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.

---

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.

---
At any rate, Nat tells me AP's ready to cave.
---

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!
---


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:

----
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.
---

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:

---

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.

---

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?"
---

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

---

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 :)

After a nice two mostly poker-free weeks (although I've put in a few hours in the last several days), I'm finally leaving Seoul tomorrow. It's been a lot of fun, but I'm ready to head back. More pics forthcoming (although not too many more because our camera decided to die. Tip: putting in wet, probably sandy seashells in the same bag as a digicam is dumb.) Take it from me, though, that Seoul is a great city to be 20-something in...if I spoke Korean I'd probably never leave. The nightlife is hopping, everything's cheap even with the bad dollar, and the food is surprisingly good even if you don't touch anything spicy. Mmm, Korean bakeries.

On the poker side, I played 3 tourneys today and wound up making another Cake FT, although it was only 50K this week and I still only got 6'th for a couple of thousand. No video this time, but the highlights included 4 shoves with 2-5 BB stacks and getting 4 folds, and sucking out on aces AIPF for the donkament life twice. In further fitting Cake fashion, my bustout hand included me shoving 8 BB UTG and getting called by the button's J8 sooooted for 98% of his stack. lol. Regardless, consecutive Sunday tourney FT's are always nice.

Looking forward to more playing time/videos/etc. after Tuesday.

The proposed regs are out. Here's the 2+2 discussion.

I haven't read these yet and am not planning on it until I get back from vacation, but I've read the thread and looked over the key paragraphs quoted in it. If there's nothing in the .pdf that's missing from the discussion, my initial half-assed legal opinion is that this is a total win and the best case scenario for online poker players as a whole. There's no definition of poker as illegal (I expected this and would have been very surprised if poker was even mentioned in the regs, but that was the worst case outcome); the regs fall back on the state laws surrounding Internet gambling, which further muddies the waters for everybody; and they all but exclude the possibility of a blacklist of ACH processors/merchants.

But wait, there's more; these regs allow banks to expend absolutely no effort on verifying whether an ACH transaction is proper at all, as long as the last foreign entity in the transactional chain says it is. That's basically the ballgame, because all a site has to do to go back to the Neteller, "money in your account ASAP" era is to find a non-US bank willing to make that certification. Moreover, as long as the bank sticks to poker sites and excludes sportsbooks, it's arguably not even doing anything wrong, because it's not violating any federal laws (at least from the Fifth Circuit's point of view, and there's no way the DoJ will ever bring another case on the matter - if the Fifth Circuit [hint: Texas] is that unwilling to give the government's broad definition of the Wire Act any credit, nobody else will, either).

This plus the ongoing WTO saga means a very rosy future for US online poker.