Re: Does anyone have any answers?

Northern Storm wrote:

How can the flow be only one way? When a player acts on his hand that
info goes from client to server. Players hands, board cards etc flow
from server to client.

I didn't mean to suggest that the flow of information is always one-way (that was poorly phrased, sorry). The point is, private information never needs to be sent to clients that don't need to know it, so those clients never have access to it, even if they are completely compromised with an exploit.

In a game of Hold'em that we're both playing, for instance, the server obviously tells me my hole cards, tells you your hole cards, and tells us both the community cards. But there are never any circumstances under which the server would tell me your hole cards, or you mine (while the hand is in progress anyway). That is, there's no possible way I could ever know your hole cards while a hand is in progress, even if I managed to completely compromise my client.

That's in stark contrast to other Internet games like first person shooters or some roleplaying games, where the clients _do_ have that private information and have to decide what to do with it (whether to show it to the player or not). That's why exploits for those types of games exist and can be useful, such as wallhacks (which allow you to see through walls) or aimbots (which allow you to automatically aim exactly on an enemy) -- and which is also why combating cheating exploits is such a high priority for those types of games.

That isn't the case with online poker games, where the primary "cheating" concerns is not software exploits but collusion and other human factors.

--
Erik Max Francis && max@xxxxxxxxxxx && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
  My life was better before I knew you.
  -- Edith Wharton (to Morton Fullerton)
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