Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving :)

After Sunday, I took another break this week for obvious holiday-related reasons - well, that, and too many good videogames have come out lately. So, today, I wanted to play some poker, spent 2 hours at the 20/40 razz tables on FTP and made 2K. Razz is remarkably easy when you run hot and play better than them; why aren't tournaments more like razz, especially in terms of running hot? :(

I always hate writing about this game because a)I don't know who's reading this, and b)there's so little in print about it that any tidbit of information I release is bound to wind up improving someone's game a little too much. The last time I wrote a couple of posts on a particular subcategory of poker, I singlehandedly made it several times harder over the course of the next year; it's still possible to crush satellites more than any other type of MTT, but nobody's as terrible as they used to be. On the other hand, razz makes for some incredibly easy examples of good hand reading/poker (just ask Sklansky, who uses it in every single book he's ever written) and might also be the most profitable midstakes game available online. (Hell, it might be the most profitable high limit game, too. There are a half dozen 200/400 regulars on FTP, and I know for a fact at least two of them are pretty bad. If I was a shade better and/or properly bankrolled...)

Why is everyone so bad? Very briefly, it's because the aggression revolution that transformed poker since '04 hasn't made it to razz yet, and the one book on it - Sklansky on Poker - is pretty much the most misinterpreted poker book on the market, with everyone involved taking its contents in the most weak/tight light possible. Yes, Sklansky says to call lots of good hands on third instead of raising in order to exploit your edge on fifth and later...but he doesn't say to play passively, and taking that the wrong way makes people give away pot after pot after pot. I would love to go into more detail, because third street in razz is probably the worst played and least understood street in any card game with multiple betting rounds, but somebody's going to have to pay me to write a book in order for that to happen. It's too valuable.

So why is the title of this blog post 'tournaments are silly' when it's pretty much a tease about a game no one plays? It's because donkaments and razz have one thing in common: almost nobody playing either them 'gets' poker. Don't get me wrong - a number of the FTP regs are pretty decent at razz, and the top MTT pros are very good at MTT's. But very few of those people who do not also play cash games understand poker as a whole. They don't make thin value bets, don't understand pot odds except in the context of their game(s), think that 'waiting for a better spot' means giving away pot after pot after pot...it goes on. Even on Cardrunners, people don't really understand that when you're getting 1.4:1 on a call when you're a small favorite against someone's 8xBB pushing range, the result is not a 'thin' call and it's got nothing to do with 'calling an all in with A4' or whatever. IMO, in order to 'get' poker, you have to intuitively understand just what your edges are and how to take them, and very few people not playing NL cash/nosebleed limit/HS PLO really grok any of that.

A pretty basic razz concept that gets my point across: as I said, Sklansky says that it's worth just calling a nice hand instead of reraising on third if it makes the other guy play bad on fourth (by calling too much in a small pot), and worth doing the same thing on fourth if it makes them play bad on fifth. But wait - what do people do really, really badly in razz? They take lots of cards off as way too giant dogs on big bet streets. So, how do you exploit that? Well, you can either give away a large number of small pots on fourth to press your edge in a now medium pot on fifth...or...you can bloat pots on third with the best hand, get to fifth as - most likely - a big equity favorite, and then get them to call as a big dog over and over again because "the pot is large". This is what Sklansky actually does say to do (just not in so many words), but his advice hasn't been followed, because the people playing the game refuse to raise without the nuts. Their mentality is the same as the people refusing to make pot odds calls on CR, and it likely just kills their results.

BTW, I don't claim to murder those games playing this way, but I'm not even that good at razz - just poker - and I'm already a slight to decent winner at the highest razz games below nosebleed. I hear I'm also supposed to be pretty good at donkaments, but they're silly. Still, I plan on winning a couple of them at the Bellagio next month.

Until then I'll probably just play a bunch of razz and Sundayments.

