Cheaters and UB and Phil...oh my!

[LLAMA]

As a side note, "Endo", I just want to say that I did have respect for you and meant what I said during our phone/email conversations. However, my feelings kept changing based on some of your decisions and the respect has since plummeted. When I talked to you on the phone and you admitted to rampant cheating, I was confident you were going to do the right thing. When you started talking about running a script, I lost a bit of confidence, but I was still sure you were going to do the right thing. When a few days went past and still nothing was done yet AFTER our phone conversation, I lost even more confidence, but I emailed you and you said you would take care of it that day. When a few days after that, you had STILL done nothing, my confidence was almost non-existant.

I tried for over 2 weeks to contact someone to let them know this cheating was going on before anyone even acknowledged me. Then it took over a week once I did get through to you for you to do anything about it. Even if you call it human error, this whole mistake could have been prevented if someone just lent an ear to me when the contest first got off the ground.

I still respect you as a person, but I feel you have made some very wrong decisions during this process and i'm sorry that you feel this "is blown way out of proportion". To me, it means a great deal to know I can take part in a promotion run by a certain entity and have the faith in them to know it will be run fair. I was fortunate enough to not lose money during this certain promotion, but there are a great deal of promotions run by your company that do entail risking a monetary value and when I do take that risk, I don't want to end up getting treated unfairly. So, no, I do not feel this "is blown way out of proportion" at all and i'm sure many people on this board feel the same way and are awaiting the outcome of this.

[Theodore Donald Kiravatsos]

The whole time reading about how you were essentially stolen from, I couldn't help but think of Super/System (1), page 25:

HONOR - A gambler's Ace-in-the-hole

Those who stole from you were really despicable. And for the house to be so inattentive to your communications, I think of p. 26:

"You must maintain a reputaion for honor in the gambling business. Your word must be your bond..."

Indeed their reputation is sullied to the extent that a deeply flawed promotion was offered, and to the extent that they totally ignored your concerns for so long.

[Baulucky]

I think you should keep enjoying being the Llama in the middle of your picture avatar.

You have manifested your intentions.

[LLAMA]

For those of you that care and were following this thread to see if anything would come of this...

I have let this die down because I was in discussions with Chris Welch, the Marketing Director of Loudvision(UB's marketing agency) and he asked me to give him a few days to look into this personally.

With permission from him, here is the part of the email with his decision on the matter...

"I do have alot of sympathy with your point of view and in your position I too would be disappointed. However looking at the evidence I cannot reopen a closed promotion,we acted in good faith when discovering the flaw and under our rules our decision is final.

Having said that we would like to offer you the following as our way of compensating you for your obvious disappointment and frustration and for the fact that we, on this occasion did not meet the usual high standards we set ourselves.

- credit your account with $250 dollars
- send you an "Everything Phil" pack which includes signed dvd/book and a bobblehead.

and because we know you wanted to meet Phil so much I would like to invite you to a personal online heads-up match with Phil Helmuth at a time tbc ,which if you were to win, we will add an additional $250 into your account."

If anyone is interested, I will post the date and time of the match against Phil when they get back to me with the details.

Feel free to discuss this, i'd like to know what people think of all this and the outcome.

[bennyhana]

it's no trip to vegas, but I'd take it. I'm not a big phil fan though.

[Wetdog]

OT but ...

In the RGP thread Granny linked was this gem:

[ QUOTE ]
From: William Loughborough - view profile
Date: Thurs, Dec 5 2002 11:14 am
Email: William Loughborough <[email protected]>
Groups: rec.gambling.poker
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On Thu, 05 Dec 2002 15:42:22 GMT, "Robert Ladd" <[email protected]> wrote:
> But if poker is ever to approach mainstream America,

"poker" IS mainstream America. There are probably 10 times as many people
who play poker than the total who have ever been in a card room and/or an
online poker site - or read all our posturings herein.

We tend to pretend some proprietorship over "poker" but that's a really
absurd vanity.

If some TV "tour" of tournament poker gets off the ground, it won't have
much effect on the actual game called "poker".

Love.

[/ QUOTE ]

Is this guy a visionary or what?

[canada_dry]

Thanks for this post. This now lets me know NOT to get an account with Ultimate Bet. They obviously tolerate cheating. F*** THEM!!!

[Dangeresque]

Uh... there's no way that Something Awful goons would only run a vote count up to 2200 if there were an orchestrated cheating campaign. I'm surprised given the number of steadfastly loyal 'goons' that they only got 2200 votes. Also, as is often the case, such as the TYMND entry into the Snakes on a Plane contest, someone may votehack in an attempt to disqualify the competitor.