Major and minor updates this morning in our developing story:

-AP has announced a full internal audit by the Kawanakhe Gaming Council, their licensing agency, using an outside group of auditors, Gaming Associates. Word is mixed on whether these are legitimate, independent agencies, but to be fair, there are some reasons to believe they are.

-In the meantime, several P5's staff members are at the AP office in Costa Rica, basically doing their own fact check before AP's hired guns get there to do it themselves. Among other things, Absolute had this to say to them:

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4) They sounded very confident that information will eventually come out exonerating them of all allegations. They believe they can prove that it's not possible to do what people are alleging, as well as that it was never possible in their system. They believe the third party audit will confirm that as well.
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Yeah. I make calls of gigantic all in checkraises on the turn with T high, no draw, and have the best hand all the time. Hasn't everybody done this at one time or another? Also, this former employee of a well known site says you're full of crap.

In other words, we can forget about a clean resolution to this in the near future (especially since they're still stonewalling as to what account #363 even is and have refused to talk about whom the five accounts belong to. It's a bit late, guys; we've got all the names. What we're looking for now is where to send the pitchforks.)

-In version 7 or 8 of the 2+2 thread (I've been locking them at 600-800 replies and starting new ones, so it's whatever number the one before last was), we've got an old AP prop player saying:

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The reason I haven't been vocal is because I have very little to add. And because I met many people I could have easily confused names and faces, and that would mean I could be criminalizing the wrong people.

I have been to the offices of AP personally. I sat in what I believe was Scott Tom's office for hours watching him play PokerStars on the account FatRaiser (I think). He played horrendously awful and it wouldn't surprise me if he were behind the cheating incident because the arrogant and oblivious-to-being-caught ways the cheaters went about cheating would be consistent with something I would expect of just about anyone I met there, but especially the guy playing the FatRaiser account. These guys just had no clue how to play poker.

I caution once again that the person I am talking about was definitely the top guy in the office but may not have been Scott Tom. Probably 85% certain his name was Scott though.

Once incident I can share that in reality says very little about any possible cheating scandal but does say something about how much of a douchebag the guy I met was: He rando-banned a player who was playing a play money game on his site. He just opened up the table, busted out the virtual banstick and banned her right in the middle of the hand while cackling and clearly in love with this pathetic demonstration of power.

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Scott Tom: an *awesome* human being.

-While on the topic of awesome human beings, we now have confirmation on several of AJ Green's other online accounts - FATRAISER on Stars (note that Google shows him playing a random $50 tournament in September and then being a complete donator at 25/50 NL one month later) and Potchopper on UB (the latter account has never cashed in a tournament in around 20 tries.) I also have uncorroborated evidence on his FTP account, where he has also, to no one's surprise, recently moved up to become a gigantic 25/50 NL fish. Just remember that while Absolute cannot tell us whom POTRIPPER belongs to, they are confident that it is, in fact, impossible to see hole cards and make all in calls on the turn with ten high no draw...err, wait, scratch that last one, I guess that's just homefield advantage.

-The scandal hit Digg for about a day, has been covered in several European newspapers, and is due to be covered in an MSNBC article tomorrow. I'm also talking to ESPN today (fortunately, not on TV, heh) to go along with the P5's podcast.

More developments as they unfold, yada yada.

Latest breaking news:

At this point, every AP insider is swarming over Nat Arem's (www.natarem.com) and my own instant messenger looking to spill the goods. In the last 12 hours, we've uncovered a gigantic amount of info. First and foremost:

The Potripper account is registered to AJ Green, Absolute's former Director of Operations and Scott Tom's best friend who is currently a VP of operations at nine.com. AJ Green is also 2+2's own POTSLAMMER, he of the 3 posts shilling for AP, who was defended by The Watchdog (Tom Scott), also shilling for AP. There is far more to be had along this line of inquiry, but releasing it now would compromise a couple of side investigations we've got going - expect more updates soon, though.

In the meantime, allow me to coin a new phrase: the plot thins.

