In a previous thread I demonstrated that the DealGuardian software was flawed in it's implementation. So, knowing this allows a form of "advantage play" if I were to be playing on an online card room that uses the DealGuardian server to deal cards to players.
My first thought was that if the one insider at Ultimate Bet was able to swindle people for $22 million by playing rigged poker, maybe I could hook up with Nick for Secure Card Dealer and offer to split it with him - $11 million each – if we worked together on this. But then I remembered that Nick said he wasn't going to look at any of the hidden cards, so that's that.
My second thought was that I could ask my buddy Josh, who practically runs the pizza place (next door to Secure Card Dealer) for $8/hour, if I could place a server there and do network monitoring of Nick's DealGuardian servers. But then I thought that his 56 million virtual hands may be over 3,000 years of one person playing poker, it is only about two weeks at a major poker room (if you don't include play chips and micro limit games). To cover this much traffic, and six poker tables per DealGuardian server, there would have to be hundreds of DealGuardian servers. On second thought, I don't think Nick can fit that many blade servers in his 5" x 8" mailbox at the UPS store. He will probably run them all off his DSL line at home, so Josh the pizza man is no help to me.
So that led me to the idea of pure "advantage play" which as a by product is totally legal, as opposed to my first two ideas. :)
When you shuffle an electronic poker deck, there are 52! (read fifty two factorial) shuffled decks you can produce. 52! = 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 … = 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,404,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or about 2^225.
Of course, the DealGuardian shuffle is flawed. It is flawed because it it doesn't return an even distribution of decks. That is, some shuffles are more likely to be produced than others are. This uneven distribution can be leveraged into an advantage if a tipped-off player is willing to sit at the table long enough. So how can we use this aspect of DealGuardian to cheat at poker?
The unequal distribution of decks skews the probabilities of certain hands and changes the betting odds. Experienced poker players (who play the odds as a normal course of business) can take advantage of the skewed probabilities that DealGuardian provides. But wait, it gets better.
The most common implementation of a Random Number Generator (RNG) produces numbers from the range of zero to about 4 billion, or 2^32, which is of course a huge number to you and I. Put another way, using this implementation of a RNG the largest "seed" that will fit into the RNG is 4 billion.
As it turns out, 4 billion is far, far less than the possible 2^225 possible decks. The bit length of the seed for the RNG helps generate the deal bias of the DealGuardian server by simply not ever, even in three millenia of dealing cards, using all possible deck shuffles. In fact, most of the deck shuffles are thrown out and never used.
Computerized RNGs are totally deterministic. For any given "seed" number you supply to the RNG, it will always produce the same string of random numbers. In other words, the same seed always gives you the same shuffled deck. The most common implementation of a seed for a RNG is to use the system clock, which provides the time in milliseconds since midnight.
There are a mere 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day. Now we are only at a fraction of the 4 billion decks we thought we had. The could really cut down on the possible shuffled decks that are used in a DealGuadian server. But wait, if we are going to cheat, it gets better!
We can synchronize our computer's system clock with the DealGuardian server's system clock. Now we only have about 200,000 possible decks. Searching through that amount of shuffles (decks) is trivial and can be done on a PC in real time.
I'll skip the math here, but by knowing only five cards in the deck, we can determine which of the couple of hundred thousand shuffled decks we are using. For the five cards, let's use our two hole cards and the three flop cards in Texas Hold'em. Once we know these cards we know which shuffled deck was used by Deal Guardian. Knowing this we now know the the turn and the river and we have never even looked at the DealGuardian server. Of course at this point we also know everyone's hole cards because we know the the shuffled deck and in what order all the cards are.
Please let me know what poker room is implementing your DealGuardian. Please.