Important info for iPoker players

Its not unusual for a deep and meaningful post for a 1000th post , this is a few late , but hopefully it will be highly enlightening for iPoker players.

The information came to light as I was unlikely to get much playing time over the summer and decided to try and grow a minute residual bankroll at VCpoker in the time i did have available just for fun and in a way to force some discipline into my play. Having played a fair few hands , I noticed there was a big difference between my actual bankroll , and my winnings reported by Holdem manager which were also similar for my pokertableratings graph.

The whole story is documented at http://www.crushonlineholdem.com/keith showing the evidence of what I discovered, but it boils down to the fact that if you have an account with an Ipoker room, every time that you play a table in a different currency to your account currency,every single transaction will involve currency charges with rounding taking a small slice of your bankroll each time.This is not only when buying in to a table and leaving a table which has a minor effect, the major effect occurs at the micro tables when auto top up replaces blinds and topping up small amounts. Here the effects of rounding can have a massive effect on a players bankroll and was responsible for all my missing winnings.For me , it halved my win rate, for a breakeven or losing micro player the effects will be even larger as they will be topping up more often and therefore paying these rounding chargess more often.

If you play at iPoker's $ tables , do your bankroll a favour and play at a site that offers $ accounts . Then the only currency charge you will pay is when you deposit to the site and withdraw from it.If you are at a site which has £ as its currency you can minimize the effects of this rounding by buying in for the maximum and not using the auto top up and manually reloading when you deem it will have the least effect.

interesting. that's a pretty big dent out of a starting bankroll.

but wow yo that site you linked to is ugly.

I call bullshit. I've played on ipoker and other sites in different currencies, they all use the same exchange rate for cashing in chips off the table that you initially got when putting the chips on the table. There may be exchange rate differences between different tables and days though.

Basically, if your account is in USD and you buy into a 1/2 Euro table for 200euro for $250USD (1.25 exchange rate), when you cash out 300 euros, they will give you $375 US (same 1.25 exchange rate). The next day if the exchange rate is now 1.26, that 200 euro buyin will cost you $252US, but you'll also cash them off the table at 1.26. You haven't lost any money due to rounding or a different rate.

I am borderline anal about my record keeping and I've never seen them stealing my pennies.

read Ipoker's definitive words before you disagree

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/2264/vcchatsun1.jpg

Okay, it looks like they round off/down to prevent rounding from giving the player more than they should get. It would be silly of them to give me 0.01GBP for $0.01.

The effect is negligible if you are buying more than pennies at a time. I suggest not buying chips 1c at a time, buy in for the full amount when sitting at the table initially.

ok ...now you accept that the rounding is occuring , now multiply that up to allow for every single transaction that this occurs on. Most Regs will have auto top up set by default. This rounding means that every single auto top up is getting this rounding effect happening.with a small piece of there bankroll disappearing each time that currency is transferred.

This isn't some random accusation saying poker is rigged. I've researched it , found out the facts , documented the proof and am putting out there for other peoples benefit.

It doesn't matter what stakes you are playing at you will still get taken for a penny each time . Obviously at higher stakes this is proportionately smaller as a percentage, but it's stilll money disappearing from your account that you are unaware of.

Can you figure out maybe an estimate of how much we are looking at here by any type of guess. Say $100NL over 1K hands of BE poker, probably re buying every orbit on at least one table

Well, assuming the rounding down to the penny happens every time, on average we'd be "losing" 0.5 cents per chip purchase. 1k hands on a 10 player table = 100 orbits = 100 "rebuys" = 50 cents. One rebuy per orbit also seems rather high, even with auto top up on. Even for a BE player, a lot of the time they will be above the max buyin.

I don't have any numbers to compare that to the actual rake taken in those 1k hands, but I'm sure 50 cents isn't more than a sliver of that pie.

