Seeing this post on Hacker News reminded me of a great story I should have blogged here long ago. The post is in reference to a question on Y Combinator’s latest application form, which is
“Please tell us about the time you (…) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage”
Wow, I could write a book on these, as that’s pretty much my one true passion in life, but I’ll give you my favorite. Once upon a time, back when I was a regular player on PartyPoker, they rolled out a new promotion called PartyPoints. The deal was that you got frequent player points (FPP) for certain stuff and could use those to buy things from the FPP store.
Their FPP program was a blatant rip off of PokerStars, who had implemented their own VIP program maybe a year or so earlier. Both gave you points for hands played, tournament buy-ins, etc., but with one major difference. PartyPoker also gave you points whenever you deposited money into your account. The best point to dollar deposited ratio was achieved by depositing $500. You had to deposit the money, wait a week, and then the FPPs were credited.
Their cashier system was web-based and poorly designed, so I noticed right away that you could make one deposit and then just keep hitting refresh to deposit again and again. I made a simple AutoHotKey script to refresh the page over and over at a 30 second interval for a preset number of times depending on how many dollars were in my Neteller account. At one point the number of refreshes was over 100, and they all worked. I’d just start the script and go to dinner or shopping or whatever, and when I got back it would be done. I’d then go about my normal playing for a week, cash it all out as soon as my FPP balance spiked, and repeat.
For a long time their store had nothing but t-shirts and other such junk, so I just held on to the points, assuming that one day they’d mimic PokerStars again and add something worthwhile to the store. Sure enough, they eventually added all sorts of electronics and other assorted goods. I did a quick check on eBay to see which of the items had the highest resale value per FPP and discovered that it was the video games, which was extraordinarily fortunate because eBay has an awesome listing system for them, in which you simply input the ISBN number and it fills out the whole page for you. And they’re the easiest thing imaginable to ship, you just slap them in a bubble mailer and print out a media mail postage label.
I made about 100% ROI in 6 months on a pretty good sum, and got a nice eBay rating in the process. And the best part of the whole story is that Neteller, the service I deposited through, charges large poker sites something like 10% of the transaction as their fee, meaning PartyPoker was eating thousands in cashier fees every week and giving me massive FPPs while getting no extra profit out of me whatsoever. Actually it was probably less, as I couldn’t play while doing the refreshes or waiting for cash-outs to hit my Neteller account.
I don’t know if anyone else ever figured that one out. I never blogged about it or posted it in any forum for fear someone at Party would catch on, and if any other players did spot that particular hack, they were smart enough not to mention it publicly too. Eventually Party removed the deposit bonus and changed the program around a bit. I’m still not sure if it was just a general tightening of the purse strings or if someone had caught on. But it was awesome while it lasted. I still have a PSP (that I’ve only used maybe twice) with a ton of games, an iPod Nano, a poker table, a ton of shirts, some poker books, an entire wardrobe emblazoned with the PartyPoker logo, a kick ass cigar cutter, lighter and travel humidor, business card holder, flask, bar tool set, year’s subscription to 10 different magazines, and I can’t even remember what else to show for it.
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