
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.