Steven Levitt comments on Absolute Poker and his anti-fraud work with another online poker room
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Steven Levitt, the economist probably best-known as the co-author of the popular book Freakonomics, mentioned today in his blog on the NY Times website that he’s contracted with an online poker room to help them develop tools that will catch cheaters.
The comment comes at the end of a blog post that focuses mainly on the recent allegations of suspicious play on the part of a group of high-stakes players over at Absolute Poker. Read our stories on the issue from earlier this week.
Levitt’s post is interesting not only because it confirms that he’s now an employee of an online poker room, but also because he seems to be on the side of the pessimistic in the Absolute Poker hacked / not hacked debate. An excerpt:
If you were a total idiot, you would do exactly what some cheaters on the Web site Absolute Poker appear to have done recently. Playing at the very highest stakes games, they allegedly played every hand as if they knew every card that the other players had. They folded hands at the end that no normal player would fold, and they raised with hands that were winners but would seem like losers if you didn’t know the opponents’ cards. They won money at a rate that was about 100 times faster than a good player could reasonably expect to win.
…
I don’t know whether these cheating allegations are true, because all the information I am getting is third-hand. The poker players I’ve talked to all believe it to be true
While Levitt, the Alvin H. Baum Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, doesn’t add any new evidence to the debate, it’s certainly worth noting that the he seems to accept the allegations based on what’s he heard.