Also, in half an hour, I've got an MSNBC phone interview about this, followed by one or two other media outlets.

update: I will also be on the Pocketfives podcast tonight as a last minute substitute. In the meantime, the story hit Digg, where it's currently #3, and 2+2 is experiencing record, 10/11/06 (UIGEA) topping traffic. This will be very big very soon.

When we last left off, we were talking about User #363:

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..."[S]tarting 2 minutes into the tournament, Potripper's table was being observed for over 2.5 hours by an account with the user ID #363 (meaning this was created during beta testing)[...]Does it surprise anyone to know that the IP address of the user of that account resolved to AP's own servers?"
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But wait, there's waaaaaaay more.

User #363 (hereafter "Hole Card Cam") was not the only player on that IP address in the Excel file. A second ID, with the email address of Scott@rivieraltd.com, briefly opened up another table, closed it quickly and was never seen again in those 2.5 hours the file covers. Since they are both on the same IP, we can make the very educated guess that scott@rivieraltd.com was actually Potripper (who never moved tables and whose IP therefore wasn't logged in the file) accidentally opening another table by mistake. [If you don't know what an IP address is, the short version is that they are two computers on the same network.]

So, find scott@rivieraltd.com, and/or find the IP address, and we have Potripper. At this point, I pulled some strings, and the IP was cross-referenced between other poker sites.

It came back as belonging to the home cable modem of a guy named Scott Tom.

In the last six months, 2+2's seen a rash of spam for Absolute, headed by two people - namely,this guy, "pokermachine", and his alter ego, The Watchdog (both from the same Costa Rican IP). He/they stopped posting after they were outed as 'in AP upper management'.

Pokermachine's 2+2 login name? "scotttom".

What exactly is Scott Tom's position? In this random blog entry, we find out that Scott Tom is one of the two CEO's and owners of Absolute Poker.

Hi, Scott. I hope you're reading this right now :)

(He almost certainly is, BTW, because rivieraltd.com and a number of other sites listed on 2+2 have been taken offline in the last 24 hours.)

The latest 48 hour recap of the AP dramabomb:

-Once upon a time, before the scandal ever broke, CrazyMarco (second to Potripper in the cheater's 1K win) asked for a hand history of the tournament to be sent to him. It was, and, on Saturday, he finally got around to checking the massive Excel file, only to find...the master hand history of over 2.5 hours of the tournament containing everyone's hole cards on every table. Oddly enough, this appears to not be the first time AP's done that by accident (kinda puts a damper on their claim that nobody can see those cards, eh?), but, regardless, this makes it really, really easy to spot the cheating. Talk about a smoking gun?

-But wait, it gets better. The master hand history *also* contains the emails and IP addresses of every observer that opened up a table. (Gee, thanks for randomly emailing that out. Anybody want CrazyMarco's email, which is half of his login ID, and his IP address? Anybody? For sale to highest bidder!) Now, Absolute uses a 'player ID' system with sequentially generated numbers - if you open an account right now, you'll be user # several million or so. Does it surprise anyone reading this to know that, starting 2 minutes into the tournament, Potripper's table was being observed for over 2.5 hours by an account with the user ID #363 (meaning this was created during beta testing)? Does it surprise anyone to know that the IP address of the user of that account resolved to AP's own servers?

-As of this writing, AP has not commented on these exciting implications. We don't care, because it's already been enough to get AP delisted from Bonuswhores (that's about a few mil a year right there), rogued by Casinomeister and, shortly, blacklisted by every major affiliate. When they do comment, my guess is that they'll deny the whole thing again, but it's a little too late for that to work now, what with, you know, US HAVING THE FREAKING HOLE CARDS FOR EVERYONE IN THE TOURNAMENT.

BTW, that 'this will blow over before it hits the major media outlets' defeatist attitude I had about the whole thing? Yeah, that's gone. Expect major developments along that front (and, tbh, it's probably better off now than whenever Congress decides it's not worth losing 100 billion dollars and passes IGRA, UIGEA's smarter, better looking cousin.)

