Since I'm a Cardrunners pro now, I took half a day off today and made a few videos.

Good news: I made a final table!

Bad news: I read souls :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuNL2LLFlQE

edit: Bah, Youtube screwed this one up. Cliff notes: I spend 20 seconds talking about how my AQs probably wants a call from 99 although it's close, the BB calls with 99, flop = 9 high. Oooops.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7200014428284116874&hl=en <----- slightly fixed, but still blurry link

I went to Korea to play a poker tournament and then go on vacation for two weeks. The tournament part turned out to be quick and painless - three hours into the thing, QQ ran into a set on a 6 high flop with 60 BB, then, 15 minutes later, ran into another one on an 8 high flop with 25 BB. As they say in this country, gg no re.

I don't actually care about this because, as it turns out, I've been busy watching this:



Yes, that's right, they really do have a Starcraft channel here...actually, two gaming channels, which both mostly show non-stop Starcraft games complete with breathless, excited commentary. If poker ever catches on here, the results will either be really really good or really really bad. I'm not sure which.

When I haven't been watching that, we've been doing stuff like this:



In that shot, I'm paying 10 bucks to have lots of fish eat dead skin cells off my feet to make them healthier. Oddly enough, this not only actually works, but is probably the most fun thing I've ever done in a foreign country.

If fish that nibble substantial parts of your legs off aren't your thing, you could always do this instead:







Those are shots of a 1300 year old, partly rebuilt Buddhist temple basically in the middle of nowhere (it helps to have in-laws that love you despite not actually having a language in common who will ferry you around to places like this one.)

Bonus shot from a particularly nice cliffside:



Prettiest. Country. Ever.

I'll probably get some more card games in and/or find Adam [censored] Junglen's mom at some point, but right now, I'm enjoying this vacation a lot.

After about 18 hours of travel time, I'm writing this from my hotel room in Seoul, where I'll be playing the APPT event in a couple of days. Initial impressions - this city's awesome, and I'm jetlagged as hell. I'll probably post more about it tomorrow or the day after, and, of course, once I busto/robusto the actual tournament.

Final Absolute update: still rigged, regulars apparently back in action. Okay, you guys won, good luck with all that.

In what seems to be the final word - because they're definitely not doing anything else so far, and it's been over a week - Absolute is on the record as saying there's been no wrongdoing and they've unlocked the accounts involved. Understand this: unless they are mouth-breathingly retarded or completely insane, they didn't actually do that. Instead, they've decided to sweep this under the rug and quietly sit on the accounts while publicly denying the entire story ever happened. In the meantime, the story's been picked up all over the poker world and even on the Freakonomics blog (who knew that Steven Levitt worked for a poker site? Certainly not me...but one hopes Absolute is quietly emailing him for his number.)

In the meantime, credit goes to Adam Junglen and myself for coming up with a solution to the whodunit:

[23:09] Adam Junglen: man
[23:09] Adam Junglen: imagine multi-accounting super users
[23:09] Adam Junglen: that'd be fun
[23:09] Adam Junglen: lol
[23:09] Adanthar: the software is clearly 1 table max
[23:09] Adam Junglen: Come on
[23:09] Adanthar: and actually come to think about it
[23:09] Adam Junglen: a little humor in there
[23:09] Adanthar: it cant be software
[23:09] Adanthar: it has to be some kind of program with a login
[23:10] Adanthar: otherwise they'd just run 2 copies and multiaccount
[23:10] Adanthar: nah you seriously gave me the idea just now heh
[23:10] Adanthar: dude
[23:10] Adanthar: you just showed conclusively its an inside job
[23:10] Adanthar: omfg
[23:11] Adam Junglen: As long as you give me the credit and make it sound as t hough it was a coherent thought
[23:11] Adam Junglen: I sure did
[23:11] Adanthar: yeah I'm gonna post it right now
[23:11] Adam Junglen: make sure to point out that I'm so brilliant I did it without realizing

If you read the BBV thread (and seen the hand history of Potripper's FT I went over), it's pretty obvious that the superuser is using some kind of aid that has to be pointed at a specific table, because the only hand where Potripper clearly doesn't cheat is exactly the first hand when he gets moved to the FT. In addition, none of the superaccounts ever played > 1 table at a time. But wait - why wouldn't they just make a second copy of the software, if it was a standalone program, and monitor multiple tables? Because they couldn't - they only had the one login/password combination and doubtless didn't want to, or couldn't, log in from multiple PC's at a time.