Rake that is calculated down to the penny (5% total, eg 37 cents on a $7.40 pot) rather than at levels (eg, 25c at pots $5-9.99, 50c at $10) takes way way more money off the table than than this rounding does. It's been a long time since I've played NL ring, but in LHE ring there are sites that still take rake based on levels, not 5% of the total.

the effect per player per table will be pretty similar above the micro tables(for a similar playing style). Its important to stress though that this is only on tables where a currency conversion takes place.

It also depends if you are a winning player or a losing player. losing players with auto topup will be making more auto topups and therefore having more pennies go missing in the process.

Originally i took iPoker at its word that the currency is converted at the same rate each way. It was only the fact that i was playing these 2nl tables , where the effect is magnified , as a challenge that i noticed the results I had in $ were differing from my actuall £ bankroll .

jyms , without prying to much, do you get these currency conversion issues and if so , is there any discrepancy between your $ results reported by HEM/pt3 poker, table ratings results and bankroll after currency conversion.

I don't think that scandal or scam are too strong words for giving 1c for 1p. If they were giving 1$ for £1, no-one would go near their currency exchanges. When its small sums people don't notice, but it can clearly add up to significant sums that ipoker's customers are losing. Excellent post. Ipoker players should definitely be aware of this.

I have no way of noticing a difference, half the time I never update the currency rates in HM so it's always off a by a couple bucks.

easy way to tell how much this is costing you is o note your account balance at the start of the day , how much it drops when you buyin to your first table so you can get a rough idea of the exchange rate, then at the end of your session in the ipoker software click on the my account option and then go through the cash table history and add up all your buyins ,all your cashouts and find the difference. convert that at the exchange rate from the first buyin,add to your starting balance and compare with the actual balance at the end of your session. The diference will be how much this currency rounding has cost you in that session , and should be relatively easy to then multiply up to give you monthly and annual costs.

sample size will obviously apply so the more days you do this over the more accurate the answer will be.

post from cuqaa in the 2+2 thread

Quote:

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to look up the approximate amount iPoker got from you by using this rounding thing you can create a customstats.txt file in your HEM/reports directory and insert these stats.
I calculated with 0.005 EUR/USD/GBP loss per topup. I guess this should be the ratio.

- these stats are for 100BB buyins only. If you play with less or more BB yo have to replace the 100 in the stats.
- also these stats only represent the amount of hands in total. the stats do not notice if you play on eur/usd/gbp table. You have to make an assumption then how many hands you played at other currencies.


<Stat GroupName="iPokerTopUpHands" ColumnName="iPokerTopUpHands" ValueExpressions="sum(case when phmisc.StackSize/GT.BigBlind+ph.netamountwon/GT.BigBlind < 100 then 1 else 0 end) as iPokerCharge01;" Evaluate="iPokerCharge01" ColumnHeader="iPokerTopUp" ColumnFormat="0" ColumnWidth="61" Tooltip="Times iPoker kept up to 1c" />
<Stat GroupName="iPokerTopUp%" ColumnName="iPokerTopUp%" ValueExpressions="sum(case when phmisc.StackSize/GT.BigBlind+ph.netamountwon/GT.BigBlind < 100 then 1 else 0 end) as iPokerCharge01;" Evaluate="iPokerCharge01/TotalHands*100" ColumnHeader="iPokerTopUp%" ColumnFormat="0.00" ColumnWidth="61" Tooltip="Percentage iPoker kept up to 1c of Total Hands during rebuy process" />
<Stat GroupName="iPokerTopUpTotal" ColumnName="iPokerTopUpTotal" ValueExpressions="sum(case when phmisc.StackSize/GT.BigBlind+ph.netamountwon/GT.BigBlind < 100 then 1 else 0 end) as iPokerCharge01;" Evaluate="iPokerCharge01*0.005" ColumnHeader="iPokerTopUpTotal" ColumnFormat="0.00" ColumnWidth="61" Tooltip="Amount iPoker kept from you in your base currency." />

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Keith_MM

easy way to tell how much this is costing you is o note your account balance at the start of the day , how much it drops when you buyin to your first table so you can get a rough idea of the exchange rate, then at the end of your session in the ipoker software click on the my account option and then go through the cash table history and add up all your buyins ,all your cashouts and find the difference. convert that at the exchange rate from the first buyin,add to your starting balance and compare with the actual balance at the end of your session. The diference will be how much this currency rounding has cost you in that session , and should be relatively easy to then multiply up to give you monthly and annual costs.

sample size will obviously apply so the more days you do this over the more accurate the answer will be.

