 SNGs. In order to do that you play in your house, on the road, on a bus and at the beach! FXCO (Slovakia) just couldn’t keep up logging only 146,554 SNGs. That’s over 80,000 more games!

Last year in Stevie444 and Skaiwalkurrr were all over the leaderboards, but both could only reach 6th and 5th respectively as the overall leader in Best 100 Streak Average Profit went to NikolasDLP  from Russia earning just under 1 Million Dollars. Wow that’s a lot of caviar!

Moving on up to Best 500 Streak Avg. Profit, while all the above winners were on the list, the Top Honors went to, Smokrokflock from  Canada with an average of $234.67

All of the above tournaments are on our main leaderboard page and all were achieved on PokerStars.

If there was one trend that we saw it was hoe Spin N Go’s effected the over all leader boards.

Total winnings and counts were down across the board as Sp N Go’s and Jackpot SNGs became more prevelant, taking many players away from Regular SNGs and MTTs.

Any Game by Country turned out to be a big hit and the list of countries represented is 52 and growing!

Last but certainly not least is Citoject from Bulgaria  won over 1 million in scheduled tournaments. That total is down by $500.000, but I’ll take a million anytime!

All in all 2015 was a great year for SharkScope and Online Poker. We want to thank all of you who participated and most of all we really appreciate your posts, chats and emails referring SharkScope to your friends! Don’t forget to like our Facebook page

Don’t forget 2015 brought the New SharkScope Desktop. This all in one tool proved to be a great success in 2015 and more networks and refinements are due in 2016, so get yours today!

Have a GREAT 2016 as the 2016 leader boards are now open!!!

SharkScope Team

Phil Ivey Accused for Cheating Borgota out of $9.6 million

“The poker pro loves to play other casino games as well, such as Punto Banco and Baccarat, and both games have brought him two lawsuits in the last couple of years.”

Some time ago Phil Ivey was playing baccarat at the Borgota in Atlantic City, and now he is being sued for his play because of an alleged cheating technique called edge sorting that according to the casino official’s Ivey used to win $9.6 million. The casino claims that Ivey did that in four separate visits, and now he is being sued for that. However, Ivey made a countersuit because he claims the casino is out of its mind.

According to Ivey, the win occurred simply due to a result of skill. He even says that the casino tried to distract him by giving him a private play area with a certain brand of cards and a dealer that spoke Mandarin. The casino even allowed him to play with a woman at his side, and later they accused her of being his accomplice.

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Phil Ivey is a ten-time WSOP bracelet winner. As reported by this site one of his more notable wins have happened in Australia at the Aussie Millions where he won a $250,000 Challenge for AU$4,000,000, which is about 2.8 million in USD. This is his largest single cash of his career. According to Australian Casino Club Ivey has expressed how much he loved Australia. And, who wouldn’t if he won that much money and had such fun memories there.

Anyway, Ivey was deposed on the matter about him supposedly using edge sorting at Borgota, but the poker pro has expressed his thoughts about the absurdity of it as well. He accuses Borgota of deliberately distracting him by offering him free booze with an unlimited budget served by pretty waitresses that are dressed in very provocative skimpy little outfits.

ivey2

He says that every time he played there he was allowed to play for multiple hours, and not one time he was asked about his strategy or his girl next to him. They didn’t even care how drunk he would get with the free booze. All of that says that Borgota wanted to keep him there and make him happy, but unfortunately for them Ivey is a pro and managed to win $9.6 million, despite all of those distractions with free alcohol in order to make him drunk enough to lose, pretty cocktail waitresses that flirt etc.

This is not the first lawsuit against Ivey for edge sorting. The Crockfords Casino in London has sued Ivey of edge sorting as well. He won there approximately $11 million playing Punto Banco, but the casino refused to pay him beyond his initial stake. Both Borgota and Crockfords use the same kind of cards and both casinos accuse Ivey of taking advantage of a defect in the manufacturing of the cards.

SharkScope and 888 New Jersey form alliance for Player Data

Date Line: New Jersey May 15th 2015

Sharkscope888_Newsletter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To further enhance SharkScope’s coverage, we approached 888 and was given the green light to provide tournament data–both MTTs and SNGs–to Sharkscope subscribers. The move was made to benefit 888NJ players, who can now access their data and track their quality of play to monitor their performance and improve their game.

