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Tracking Prevention

Sports Interaction does not support the use of tracking software (software used by players to track the play of others). We are proud to lead the way in preventing the effectiveness of software that unfairly gives players an advantage over others at the table.

In order to allow players to study their hands, Sports Interaction stores a Hand History text file for every player that can be reviewed later. Tools have emerged over the years to allow players to better understand their own play by loading these text files for analysis. For some players, these tools are useful to try and learn how to better their play. Sports Interaction welcomes players to study their own hand histories to better their own play, so long as they do not use tools during game play.

Recently, some tools have been created that can also be used to track and store the long term play of other players at the table. Not stopping there, some tools are actually sharing their tracked data with other tool users. This allows the good possibility that players who are unfairly using these tools will have statistics on players they’ve never played against before. These tools currently rely on a common factor: that poker sites will rarely allow players to change their nicknames, if at all.

Sports Interaction players will be granted the option of changing their Poker Nickname every 7 Days.

By allowing players to change their Poker Nickname often, Sports Interaction thus negates the effectiveness of shared or prolonged poker data tracking.

It is important to point out that any Notes made on a player in the game will always remain linked to that player in Sports Interaction’s Note system. While we strive to make our poker game fair, we realize that players want to remind themselves about the habits or behaviors of other players. Much like playing in a casino and moving to a table to play against someone you met the previous day, Notes are there to remind you personally about the people you run across, even though their Poker Nickname may change.

Random Number Generator (RNG) and Shuffling

Creating a fair and quality gaming experience for our players is our highest priority at Sports Interaction. The solution chosen for RNG/Shuffling is critical to ensuring a fair game for all players. Consequently, Sports Interaction investigated many systems and algorithms before deciding on implementation of what we believe is a superior solution.

Sports Interaction's RNG solution ensures the even distribution of cards whereby no sequence or relationship can be discovered in any way. The RNG solution is unaware of what’s going on in the game itself, so when the game requests a random card, the RNG has no idea of whose turn it is nor how the game is being played. We believe this is the ultimate impartial tool, better than the physical shuffling of cards.

Sports Interaction uses the cryptographically-secure RNG system found in Microsoft’s CryptoAPI. "Cryptographically secure" means that the RNG is so completely random that even a large amount of computer analysis cannot predict or detect patterns in the output, a fact that has been validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Microsoft CryptoAPI RNG

Microsoft’s CryptoAPI RNG complies with Federal Information Processing Standard 186-2 appendix 3.1, using SHA-1 as the G function. It has been validated by the NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program. Details on this may be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/security/topics/issues/fipseval.mspx.

It is important to note that computers are deterministic machines, and as such, they cannot produce truly random numbers. For this reason one often refers to Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG). Pseudo implies that a PRNG does not produce truly random numbers, but numbers that are random enough for a specific practical use.

The validation of Microsoft’s CryptoAPI by the National Institute of Standards and Technology proves the PRNG system used is highly random and highly secure as it is a critical building block for the CryptoAPI. For more information on NIST processing standards and security validation, please visit:

• Federal Information Processing Standards 140-1 and 140-2: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/index.html
• Cryptographic Standards Validation Program at NIST: http://csrc.nist.gov/cryptval/
• Computer Security Resource Clearinghouse: http://csrc.nist.gov/index.html

If you require any further information about the fairness of our games or Sports Interaction’s RNG/Shuffling implementation, please contact us at poker@sportsinteraction.com.