[adanthar]

This probably belongs in politics, and I will probably repost it there eventually. That said:
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Having just gotten off the phone with a relatively important person at AP, which should just about end this chapter of the story (tomorrow morning, anyway), let me now say a couple of things about this thread:

First off, *every single piece of research* Nat and I had pointed to Scott Tom and AJ Green. These may or may not be the people that wind up implicated, because either one of them may 'merely' be guilty of gross negligence. I won't comment on that yet and it doesn't really matter, because the more important thing is this:

After over a month of completely unpaid, volunteer research, comprising more time and energy than I care to admit, one thing that is extremely clear is that the free market does not even remotely work. The reason is twofold and self evident:

1)AP got 81(!!!) people in their 100 person guaranteed 1K event on Wednesday, when they were still in the middle of the coverup,when every single one of those people knew exactly what was going on, and when AP could, looking at the fact that even their biggest tournament only dropped 20%, have decided to stonewall us into oblivion;

2)One of the major free market supporters immediately took off and ran with the free market angle without doing the least bit of fact checking, something that would have taken him exactly two minutes to do.

In other words, this scandal is the best poker example ever that, when faced with a decision that maximizes the short term utility to themselves at the cost of the long term utility to the entire industry they base their livelihood on, the vast majority of humans involved will take the immediate profit, and damn the consequences. In the meantime,

1)Many of the masses predictably reacted to this discovery with the standard "online is rigged" outcry - even when *they are 2+2'ers that know something about poker* and the person that co-uncovered the entire freaking thing was/is telling them the opposite;

2)Just as many others didn't bother to do any research and came up with their own theories of how the whole thing evolved without even reading the original post in BBV, much less any of the other stuff.

You know what the best thing to come out of this is? The KGC, a licensing agency which has heretofore done *absolutely nothing* to police their licensees, woke up and will now act as a proper authority, *after* multiple senior executives at one of their holdings embezzled a million dollars, *after* the embezzlers (that is the proper crime here!) proved to be the worst criminals ever, and *after* they happened across two of the literal handful of people in a position of authority in this field that could actually drive public opinion to do something about it. Despite that, without the Excel file, which might well have been incompetence rather than whistleblowing, they had a good chance of getting away with it anyway.

Oh yeah, and nobody's going to jail, anyhow. Lack of regulation sure is awesome.