We applaud 888NJ for their understanding of customer service as it relates to players. They understand that many players won’t play on a site where they can’t get stats (especially those who multi-table) and want to provide 888 New Jersey players access to these tools.

There are many promotions that 888 would like to introduce with this new SharkScope feature, such as $30.00 free (no deposit needed) and a deposit bonus of 100% up to $888.00.

At SharkScope we couldn’t be happier to work with a premier network like 888, and we’re thrilled at their generosity with sign-up bonuses.

If you use SharkScope and play online in New Jersey, you now have it all with 888 NJ.

Team SharkScope
Team 888NJ

A NEW NETWORK TO GET ON TRACK WITH, THE WINNING POKER NETWORK NOW COVERED

wpnlogo

It’s been in the works for a while now but we can finally announce the Winning Poker Network (WPN) is now being tracked by SharkScope.

 

Here are the facts:

  • For history data we’ve been able to retrieve about all Octobers results and we’re current with the data now
  • Players can report missing games on the Report Missing Game page or just click here: https://www.sharkscope.com/#Report-Missing-Games.html
  • At the moment satellites are not covered, although we hope to add them in the near future.

 

This couldn’t come at a better time as Winning Poker Network is getting ready to hold a 1 Million dollar guarantee early in December.

 

See our ad on the site for ACR’s sign up bonus to get in on all the action.

 

Sites on the WPN are:

Americas Card Room

Black Chip Poker

True Poker

BetCris Poker

BetDSI Poker

BookMaker Poker

888Poker back on SharkScope!

SharkScope is delighted to announce that, after extensive negotiations, we are now able to partner again with one of the world’s fastest growing poker networks, 888 Poker and their sister Spanish site 888Poker.es.888Poker back on Sharkscope!

The agreement is to implement a similar system to the one we currently employ on PokerStars and Adajabet where, by default, all ROI and Profit data is hidden until you opt-in. Once you opt-in you have full access to SharkScope’s wealth of features to analyse your statistics.

888Poker and 888Poker.es have set up mock tournaments with the names of SharkScope Opt In & SharkScope Opt Out, and the passwords for these tournaments are “optmein” and optmeout” respectively. This will be the new easy way you can get your accounts opted in and out as needed.

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888Poker-optin

For more details on the opting in and opting out procedures please see here:

Opt-In

Opt-Out

In an effort to give the integration a jump start 888 has designed many new promotions for new depositors which can be found by clicking the banners on the Sharkscope.com website, they include free money, deposit bonuses, freerolls, WSOP satellites and entry into steps for the WSOP as well. In other words 888 is going all out as a partner to give SharkScope users the best possible reasons to play on their site.

For those of you who have been playing on 888 we are doing everything we can to get some of the results from the past months that are missing from our database. If we can accomplish this the data will be added to your charts – otherwise there will be a gap in all statistics from the 18th of July 2013 to the 25th of March 2014.

SharkScope would like to thank those of you who have written and posted that you’d like 888 back. We heard you and are glad that we could, with the help of 888 accomplish this goal.

Lastly, we want to thank 888 for their fairness and openness to once again become part of the SharkScope family.

iPoker switches to opt-in system

iPoker

We’re sorry to announce that the iPoker network, which consists of skins such as Everest Poker, Poker770 and William Hill has chosen to switch to a FullTilt style opt-in system, where by all results from games with less than 30 players are hidden by default, until that player opts in. Opting in and out is now a very simply process of finding the special SharkScope cash table in the iPoker client and typing either optin or optout in the chat box.

The changes will affect both the SharkScope website and the SharkScope HUD, but ensures that SharkScope and all its tools continue to be fully permitted by the iPoker network.

Details of the opt-in and opt-out system can be found here:

iPoker-Opt-In

iPoker-Opt-Out

iPoker players which are currently listed in our leaderboards will be automatically considered opted-in for the next 3 months, to give them time to opt-in manually during that time without losing their place on those leaderboards.

Whilst in the short term these rule changes do reduce the amount of information available to most users with regards to looking at other iPoker player statistics, there are still many ways SharkScope can still be used effectively and in particular users should review the VS Me functionality:

  • Versus Me Functionality

    Once you have configured your own player names if you search a player who has not opted in yet, or even has blocked their name, you will see the full statistics derived from the games that you have played against that player.

Please bear with us during the transition to this new system as It will take a little time for us to get to the critical mass of players opted-in and we appreciate your patience. However if you are a current subscriber and wish to discuss your subscription please contact support@sharkscope.com.