Posts Tagged ‘cheating’

I was telling my girlfriend about the latest online poker gossip/scandal involving an alleged chatlog in which Thorladen and Imperium discuss multi-accounting with the help of services like GoToMyPC that allow you to access other computers remotely from a different computer anywhere in the world. The basic idea, and something that has surely happened dozens of times whether these two actually did it or not, is for a very good tournament player to stake several decent but less-good tournament players in super-profitable online events like the WCOOP or the FTOPS. Should one of the horses start to get deep in the tournament, the better player can take over for the decisions that will have the biggest impact on the team’s EV.

“They’re like poker fluffers,” she quipped without missing a beat. “They get it started, and then the pro comes in to finish it off. You’d have to be a pretty big tool to agree to something like that, not just ethically but like… as a matter of personal respect.”

I agree, though I’m sure plenty of people care a lot more about getting backed for these tournaments by any means necessary, not to mention getting to take credit for the win on sites like Pocket 5′s, than they do about stuff like ethics and personal respect. Anyway, I think “Poker Fluffers” is a brilliant names for these clowns, and I encourage you all to do your part to make it stick!

Part Time Poker just published a short interview with yours truly. I’ve generally shied away from doing a lot of self-promotion, but this was a fun and original set of questions. They also persuaded me with liberal doses of flattery:

When you talk about approaches to poker, there are two extremes. At one end you’ll find players who are guided almost entirely by instinct and don’t spend a lot of time articulating their processes. At the other end you’ll find players like Andrew ‘Foucault’ Brokos, who spend so much time articulating their process that one wonders – when do they actually find time to play? All kidding aside, Brokos is an excellent player with a focus on mid stakes no limit cash and some interesting insights into what it takes to make both a good poker player and industry alike.

The cheating scandal at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker made national news yesterday with an article in the Washington Post and a segment on CBS’ 60 Minutes. There was a lot of doom and gloom predictions about what this coverage would look like, but in the end I thought both pieces were reasonably fair and comprehensive, though not without their flaws.

Needless to say, the Post story was better than the 60 Minutes segment. Authored by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Ira Rosen, it explored the cheating and the means by which it was discovered in considerable detail. Best of all, it kept the focus on UB and AP rather than painting all internet poker sites with the same broad brush. The overall theme of the story was that cheating occurred and that, although the perpetrators were not substantially punished, the players were able to uncover it and force restitution to be paid.

The 60 Minutes story was a bit more sensational, with references to the Wild West and cards “tumbling out of the computer”. It was also a bit more entertaining. After he declined to return their phone calls, they took several pretty funny shots UB cheater and former WSOP world champion Russ Hamilton, who won his “considerable weight in silver” along with the 1994 title.  Read the complete post...

Not that it’s really any of my business, but I knew Eric a bit a few years ago and was very surprised/worried, in light of the recent cheating at Ultimate Bet, when I heard that he was joining up with them. So it was with considerable relief that I read on his blog that

After a lot of reflection and thought, I have decided to separate myself from the Ultimate Bet brand. I hope that everyone will respect my privacy, as I wish to not go into the decision in any great detail at this time. At this point in time I just believe that the things I’m trying to accomplish in my career are not in sync with the Ultimate Bet brand.

Mike and Adam managed to get a 35-minute interview with Chief Operating Officer of the heretofore tight-lipped Tokwiro Enterprises, Paul Leggett, on this week’s 2+2 Pokercast. The subject, of course, was the recent cheating scandal at Ultimate Bet. I imagine these kinds of interviews, where the interviewer needs to press the subject hard for information without alienating him, can be tricky, but I thought the 2+2 hosts did a great job. In fact this was probably the most interesting of their shows I’ve heard. Here are a few things in particular I found interesting:

1. Cheating at Ultimate Bet- Ultimate Bet’s press release carefully avoided the word “cheating”, instead using the phrase “unfair play”. Mike and Adam resolved to press Leggett to use the word cheating, but surprisingly he employed it readily and without prompting.

2. Refunds- Leggett also referred many times to “refunding” money that was stolen from players. I’m really surprised by this choice of words, because it seems to imply that Tokwiro is returning money they have rather than compensating affected players out of their own pockets, which is what they claim is happening. I find it very strange that they don’t make a bigger deal out of the fact that they are doing this. I mean, if they were actually taking millions of dollars from their own coffers to replace money that they didn’t steal, you’d think they’d jump up and down about what an amazing thing it is they are doing for their players. But Leggett constantly refers to it as a “refund” and could not sound more dispassionate when he insists, “We’re very upset that someone was able to do this on our site, to our players.”  Read the complete post...

The Ultimate Bet cheating scandal made the front page of Canada’s National Press today. Citing the investigative work of 2+2′ers such as Cornell Fiji (Steven Ware), the article does a very nice job of explaining simply and concisely what happened and how without blowing the issue out of proportion or making unwarranted claims about online poker in general. Specifically, the article expresses concern for the credibility of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission:

Bobby Mamudi, an industry analyst and managing editor of the London-based Gaming Intelligence Group, said the new cheating incident is another blow to the reputation of Kahnawake’s gambling industry. “They definitely do seem to be losing credibility and not doing too much about it,” he said.

The article also includes more empty promises from the KGC:

Murray Marshall, legal counsel to the gaming commission, said that Kahnawake’s regulation is among “the tightest in the world” and said similar frauds have occurred in casino gambling and banking. “We would obviously prefer to prevent all possibilities of this kind of thing happening, but no system is infallible,” he said.

Tightest in the world? What does that even mean? How did the same shit get past them twice? Not only did they fail to identify cheating that amateur internet sleuths could and did identify, but to my knowledge there are no documented incidents of the KGC actually doing anything except for fining Absolute Poker after the fact. Their tight regulation hasn’t managed to catch or prevent any malfeasance.  Read the complete post...

Ultimate Bet released a press release today admitting that employees of “the previous ownership of UltimateBet” were responsible for cheating high limit players out of an unspecified amount of money, largely believed to run into the millions, thanks to “unauthorized software code that allowed the perpetrators to obtain hole card information during live play”. In other words, UB employees could see players’ hole cards and exploited this to steal quite a lot of money from high stakes players over the course of about two years.

The theft was uncovered through the collective effort of several 2+2′ers who were high stakes regulars at UB affected by the theft, most prominently trambopoline, dlpnyc21, josem, and also Nat Arem. 2+2 Moderator Cornell Fiji composed a thorough summary of what is believed to have happened along with the damning evidence that goes well beyond what UB admits in its press release.

In this new thread, Cornell is once again doing an admirable job exposing all of the deception in the press release. I’m not going to try to summarize it all, but basically it is at the very least a shameful lapse, and more probably deliberate negligence, that UB’s security didn’t notice any of this until 2+2′s amateur investigators compiled undeniable evidence. If security isn’t tracking win rates and investigating the play of the biggest winners in the biggest games on the site, what exactly are they doing? How is it that amateurs with nothing more than Poker Tracker databases can unravel this stuff, but a supposedly professional security team cannot?  Read the complete post...