[Shaffer]

First, sorry for the long post.

Okay, I just have to de-lurk and post here that this story is truly incredible, and it's truly a statement to the nature of the Internet age that a group of people with no more resources than an Internet message board, a smoking gun Excel file, and a good deal of technical savvy can blow the lid off a story like this as thousands of lurkers can watch it unfold almost in real time. Amazing work.

Back OT, to the topic of restitution, it seems to me that there will be no "fair" way to provide restitution to all players. If I had to guess, I'd say that for tournaments, they'll likely bump everyone up a slot in the money in any tournament where a superuser was involved, meaning in the cases of tournaments won by superusers it will benefit the 2nd place player more than anyone else. This isn't precisely "fair" to, say, the people that POTRIPPER victimized earlier in the tourney that still finish well out of the money even when moved up one slot (who may have gone on to win the tourney had they not been cheated, who knows), but if POTRIPPER's winnings are evenly distributed to all participants, that's hardly fair to the 2nd place player, who, as the tournement actually played out, would have won much more had he not been victimized.

As to cash games, I find it seriously doubtful that AP will dig through the hand histories and find exactly who lost what to POTRIPPER and refund that amount. As pointed out, this doesn't compensate for money lost through "bets saved", and unfortunately there is no way to quantify how much money *would* have been lost by POTRIPPER in each of the hands where "bets saved" were a factor. It's not like we can go back and replay those hands legitimately.

For cash games, I think that estimation of EV lost is probably the only "fair" way to go about recompense. Take the total amount of money that a cheater won, and compensate it to affected cash game players as a percentage of the hands that they played against the cheaters vs. total number of opponent-hands that the cheaters faced off against in affected hands. It's before noon here on Sunday so you're not about to see any equations from me, suffice to say that it should be the most accurate gauge of EV lost due to being at a table with a cheater in a cash game.

Of course this will affect the players that lost at a faster to the cheater than others, which probably has nothing to do with skill (or may in fact have an inverse relation), but unfortunately that's probably going to have to be written off as part of the normal variance of gambling. I don't see a solution to the payout issue that's not going to have that as an issue.