I'm gonna set a little goal for myself. Namely, I'm gonna re-read part 10 of Bond's post and stop griping about variance :)

Check out the whole series if you haven't already; it's very good and the type of thing I would love to churn out if I had time. (Which I do. I'm just hideously lazy.) Seriously, though, it's some great stuff.

Okay, on to serious business. I've played okay this week, with few results but an occasional thin value bet (I can always tell when I play well; it's when I'm surprised to get a 'thin' bet called by a better hand and surprised to double up through a much worse hand in the same tourney. Oh yeah, and when I pull off some dumb bluff...wait, no, that's when I play 'inspired'. "Inspired" in poker is often a word that actually means 'suicidally dumb, except they're worse'.) Of course, I hope to change that today, but since we're talking about poker, breaking even would be OK, too.

Good news on two other fronts: my CR videos have been well received, and I'm making some extras for some magazine or other that wants a few. At the same time, it looks like I'm joining Team Wafflecrush for live events for at least the next eight months, which means I'll be playing in at least one of those weird "gigantic buyin events where everyone plays inconceivably horribly" things a month for a while. This has the joint effect of getting me out of the house and letting me experience the thrills of slightly different-looking casinos on every possible continent, in addition to possibly winning a lot of money and/or losing it for other people. Hopefully, it's the first one!

Another minor promise to myself: in addition to making another video tonight, I'm gonna find some hand worth posting and then get an audio clip of me dissecting it on here within a day or so.

At this stage, it appears as if the investigation from my own standpoint is largely over. AP has cleaned up as much as they could - I can't test them any more than I already have from where I am, but they are saying the right things re: "changing" their ownership structure, and certainly, none of the implicated people remain in day to day operational control. I have another radio interview tonight and the delayed ESPN article is finally coming out in a day or two, but that may be the end as far as the media is concerned, as well.

With that done, I'd like to talk about where the industry, as a whole, goes from here.

Politically, we (that is, the PPA) are making much faster gains in Congress than I expected a year ago. The WTO case's nascent explosion - as desperately as the US is still appealing, the writing is on the wall and the majority of House members are now aware of the potential 100 billion in damages figure - is galvanizing them into action. I would not be as optimistic as Barry Greenstein's 'six months to legalization' figure; that is unrealistic, because I can almost guarantee no action on a subject like this one will be taken in an election year. But we do have an excellent shot at legalization in the 2009 Congress, especially with a Democratic president in office (no need for partisanship - the simple truth re: the 2008 election landscape is that if a Republican wins, it will be a narrow victory, and they will certainly be too beholden to the FoF types to immediately pass an Internet gambling legalization bill even with that kind of pricetag attached.)

With this in the background, the last thing that anybody in the poker community wanted or needed is the discovery that, in the words of one of my AP sources, "two morons in Costa Rica were ruining everything". As I've written before in this blog, the other sites have watched this closely, collectively slapped their foreheads and taken measures to clean up their own houses. Of course, almost nobody's willing to publicize this further - why would they? - but everyone recognizes that a second scandal cannot be tolerated right now. A hint of massive corruption behind the scenes of the sites/money/people driving the legalization bus would have incredibly bad consequences in Washington; at the very least, it would mean the end of the current industry, because any bill would have to specifically exclude the existing offshore entities to be palatable. In other words, a whiff of bad PR in the next year and a half could cost a handful of people many billions of dollars. I don't think I need to spell out the likely result if someone gets caught trying this again in the near future.

At the same time, we also discovered one very disturbing thing about the poker community - we're absolutely (ok, I'm done) horrible at regulating ourselves. The entire HS MTT player base screamed about AP's riggedness for a month; this had zero impact on player traffic. When AP was *proven* to be rigged with the Excel file and admitted to the rigging, with several articles hitting the front pages of MSNBC and Yahoo, their numbers dropped about 5% for the first week and have now made up almost half of that this week. In a twist that is frankly shocking, even a game that was proven to be rigged still attracts players. That does not bode well for anyone - either ourselves or the industry at large - because, for all that AP is reformed, the fact is that there were almost no long term consequences. Once the players are fully paid back, the penalty for cheating turns out to be less than a 100% markup, and no one's going to jail. In the long run (I am talking a decade plus) this kind of non-responsiveness from the market could very well drive the industry off a cliff or keep it just as shady as ever.

