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?

---

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.

EdmondDantes says

Yeah, as a business owner, Absolute's lack of action is really amazing. Not sure why anyone would stay at the site. As for your take on the rate cut, the Fed pretty much said "It's worse than we thought." and the market said "Whee!" I think that will wear off soon enough. The dollar's taken a beating against the euro but there's still more downside, me thinks. Careful, though. In a flight to quality, investors buy Treasuries and that has given the dollar a boost in the past.

09/18/07

Anonymous says

Keep us informed about the Absolute fiasco.

09/19/07

Anonymous says

I had a difficult time believing it at first, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming. What's interesting is that nobody on the 'defending AP' side seems to address the facts. They simply say that anyone can get lucky and there aren't enough hands to make a judgment either way. I say horse shit. You only need a few hundred hands when the person doing the cheating is so stupid and doesn't realize how easy it would have been to mask the truth. Lucky for us, they were so stupid and obvious.

09/19/07

Anonymous says

The river aggresion is pretty cut and dry for me. Only raising or folding on the river looks like he can see the cards.

09/19/07

Bond18 says

The river aggression is seizure inducing insane. There is absolutely no way someone can play that way without being able to see the hands. At least not profitably. Meanwhile the absolute 1k still might not get an overlay tonight.

09/19/07

Anonymous says

"Uhh...pull as much of your bankroll out as possible and stick it into an account denominated in something whose color isn't green"

For us dumb ass investors...what would something not green be?

09/20/07

lakong says

I worry that this could be really bad for the industry. Do we really want the mainstream press to pick up on this? Not sure if it would be good. I also don't see AP coming clean on it. I'm sure they will deal with the issue, but admitting the problem could really spell trouble for them.

09/20/07

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