Game, set, match. The reason AP is trying to bury this is because a superuser program with an outside login - something that should never exist and should certainly not be publicly revealed if it does - somehow got out into the wild, or, more likely, a disgruntled security guy pulled off the steal of the decade. Of course, they now have no choice but to try to bury it; otherwise, their entire site has a high chance of going under (screw the people who lost half a million dollars; they aren't important.) This will even probably work, since none of us have a high desire to let Focus on the Family run any more misinformed 'online poker really is rigged' hit pieces and will probably let them get away with it.

And thus, another ridiculous chapter in the history of e-commerce/online poker/people who shouldn't be trusted to run an ice cream store comes to a close...except for one thing. Some people, even a few high stakes players, still apparently want to play at AP since it's such a soft game now that the better informed regulars have all left (lol). To them, I offer this 2+2 post of mine:

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On one level, it may make sense for Absolute to do this, but on that same level, it makes zero sense for HS players to ever deposit a dollar there again.

You may think that since the games are going to be softer in the near future, you'd want to go back and give them a shot. Well, there's two problems with this:

1)You're relying on Absolute to be stonewalling while fixing their mistakes internally. What happens if they're simply dumb and the hacker is still out there, or if it's an inside job [editor's note - oops!] and he's just taking some poker lessons before trying again?

2)It's hard to play perfect poker at the best of times. Now you're gonna have to wonder whether an unknown can see your cards whenever he raises you off your missed overcards twice in a row. You think you're gonna be playing optimally vs. him for the next hour? How about in the big MTT's, where timex already panicked enough to make a thread about it once? Hell, that guy could've really been cheating and decided to tank the tournament to deflect suspicion. You'll never know. Have fun working out your new, updated EV, cause I'm not gonna be the one sticking up for you and compiling a body of evidence after Absolute quite clearly admitted they're not going to act publicly.

My prediction is that no high stakes player that is aware of this scandal is ever going to play optimally at Absolute for a very long time, and it's going to send your EV straight through the floor even without the benefit of any hacking. GP and a few others might prove me wrong over the long run, or they might not. Remember that in the long run, it only takes one giant hole card cammed pot to wipe out a couple of weeks' worth of rungood.

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Let's hope that every other site is very quietly taking notes. It's too late for Absolute to do anything to retain a good chunk of its high stakes playerbase, but if you're somebody else with hole card cams...for the love of God, delete the functionality and never access it again. Better yet, hire me as your crisis PR guy; I promise you I'd do a better job than anybody at AP.

The Absolute tally thus far: three days, five clearly cheating accounts, upwards of half a million dollars, zero acknowledgment from senior Absolute management in any way. Well, okay, it's the biggest scandal in online poker history since Planet's RNG back in 1999 or whenever the Internet was still a series of tubes; perhaps they're trying to keep it in-house and contact everyone involved behind the scenes or something...wait, no they aren't, because I haven't heard shit.

Since 99% of the high stakes poker world *is* hooked up to that series of tubes now, though, there is an awful lot of damage being done, and AP should really have a public relations team on the case. Fortunately for them, the 1% is still stubbornly defending them in this Casinomeister thread with a disjointed post that starts thusly:

The whole issue is just amusing...

Do people really buy that crap? come on..

It goes on from there. Unfortunately, one post later, this guy gets outed as - no kidding - a repeated Absolute spammer who has the same IP address as the President of Absolute Entertainment. He, of course, never posts again.

Wow. Just wow. *This* is the best you can do? Get with the damn times; you're giving this entire business a black eye on a daily basis. In the meantime, every day you don't do anything about this (and I'm including a BIG PR push - not counting spamming shills) is a day I probably personally cost you another five digits in lost business just from compiling freaking hand histories. How do you people run an eight (if not nine!) digit a year enterprise and spend two days with the only response to the nuclear bomb of online poker coming from a random affiliate manager who doesn't know what she's talking about?

How do you manage to print that much money and suck this bad?

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In other sort of poker related news, the Fed cut rates half a point today, stunning pretty much everybody. This sent Wall Street up and the dollar down, a scenario which is going to repeat for the next few months until, most likely, the Dow finally goes down with the ship. The reason I say this is that looking at the combination of a spike in oil price + a weak dollar (driving up oil obv) + subprime today gives me the unpleasant impression that this bounce looks a whole lot like those two minutes on the Titanic where the aforementioned ship stood on end before taking a final giant, glorious swan dive. The rats (that is, those of us who, thanks to earning 100% of our income in dollars while traveling all over the planet, have to hit the water first) are gonna be scurrying around looking for buckets, but unfortunately, BBV4Life tells me the bucket seal is dead. Where am I going with this tortured metaphor? Uhh...pull as much of your bankroll out as possible and stick it into an account denominated in something whose color isn't green, because even one or two more interest rate cuts from now on means that the Canadians are gonna start making jokes about our worthless toilet paper money. If even my lazy ass is going to do it, you ought to get in line before the last life raft sails.