In other words, we need regulation. The ancaps at 2+2's "no true Scotsman"/"the government is worse"/"this market isn't free" dodging aside, there is nothing that could be worse for us at this point than a widely held perception that online poker really *is* rigged that we cannot instantly refute in a single sentence. That has got to immediately change. In the short term, the change may have to come from the sites themselves or from their licensing agencies - certainly, the KGC's new...umm, existence...is a start, as is the theoretical new culture of transparency at AP - but in the long run, we must both accept and embrace governmental oversight. Furthermore, the PPA is currently not the best vehicle for this; it is a body formed by and controlled by the existing sites, who have a slightly different agenda from the players and will not be nearly as quick to react to a gaming scandal from our end as they should be. It took them a week after AP's admission to even put a blurb about it on their site; that's not good enough. Had any FoF-owned Congressman been a little quicker on the uptake, their meet and greet function a while ago would have faced some extremely tough questions.

So, as I said...we need reform, and it's unlikely to come from the existing players in the political arena. Time will tell how and in what form Internet gaming will be legalized, but if we want an optimal resolution - legalization of the market we have now, without losing the ability to play at places like Stars and FTP in the process - three things *must* happen:

1)The sites have got to maintain their newly improved security procedures and remain on their best behavior.

2)The PPA must be more proactive with respect to these issues than it is now, and must seek to develop some sort of platform for answering the question "What form of regulation should Congress impose?" Simply seeking a "legalize and forget" bill without wondering about what happens if and when someone asks for conditions - and a large number of Congressmen surely will - is not good enough.

3)Either the PPA or the sites themselves (same thing, really) must come up with some sort of PR strategy for handling these types of issues in a coordinated fashion. Online poker is not a fragmented marketplace where one bad vendor affects only its own customers; another scandal could wreck the entire trade fair. By a minor miracle, this last disaster landed in the laps of several trusted people in the poker community who were able to manage the fallout. What happens when the next one makes the headlines and nobody bothers to ask any of us what we think? The Cardplayer tactic of hiding its head in the sand and hoping the whole thing goes away is not going to cut it.

In the medium term, I hope to work on some of these myself; perhaps this is the first step on my eventual transition out of the playing field, and perhaps not. What I do know is that no one can afford to leave these things undone.

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Poker status: meh. As usual, I've only played a handful of days recently. The one thing that went right from a pretty disastrous Sunday (it's not every day you lose 2 82/18's and a 93/7 fairly deep, all for lots of chips) is that I'm now 7/8 in my last Cakeaments, with the 1 being a 72 player/1 seat, 3 small $ sat where I self-destructed away a chip lead. No real harm done there, and being on fire at Cake, even with those smaller prizepools, does wonders for my confidence.

Obviously, over the last week, the AP mess has more or less continued to spiral around the 'net. It's going to keep doing that for a while, while the lawyers sort everything out. In the meantime, I now have enough contacts, both external and internal, to sort out this entire story, and at some point in the future, I'll probably blog about it, but for now some things are still sensitive and I'd rather keep a few details to myself. Suffice to say, however, that AJ Green's scalp has pretty much been nailed to the wall, and I'm definitely proud of the investigation Nat and I - okay, more Nat than I, even if I threw a few critical details in there - managed to pull off entirely over the Internet and entirely based on public pressure.

For those of you who haven't been reading the monstrous 2+2 threads, other incidental subjects of interest that have come up this week:

-Nat may be going to Costa Rica as an informal player auditor/interviewer role. We've talked about me going as well, but I'm pretty undecided. We'll figure it out.

