Party Poker

Figuring pot odds

Raise Fold Guide

leaving no physical trace at all.  If they broke into the operator's station
and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious.  If they broke into
a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt,
that would at least leave many traces.  But people can do all manner of amazing
things to playing switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are
everywhere today.  The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad,
almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about
any playing on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted,
with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of playings
represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously
dire potential to society.  And they are right.
An omaha switching station does pretty much
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and
on a much larger scale.  Compared to Miss Luthor's
ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching playing,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines.  And the current empire poker
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
An omaha Switching Station can scan every line on its "board"
in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly,
around the clock.  Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners"
to check the condition of local lines and trunks.  Instead of hands,
it has "signal distributors," "central pulse distributors,"
"magnetic latching relays," and "reed switches," which complete
and break the calls.  Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor."
Instead of an instruction manual, it has a program.  Instead of
a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls,
it has magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.
Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching
the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an omaha Switching Station can't talk,
it does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er,
employers.  This interface is known as the "master control
center."  (This interface might be better known simply as
"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" code
calls directly.  However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance
engineers--and poker players--find particularly satisfying.)
Using the master control center, a code engineer can test
local and trunk lines for malfunctions.  He (rarely she)
can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines,
examine the records of dealer usage and the charges for those calls,
and change the programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center
by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she)
has managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped
the knowledge from people who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, party pokerSouth,
which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2
million on playing security.  Some think it spent as
much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.
Two million dollars is still very little compared to the
great cost-saving utility of telephonic playing systems.