It seems like I see a thread every day asking if this is real, and how it works. The answers...

It's sort of real... I mean it's a real scam... Which kind of makes it real.

It works... It works by getting people to give you money for a product that is worthless, and then taking the money and spending it. If that is the goal, then it works really well, at least for the guy who wrote it. <READMORE>

Here's the lowdown on "card scanning".

Your hole cards are never sent to your opponents computer unless you have called bets all the way to the river. Once you have called all the bets and it's time for a showdown then your hand is sent to your opponents computer. Until then your hand is only sent to you.

For these programs to work (other than working you over for your hard earned cash) they would need to do three things for each opponent every hand.

1. Hack into the computers at the web site where you are playing, and they would need to do it thousands of times per second even with just a few users. This is not happening, couldn't happen, and definitely wouldn't be for sale for $39.95 if it was.

2. Know where your opponents cards were stored in the database on the poker site. This would require finding your opponents password and log in name as well as hacking the database. this also could not happen, and if someone could do this they would simply hack the biggest banks in the world and steal all of everyone's money. That's right, they could easily have all of the electronically stored money in the world if they could break the encryption that easily and hack that fast with a crappy little downloadable program.

3. Avoid being "dealt with" by the poker sites themselves. Do you really think a company based in Costa Rica that makes a million dollars a day would have a problem "taking care of" someone who destroyed their entire system? Here's a good bet for ya. I bet the first guy who actually hacks Party Poker's servers, and distribute the information on how to do it for $39.95, disappears shortly afterword and they find the body in Venezuala 40 years from now.

These people would not set up a crappy one-page web site to sell a product worth millions of dollars for $39.95, and if you think they would maybe you deserve to lose $40 to learn a valueable lesson about being gullable.

Don't waste time worrying about whether it's real. It's not real. You know it, and I know it, and everyone but a few morons who are $40 lighter than they were before, has known it all along.

My world has been good this week. Bankroll was getting thin from doing so much writing and so little playing, but I've been hitting the tables hard the last week or so and it has helped things quite a bit. I've been playing a lot of limit Omaha8 lately, and the money has been good. It's nice to be at a table full of suckers again after playing limit hold em for a few months. The limit hold em tables on the Party network are filled with rocks and it was getting annoying.

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