-David Sklansky briefly made an appearance and said he'd go down for 200K. That thread lasted five minutes before the very obvious deletion.

-AP's released a couple of statements, with lots more on the way. They're remarkably bland, primarily for legal reasons, but it's a start.

-Proposed screenplays: 1. Proposed books: 1. Airtime: at least an hour's worth on the radio (click me for a really long interview), and probably another three or four hours' worth of phone calls with the media, not counting emails and back and forth with AP management. Why is Tila Tequila on Jimmy Kimmel and not me? Oh yeah, the bisexuality and boobs, my bad. Still, I think I've done pretty well as an impromptu industry spokesman.

In fact, I'll definitely have a future blog up on the media/politics/regulatory angle of this whole thing sometime soon. In the meantime, stay tuned; this might be winding down, but it's not by any means over.

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Oh yeah, and I actually played some poker. I'm now 5 for 5 of my last big Cakeaments with 3 FT's, but unfortunately, I pretty much bubbled (2K consolation prize) an Aussie seat package. It'd be lamer if not for the fact that at least one person says hi to me at every table I sit down at. Wheeeeeeee, Internet celebrity.

First and foremost - major thanks to Nat Arem (who'll never get all the credit he should get for this - for those of you who haven't gotten the skinny, his blog has a great summary of the whole story at www.natarem.com), Michael Josem, and everyone who's talked to me, emailed me hand histories, and kept persistently digging long past when most people would have stopped bothering. You've all not only uncovered the biggest scandal in online poker history - you've forced a cheater to disgorge as much as a million dollars. There are literally hundreds of people that will be getting a lot of money back because of your efforts, and without them, none of this would have been possible.

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The title of this entry is definitely early - I haven't seen AP's statement, and, for all I know, will be spending two more weeks uncovering dirt. There's certainly plenty of dirt to go around; as one involved party told me recently, he'd heard all over the place that "Scott Tom is pretty much the worst person in Costa Rica"...and that was *before* the scandal broke. Certainly, I'm not going to be surprised if their statement blames the whole thing on an inside hack; that's really their only way out at this point.

Having said that, I'm told this blog is going to be very popular very shortly (hi, MSNBC!), and even as one of the people heavily involved in uncovering this, I really, truly feel this scandal misrepresents what online poker is today. As such, I think I owe it to everyone to outline the ongoing and likely consequences.

First, what's happening at Absolute Poker right now as you're reading this is unprecedented. Word on the street is that certain owners are being forced out of management. These people will no longer have any kind of operational pull at the company going forward (nor, it goes without saying, access to superaccounts.) In addition, and just as importantly to the industry, the scandal has forced the Kawanahke Gaming Council - an auditing group that is a big player in online poker and has herefore been heavily involved with Absolute's management, to say the least - to step up, grow a spine, and begin a wide ranging audit of both Absolute and Ultimate Bet, conducted entirely by a reputable third party. The ramifications going forward for KGC are large enough that I am very positive they will never be asleep on the job for a very long time.

Second, the rest of the online poker industry has been goggling at this for days and has taken an enormous amount of action. Multiple major affiliates, with hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to lose, have pulled their Absolute Poker ads; magazines and online media entirely dependent on only a handful of revenue streams have begun covering the scandal and also pulling AP ads; and, of course, the sites themselves - although it must be said that everyone is swearing up and down that the type of stupidity we just saw at AP would never be repeated anywhere else - are beefing up internal security to match.

But most importantly, I am proud to say that this is no longer the game it was 40 years ago. Most of us in the community have heard the old time Texas stories of people robbing games, then sitting down to play in them the next day and going unpunished. Today, we've set a new precedent, one that will likely govern this game going forward. Within a month of a cheater running a game taking a million dollars from his customers, the playerbase, the affiliate base, and everyone else dependent on this game for their livelihood revolted and managed to uncover the entire scandal. Insiders lined up to tell their stories, a likely whistleblower provided a key piece of evidence at a critical moment, and a company that could technically have gotten away with it instead spent a week leaking like a sieve, because a number of people felt compelled to do the right thing. This will not be the last time that happens, and even though this has been a dark time for online poker, I feel that this will make the game a better, safer place going forward.

