Posts Tagged ‘Ultimate Bet’

Edit: Important correction here. The non-bountied live pro I busted was not Bill Gazes but rather Bill Edler.

I decided to play the Bay 101 because of the combination of a nice location, great structure/tournament director (thanks Matt Savage!), and interesting people I thought it would attract, both because of the area and the number of pros who play as “shooting stars” with $5000 bounties on their heads.

At the outset, they distributed the bounties evenly, with one or two at every table in the 5 and/or 7 seats. I was fortunate to get probably the single softest bounty in the field at my table: 2007 WSOP main event champion Jerry Yang was seated to my immediate left. He was very quiet, but friendly enough. To my surprise, he made a lot of hopeless bluffs, especially in the early stages of the tournament. That’s not exactly how I expected him to play, which is maybe what he was going for. I called him down correctly once with 8s 4s on a Js 8h 3s Qd 3d board.  Read the complete post...

This afternoon I got an e-mail from Ultimate Bet reminding me that I still have a $.26 in my account and suggesting some things I could do with it, like a $.02 tournament. They only let you cash out whole dollar amounts, so when I cleared my account, I had to leave the change.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to give them another chance. However, their e-mail also reminded me that I had 67,000 unused UltimatePoints, which are their frequent player reward. Turns out that was enough to get a Nintendo Wii and a Nunchuk controller, so that should be on its way.

That was a fun little surprise, since I pretty much never buy any kind of consumer goods except for the occasional CD or book. After taking so much (actually, to my knowledge UB didn’t actually steal anything from me), it’s nice to see UB giving back!

At the beginning of last year, I set some poker resolutions and goals for myself. It’s time now to see how I’ve fared during the course of 2008.

Resolution 1: Focus on Short-Handed NLHE Cash Games

I pretty well kicked the tournament habit, but my focus wasn’t exclusively on short-handed play. I played a fair bit of full ring NLHE as well when the games were good, and I don’t regret it. Over about 170K hands played at 6-max tables at Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker (Poker Tracker 3 doesn’t collect UB stats), I ran at about 2 BB/100. This covers stakes from $.5/$1 (for a Poker Savvy video I was recording) to $50/$100, which is the biggest I’ve played.

Over 27K hands of heads up NLHE, I ran at nearly 4 BB/100. Sadly, a few ill-fated forays into 25/50 heads up nevertheless left me down about $35,000.

I say that I don’t regret expanding into full ring because over 60K hands I ran at about 4 BB/100.  Read the complete post...

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...