In the meantime, BBV's your exclusive place to go for 'Superuser #363' T-shirts.

edit: To see for yourself, sign up for pokerxfactor (you can use a fake email) and watch the hole card cam at work.

...I've played about an hour of poker, a 15/30 razz session that ended with me up $2. Jet lag can be brutal, and it seems like west -> east is a lot worse than the other way around. I've been home 3 days and still haven't been asleep past 8 AM, which is about 3 hours earlier than usual. In other words, I've got nothing to write about :)

Since that's the case, and I've been slacking on this blog, it's time for a filler hand. This is a Bakes PCA sat hand posted in HSMTT:

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No reads as I just got moved here.


Poker Stars, $615 + $35 NL Hold'em Tournament, 100/200 Blinds, 8 Players
LegoPoker Hand History Converter

MP2: 3,352
CO: 7,652
BTN: 6,301
Hero (SB): 14,800
BB: 12,556
UTG: 9,135
UTG+1: 19,275
MP1: 4,990

Pre-Flop: (300) Q Q dealt to Hero (SB)
UTG folds, UTG+1 raises to 600, 4 folds, Hero calls 500, BB folds

Flop: (1,400) T K 3 (2 Players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets 1,000, Hero calls 1,000

Turn: (3,400) K (2 Players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets 1,400, Hero calls 1,400

River: (6,200) 9 (2 Players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets 2,000, Hero calls 2,000

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I think this'll be a long thread that'll probably end up with people reaching the wrong answer. In a satellite, with these stack sizes, it's not nearly as well played as it would normally be. Here's why:

-PF is sketchy. Nobody likes reraising PF normally; we're too deep and OOP vs. an EP raiser that can play optimally, etc. However, this is a satellite, meaning that having our hand face up isn't really that bad - taking down a 900 chip pot is fine when we've got a stack this big this early - and, if we get any more action, we can just fold or c/f because nobody plays back in these things. Just calling is OK, but since the point of this exercise is to get to the bubble with a medium stack and not to get the most chips, deciding to keep the pot small means you should eventually wind up folding the best hand fairly often (that is to say, err on the side of caution.)

-So, Bakes calls and sees a KT3, 2 flush flop, which his opponent makes a clear cbet/value bet on. Does Bakes have the best hand? There's a good chance. Is his equity vs. villain's range still the 7x%ish it was PF? Very unlikely; this flop hit a whole lot of his raising range. In addition, the specific bet size is a tell, not necessarily that we're beat, but that our opponent has a clue. While we still can't really say anything about him, him having a clue is going to make it pretty hard to extract any value on the river if he checks behind with a worse hand on the turn; it also means we'll have to fold to a turn barrel. I am generally fairly indifferent between check/calling and check/folding this street here since c/f'ing feels so weak/tight, but in a sat, especially one where a lot of people play very tight/predictable, I think that folding might be correct.

-Instead, he calls and sees a king, which is theoretically a great card for him (reducing the chance he's beat and eliminating Tx's, etc. 2 pair outs.) He checks and villain...underbets. We'd know we've almost certainly got the best hand if he checked, and could have snap folded to a real bet, but an underbet is a problem because we've got no idea if it's air, a king trying to eke value out of a worse hand, or JJ/Tx mistakenly value betting. What do we do?

In a real tournament, the line Bakes took is fine by default because QQ still winds up good more than enough to make it work, even when we know we'll probably also have to call a river bet. In a sat, though, with a really big stack, we should already be thinking 'preservation' above all else. I think this is a spot where you will frequently be folding the virtual nuts, but should probably do it anyway, moreso than on the flop.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bakes won the hand, BTW. I just don't think it's a good idea to take this road in a sat. As an alternative, if we had wanted this pot a little more, I'd suggest betting the turn (easy fold to a raise/shutdown to a call, worse hands like JJ/draws do sometimes call - this is one of the few times an information bet is OK, because it's very hard for anyone to bluff raise). As it stands, though, I think this is ultimately a +cEV, but -$EV line.

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Tomorrow marks the first time I play a full tournament schedule in 3 weeks. For some weird reason, I'm really looking forward to it :)