Again, thanks to everyone that has provided invaluable assistance in this matter.

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At any rate, Nat tells me AP's ready to cave.
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15 minutes later:


PocketFives just received a phone call from Absolute Poker confirming the suspicions of the online poker community over the past month. While we need to be vague in this post to respect their wishes, we can say that their systems were compromised, and that they are prepared to provide the details in a statement coming shortly.

Part of the statement will include a plan to refund players affected by this compromise.

We are extremely relieved to hear this outcome, as our most important goal in all this is to see justice given to those who were cheated in this process. Pocketfives is extremely proud to have played a part in the process of uncovering the impropriety that has occurred. We would of course like to thank all the other parties who played a key role in this process—specifically the folks that have been posting here and at twoplustwo.com.

This is great news for everyone. Keep your eyes out for the statement.

Extremely Relieved,

--Adam

I spent a large chunk of today giving interviews to some surprising places after the Associated Press (the good AP, not the bad AP) picked up the story. Whether stressing that this is an absolutely (I'll never get tired of this) isolated incident did any good remains to be seen.

The first of two big surprises on the day came from a really good reporter for a paper in Montreal. Did you know that the guy who used to run the KGC, an Indian chief with the last name of Norton, also owns/owned (unclear) Absolute? The good news is that the audit they're ordering is likely legitimate anyway, since at this point, they're panicking hard and in no position to cover anything else up. The bad news is, this isn't the greatest time for that news to come out. Oops.

The second surprise, all of 30 minutes old, makes all of the detective work we did pretty much obsolete if it checks out, because...

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http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/poker-forum/index.php?showtopic=110060&st=440&#entry2201691

Alright, some pretty crazy [censored].

I was just talking to a friend of mine who plays heavily at Absolute Poker (he would rather be left nameless) about the recent POTRIPPER scandal. He does not post/read any internet forums, and was unaware of the situation. After linking him to a couple of the summaries, he had some very interesting things to add.

When I mentioned that people had linked Scott Tom, the former CEO, to the case, he immediately recognized the name, and said he knew the guy. He had sat at a table roughly 5-6 months ago, where a guy claimed to be Scott Tom, and wanted him to test the new AP 8.0 software. This guy seemed to know a lot about him (email, location, first name, deposit history), and even put $300 in my friends account to prove he was from AP (by credit adjustment, not deposit/transfer). He also emailed him the new software from this email address: stom@fiducix.com.

Just to make sure my friend contacted AP support to see if this guy was legit. The email re received back might break this case wide open:

Thank you for contacting us.

We contacted our promotions department and they informed us that steamroller belongs to the Absolute Poker Staff. For this reason, what he offered you is in legit.

Good luck at our tables.

Thanks for playing at Absolute Poker! If there is anything else we can help you with, please let us know. We are here for you!

Sincerely,

Aaron
Team Absolute ~ Customer Support
"To Continue to be the Best and Most Trusted"
Support@AbsolutePoker.Com

We’re Here To Stay! All Players Welcome!

Come and join the action this weekend with our 150k guaranteed on Saturday and 60k on Sunday! With more and bigger guaranteedtournaments, Absolute Poker is your place to play. See you at the tables whenever, wherever!
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I'm waiting on the email headers and the actual email before I anoint these guys the Official Worst Cheaters of All Time. That said, does anyone really doubt this one's legit, too? Forget all this complicated IP address nonsense - they used the same freaking account that they already advertised as tied to the site. BRILLIANT.

At any rate, Nat tells me AP's ready to cave. Let's see how much more incompetence comes out before they do; I'm literally stunned at how arrogantly stupid these guys were.

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.)