A poker teaser inside a treasure hunt inside a maze inside the body of a dinosaur
I never thought the endgame would be a Tuesday night spent frantically completing captcha puzzles at 2am but there I was, absolutely sure of the North American Poker Tour (NAPT) Pass location with 7 out of 8 clues solved, myself and my old friend Blockey on a zoom call as we jointly, painstakingly, finger-blisteringly brute-forced the 8th.
There were 200 possibilities and I think we tried close to 150 of them before getting the good news. Then, ironically, I didn’t send the very necessary email right away, because I failed to read the fine print on the bottom of the congratulatory message. After a fortnight of reading and re-reading messages, pouring over their cryptic significance, it was like that part of my brain had shut down.
a riddler inside a comedian inside a genius inside a total b*stard
The man who designed this poker teaser inside a treasure hunt inside a maze inside the body of a dinosaur is a riddler inside a comedian inside a genius inside a total b*stard who I hope either gets a GPI Order of Merit award or locked up for what he put us all through.
Runner, runner
In late November 2022, PokerOrg launched ‘Runner, Runner,’ a unique promotion, part-scavenger hunt/part chase when they put a Pokerstars Platinum Pass into the hands of a poker player who, in order to keep it, had to traverse America without getting caught.
Moving from city to city, The Runner had to leave clues as to his whereabouts while also playing poker in a legal American poker room at a minimum of once every two days. If he got found, he had to surrender his $30,000 pass to the seeker and in the closing days, his identity was known by Ryan DePaulo and his small band of poker detectives.
Jonathan ‘Slow Poker’ Rand literally unmasked himself in the Wynn Poker Room
On December 16, the poker player and scandalously under-rated YouTuber Jonathan ‘Slow Poker’ Rand literally unmasked himself in the Wynn Poker Room. Almost three weeks of hiding had taken its toll on him physically and mentally but, a fugitive no longer, the relief was palpable as he knew that he was going to the Bahamas to play a $25,000 buy-in.
CodeOrg declared
On October 4, 2024, PokerOrg unveiled a brand new Runner Runner competition giveaway for a $10,000 Gold Pass to the NAPT Las Vegas Main Event. On October 6, the PokerOrg X account tweeted the following ominous message:
To the untrained eye, it seemed like something had gone wrong with the promotion, maybe a problem with Ts&Cs or a legal hiccup. However, to anyone familiar with the machinations of ‘Runner, Runner,’ this was a signal that the game was on, or perhaps had already been for some time.
On October 8, it was clear that this would be ‘Runner, Runner’ with a twist as PokerOrg declared a ‘CodeOrg.’ Apparently, a mysterious group had stolen the NAPT Pass, hacked into the PokerOrg site, infiltrated the X accounts of its staff. Would they leave clues as to their identity or whereabouts. We would have to wait and see.
Alternate reality game
What followed, nobody could have been prepared for as the masterminds of this Alternate Reality Game (ARG) did not make things easy. In fact, the BLOCKERS (as they became known) made it incredibly tough, all the while maintaining a fun and compelling narrative.
PokerOrg’s editor-in-chief Brad Willis has promised to publish a full post-mortem unveiling the answer to every clue that led to the ultimate recovery of the pass, so I won’t go into too much detail. What I will say though is their bag of tricks included cryptic clues, hidden messages, ciphers, coding conundrums, riddles, steganography, mazes pictograms, brain-teasers, crossword puzzles, and a lot of virtual scavenger-hunting.
I probably spent upward of 30 hours following the exquisitely laid out trail of breadcrumbs
I was gripped from the get-go but I assumed that the game would last a few days, maybe a week. As I gathered clues which led to other clues and other clues which led to numbers, it became apparent that this was not going to be a small commitment of my time. In fact, I probably spent upward of 30 hours following the exquisitely laid out trail of breadcrumbs, intrigued and often tortured by the complexity of the adventure.
One of the sickest aspects of Runner, Runner 2.0 was how, as it got harder and more time consuming, I realized that the field of possible victors was narrowing. As my equity in the competition went up, I became even more pot-committed. It became an obsession. The frustration that I felt as I poured over the elaborate and perplexing clues was matched only by the sense of satisfaction when I finally deciphered and disentangled the meaning of what was before me.
Wrong number
Last weekend, the game was entering its denouement. Players needed eight pieces of information, seven of which had been collected over the prior fortnight, one of which was outstanding. Easter eggs along the way suggested that the eight numbers would either form part of a GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) decryption code or the coordinates of a location so I was prepared on both fronts.
My friends Blockey and Adam (who helped me solve the python maze) and my girlfriend Saron (who helped me with the steganography and crossword) were all ready with GPG decryption tools while I was already narrowing the possibilities if the numbers were GPS co-ordinates. On the penultimate night, we discovered that it was the latter and the hunt was on. Unfortunately for us, one of my numbers was wrong.
I landed on book-code and called up my friend Barry Carter to grab his copy of ‘The Biggest Bluff’
Over one week prior, Maria Konnikova posted an enigmatic message to X. Speaking in Russian, she said “I have a book in my hands and my hands in a book 236 3 12, and it will be 60 then. What is 245 23 13?” Early on, I landed on book-code and called up my friend Barry Carter to grab his copy of ‘The Biggest Bluff’ off the shelf. Unfortunately, like me, he had read it on Kindle so there were no pages as such. I tried to look it up online and found that there were multiple paperback version lengths listed and mistakenly rejected the possibility that a clue could lead to potentially contradictory information.
So, armed with seven correct numbers and one incorrect one, I quickly narrowed my search to five towns in the contiguous USA:
• Price, Utah
• Livingstown, Montana
• Evanston, Wyoming
• Tucson, Arizona
• Winslow, Arizona
Cross references, rabbit-holes, and brute-force
I cross-referenced these towns with what I thought could be the dangling clues or hints that I had gathered. They were all potential red herrings or Macguffins and I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many rabbit-holes I fell down. Let’s just say I watched old episodes of The A-Team and Bonanza, know the location of every dinosaur exhibition in America, learned more about the acting career of Dan Blocker and the baseball stats of Bob Locker than I would wish, discovered the vital importance of three words (but which ones) and almost bought a children’s book called Stegosaurus Would Not Make A Good Pirate.
In the end, one of the hints matched with one of the many theories I had concocted and was in one of those towns. From there, let’s just say I was ‘taking it easy’ at the location but the problem with co-ordinates is they are very exact. My one wrong number was the fly in the ointment but the good news for me was I knew where six of the seven correct numbers were placed. That left 100 possibilities in two configurations and while there was a captcha failsafe to prevent the use of true computer brute force, myself and Blockey knew that we could manually enter 100 numbers each in about two hours.
my new puzzle is figuring out how to get a last-minute flight from Malta to Vegas without blowing all of the spending money
What we didn’t know was if anyone else had the same (or better) information that we did and if they could get to the answer faster. Fortunately, they didn’t and my new puzzle is figuring out how to get a last-minute flight from Malta to Vegas without blowing all of the spending money.
In conclusion, I want to thank Pokerstars and the PokerOrg ‘Runner, Runner’ team, specifically Brad Willis, Lee Jones and Jonathan Rand. I want to commiserate with my fellow chasers and apologize to anyone that I threw off the scent with my scurrilous endgame ‘Mr. Rabbit’ distractions. I would also like to thank all my friends whose heads I wrecked over the past fortnight, especially Saron, Blockey, Adam, William, and Jesse.