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I tried this out last night and came up with the following results:

I always buy in for the maximum and have my Auto Top-up Preferences set to auto-buy when my chips drop to less than 90% of my initial buy-in.

I noted down my balance, and the exchange rate at buy-in (£6.32 of my account balance for each $10 table).

I played 4 tables of $10NL until I'd played a total of 1000 hands. At the end of the session, I had made a profit of around $5.

The discrepancy when converting back was 14p, or around 22c, which may not seem much, but it's over 2bb/1000 hands, or 0.22bb/100. Obviously, this amount will differ depending on how many times your stack drops below the limit set by your Auto Top-up Preferences, but I would suggest people who have their Top-up Preferences set to auto-buy when their chips fall below the initial buy-in amount, change the setting.

Thanks for this post Keith, very interesting!

Wow, thanks for posting Keith. I just signed up on Titan, and had no idea. I also play the micros and had my auto-top up set to <100% inital buy-in. I'll change that and avoid tables in other currencies from now on.

Shame though, I am on my way to complain to Titan support right now, and I suggest that all iPoker players do the same. Raking, OK. Stealing, not at all.

VC poker announced today they are moving from ipoker to entraction.

That's the second huge site that has a ton of players signed to big RB deals leaving for Entraction. NoIQ left a while ago and now VC. With the way iPoker is going, I see them falling by the wayside soon enough. The Ongame/party merger will be strong if they can at least lose the Ongame software and Entraction is throwing money at people, if they get traffic look out.

I can see a lot of the big UK bookies like betfred, paddypower,william hill bet 365 ,bluesq,boyle and their white label skins etc all jumping ship. What Ipoker are doing with the currency skimming is tantamount to fraud and they are doing nothing about it. The uk bookies can't afford to have their gaming and book making licences put at risk because of some shady practices by ipoker that effectively have them as accomplices.

It's even worse for the bookies because they get no benefit from the skimmed money, it doesn't count as rake for them to get a cut , and its being removed from the poker pool so won't be wagered so that they can get a share of the rake that would have been generated.

It's not really currency skimming. It's an effect of rounding. On average you're losing half a cent/pence each time you buy chips. If they simply rounded off/down, it would open the door for abuse since players might have a way to buyin/cashout over and over, gaining a cent at a time.

If you guys are that concerned about it, turn off auto top up or set it to a lower amount.

The point is though that they are abusing the players by making them repeatedly do the currency transaction and thereby enforcing the rounding that makes this add up to a fraud.

Ipoker could calculate the account balances to 2 decmal places more than the conversion rate they use and there would be no problem . Noone worries about losing the extra fractions if they close theiir account.
They could make it so that you have your balance in multiple currencies and transfer between each account when you want to at that days rate.

They have no incentive though because they make a little bit of money on millions of cross currency transactions each day which all adds up.Ipoker aren't alone in doing this either . Stars does exactly the same thing if players use the seamless conversion option for playing on different currency tables although they do have the option to have multiple currencies in your account

No different than Paypal giving 2.8% off the wholesale currency exchange rate when I pay for something that's billed in US $ (I'm in Canada with a credit card billed in CDN$).

FYI it doesn't matter how many decimal places they use for the currency conversion. There still needs to be rounding to the nearest cent, and they are never going to round in the player's favor. Say I have a US$ ipoker account and am playing the Euro tables. They'd be daft to let me buyin 1 euro cent for 1 US cent.

It would make sense to either get your account in the currency you'll be playing most often and/or don't auto top up every time you drop a few cents below the max.

As a result of the "hello from Titan poker " thread its been brought to my attention that the evidence link in the first post of this thread is now broken. I've reposted the evidence at
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