button in SafariAre You as Fast as a Superuser?
Table Of Contents
Superuser is a term that gets thrown around the online poker world a lot more often than one would hope, with a recent superuser scandal grabbing headlines, as it refers to a player who can see your hole cards. They find folds when you have it, calls when you're bluffing, and bluffs when they see that you're weak. To top it all off, they find their "soul reads" in a fraction of a second.
Now, you have the chance to see if you could keep up with one, with just one caveat: you can't cheat.
The four hands that you're about to play come from a real case. AceGuardian, who not long ago rolled out their superuser detection software, is QuintAce's anti-cheat team, and they went through 757 hands played by "Player A". Using nothing but the hand histories, its model flagged 72 of them.
In the scenario, you play as "Player A", but you can only see your own cards. You can take as long as necessary to follow the action early streets, but when the river hits you will have just two seconds to come to a decision, which is the same amount of time that "Player A" took. Let's see if you can match both their speed and their accuracy.
Acting Fast is Suspicious. Always Being Right is Proof.
If you struggled to decide, or acted incorrectly, that's as expected: these are not easy spots! Folding pocket aces or two pair to a single bet usually involves going deep into the tank, and that's if you find the fold at all.
Incredibly, "Player A" managed to fold all four hands in just two seconds, and was right every time. Who'd have thought it? When you can see the other player's cards, it's pretty easy to play poker.
That being said, fast doesn't always mean guilty. Plenty of players do act quickly, and even a player who can't see their own hole cards could get one or two hands right. That being said, always being fast, and always being right is an extremely suspicious combo.
AceGuardian sorts flagged hands like these into three groups, and the four in the minigame above cover all three:
What Helped Give "Player A" Away?
In the moment, at the table, it's incredibly hard to tell that you're up against a player who can do no wrong. If you fold, or they do, you never get to see their cards, and it's very easy to feel that someone is just getting lucky time after time after time.
Fortunately, however, the poker site gets to see everything. It knows every player's cards, even in hands that never reach a showdown. Once a hand is over, every decision can be checked against the tendencies, speed and frequencies of the normal poker population. When Player A's decisions were checked, there were key three things that stood out.
Over a small sample size, a single one of these factors could well be due to luck. However, all three of them over 757 hands, almost all of which came against the same opponent, is extremely hard to explain. Unless, of course, "Player A" could see the other player's cards.
That's why catching a superuser is the site's job. None of this needs access to anyone's computer. It's all in the hand histories the site already keeps. John Andress, who leads our anti-cheat team, explains the full method in his write-up on superuser detection.
What to Do if You Sense a Superuser
There are three key steps to counter superusers in the online streets:
- Save your hand histories: they're your best evidence against your opponent.
- Rather than calling it out at the table, report it to the site's security team. They can see what you can't.
- Only install poker software from official sources. Fake or tampered poker tools have been used to let cheaters watch players' screens.
Think you'd have folded those aces in two seconds? Send this to the friend who swears they would. For the other kinds of cheating you might run into, read Four Cheater Archetypes Every Online Poker Player Should Know.
Write-up by Harold Knight, supported by AceGuardian.
