Pitbull Poker Security Issues: Update
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The story surrounding alleged security holes at online poker room Pitbull Poker continues to develop this week. Pitbull, an independent room with a few dozen players online at any given time, came under fire during the last month or so as allegations of superusers and various security leaks were posted on popular poker forums.
The primary force driving the accusations: Chesterboy, a posted on 2+2. Chesterboy was a prop at Pitbull Poker and started noticing very suspicious patterns of play in the 2/5 NL game at Pitbull. As he told PokerNewsDaily in a recent interview: “I have faced numerous opponents that all play the same style, which involves donk betting at an abnormally high frequency, typically 2 big blinds, no matter what the size of the pot. I noticed this before I sat in the games, and these players are the reason I decided to sit. I normally don’t play higher than $1/$2 but these guys looked like free money so I joined the games. However I quickly noticed they would only donk bet when I missed the flop or had a draw. If I tried to raise the donk bet, they would call, and make another 2bb donk bet on the turn. If I had a draw and hit, they would check fold every time. I basically was never able to get any action when I had them beat, and they consistently made small bets at me when I had air. The accuracy was way too high to be possible without seeing my cards. I have never faced so many players that play this style on any other site. Anywhere else you play, if someone donk bets that much it is great because you get all their money eventually, but on Pitbull Poker they are never wrong.”
Chesterboy has been engaged in a fairly public back-and-forth with a Pitbull representative on the 2+2 forums. He’s requested a number of hand histories covering the disputed play, and Pitbull has apparently yet to deliver those HHs. The Pitbull rep on 2+2, posting under the name pbdave, has denied all accusations against the room. In a somewhat bizarre turn, pbdave announced to the forums that he wouldn’t be posting there anymore late last week, only to reverse course a bit later and return to posting.
In addition to the security issues, new concerns have been raised regarding the validity of Pitbull’s gaming license. Pitbull representatives have yet to respond to these concerns.
Pitbull refused attempts for interviews and issued the following statement to PokerNewsDaily:
We were accused by 1 player with the screen name FluffyChester on the 2+2 forums that he suspected we had a super user account, even though FluffyChester never disputed 1 hand he felt cheated on.
He requested a downloadable format of his hand history, although he could view his previous hand histories by hand number or date range through the website. Our poker system was developed in flash and we did not have a download feature for hand histories.
On Monday August 3rd, 2009, we provided FluffyChester with the last 1,000 hands that he played on Pitbull Poker in text format and are awaiting his analysis.
We have since developed a feature that will allow for hand histories to be downloaded in text format and it will be available next week to every player.
Superuser Accounts have never existed and we are awaiting FluffyChesters’ analysis to clear the rumors.
Updates as events warrant.
Chesterboy interview with PokerNewsDaily here.
