This is a bit pointless, as I’m blogging about a “controversy” that has already been settled. I do think there are useful tools to take from this incident, though.

For those out of the loop, a few days ago players of online poker site “Absolute Poker” (no link, deal with it) accused a player called “POTRIPPER” of playing while being able to see the hole cards. I’ll save the poker laymen’s task of trying to figure out what that means (as I had to) - in that variant of poker some of the cards are shown, while others are hidden. People were accusing POTRIPPER that (s)he was playing while being able to see everyone’s hidden cards.

I should point out that this is a settled controversy. Absolute Poker admitted that this is the work of an internal security breach. I am less interested in the specific case, however, than I am in looking at tools designed to answer the “how can we know” question. (more…)