Cheating at AP, updated cliff notes

[0evg0]

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What would make you happier assuming you lost money to the superusers?

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would you rather have money or money and an apology

what a stupid poll, get this out of here

[Exitonly]

Uh... i'd have way more incentive to play there if they acknowledged it and detailed what they've done to prevent/take legal action vs the employees.

i dunno, but them sweeping it under the rug and giving ike/druff their money back and pretending this never happend would piss me off a lot.. (though maybe i dont matter?)

[ASPoker8]

I honestly feel as if Dan Druff has been bought off or something silly because his new stance seems illogical and different from his past reactions.

To imply that AP can't simply say something to the tune of the following is silly, imo:

"Yes, #363 exists, as do various other accounts that were created when we were beta-testing the site. We needed these accounts to ensure that our software worked adequately. These accounts were intended to be dismissed once real-money play began on AP. The fact that one of them was hijacked and used to cheat behind our backs is unfortunate and will certainly never happen again"

[rzzldazzl22]

personally i dont want to see some sort of compromise with absolute poker and tbh i dont want to see them admit to a superuser account i think its in our best interest that they dont bc at the rate this story is exploding it will be picked up by a mass media outlet and if they still refuse to admit blame in the face of such evidince the public pressure will only increase until this story ends up on 60 min 20/20 or some other top news organization and i think the story hitting that high would be our best opportunity for implementing spin towards regulation...just my 2 cents

[Cruzincat]

I wish I could say I saw this coming back when AP stopped showing the player's location, but I didn't. If there is a future for AP, they need to bring this back in a way that it is impossible to put anything but the truth as to your location. How much faster would this cheating have been picked up if all the cheater's location had listed San Jose, CR?

[ibluffoldladies]

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wow, terrible ideas from dan druff. pathetic, actually.

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Really feels like you're treating AP with kid gloves Druff.
I do appreciate your effort, but I also question the motive.

[Phil153]

Druff,

You don't seem to realize that AP's BS cover up, which contained blatant lies when they thought they couldn't get caught, is as big a story as the original evidence.

And I don't think public admission would be the end of them. They're not going to say "there was a superuser account who could do anything it wanted". There are ways of saying it.

You also don't seem to realize that there needs to be a public admission in order for there to be public steps taken to ensure this can't happen again. Such as firing/prosecuting/blacklisting anyone involved. Such as getting a trusted independent security company in. Such as hiring a well known manager as their public face, and giving them full access to everything.

I for one will never go back without full disclosure (there's no way to know I'm not being [censored]), but if some of the above steps were taken, I would. Because those steps do guarantee that [censored] like this will never happen again. Nothing else will suffice given how deep this went.

[sethypooh21]

Seriously, I can't believe Druff is getting all this flack for trying to find the a solution in which he is reimbursed. Given that AP will have a hard time recovering from this, period, it's not unreasonable for him to think that restitution with no admission is the best case scenario, and given the amount of "skin in the game" he has...

I'm just saying that it's pretty easy to take a stand on principle with someone else's money.

[jalexand42]

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There is too much evidence out there at this point for AP to be able to deny that this occurred. AP's continuing to make statments like the two we've seen serve only to make people angry and frustrated. Nobody here is interested in reading carefully-prepared corporate statements about how nothing nefarious occurred. There are a lot of really smart people on 2+2, and none of us will buy it in the face of everything else we know. What we have all been looking for are truthful and plausible answers to all of our questions.

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This is true. Nothing short of explaining what happened is going to suffice here. The PUBLIC perception now is that there has been a complete breach of the most important thing to a poker room - trust that the game is fair.

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Then he asked one question that sounded promising -- the first thing I've heard from an AP employee that gives me hope. He asked me if the players would be satisfied if we were to simply be returned the money that we lost to GRAYCAT, STEAMROLLER, POTRIPPER, and DOUBLEDRAG.

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This right here is admission that something went on that is nefarious.

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I told Roger that I understood AP's situation. I said that I realized that they're "damned if they do, damned if they don't", regarding owning up to the superuser situation. If they admit their games were compromised by an insider with access to hole cards, it will be a huge story and nobody will trust their games again. If they stick to their bogus claim that no cheating occurred, everyone will be angry and feel cheated, as the existing mountain of evidence clearly says otherwise.

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WE KNOW THEIR GAMES were compromised. That is proven. They need to explain exactly what happened and who did it and how they are addressing it -- or noone with a shred of intelligence would trust them again.

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There's no doubt that chip-dumping occurred on a massive scale. Chip-dumping is very much against AP rules, and obviously anyone engaging in it in such huge amounts is up to something no-good. It's not like it was a case of me dumping to another known player as a means to trade chips between sites. These were completely unknown accounts dumping to one another, and never being seen again. Surely AP could not be blamed for confiscating the money belonging to these chip-dumpers. Therefore, if the money from these accounts could be returned to those they won it from, on the basis that the accounts were closed for chip dumping, this would be a way that AP could legitimately return the money to the victims without admitting that a superuser account exists. Basically, they'd just be confiscating money from shady accounts (based upon the chip-dumping) and returning it to where it originally came from (instead of just keeping it on AP). Nobody has to admit to a superuser. Nobody has to admit that cheating went down. The affected parties will have their money back. There's no ideal solution to this mess, but I feel that this is probably the closest we can get to it.

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Are you kidding? Why the hell would they need an excuse to punish the involved parties? Absolute knows what happened, it is clearly cheating in some form, they don't need to invent 'chip dumping' excuses to confiscate funds. As for 'no good outcome', well obviously there is no good outcome for absolute right now. However, if they don't come completely clean, their reputation is COMPLETELY destroyed. When an insider of a company does things wrong, the company survives by destroying that individual and fixing what that individual did, not by stonewalling and not admitting what happened.

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Let's face it, guys. While it would be wonderful for Absolute to fully own up to everything that has been found here, it would be suicide for the company. If they were to admit to the abuse of a superuser account -- especially by a former/current employee -- it would likely be picked up by the media everywhere. Major poker magazines would be all over it, blogs and internet news agencies (maybe even Drudge) would be all over it, and it might even make it onto the mainstream television and print news. AP has their own future to think about. They can't and won't destroy their own business just to satisfy those who were harmed by this. While it would be great for us to see AP announce, "Yes, there was a superuser. Yes, everyone was right all along. Yes, it was an inside job. Yes, we are giving everyone their money back", this is not something we can realistically expect, given the fallout that would occur.


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Media is already going to be all over this. That's way too late. How do you think it's going to come across if AP doesn't fully disclose what happened, that media will completely latch onto that stonewalling and sensationalize it.

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If certain employees or ex-employees had the idea that they could cheat and get away with it, they now know better.

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If AP doesn't publicly disclose the cheaters and go after them, guess what? They got away with it.

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The money has to be returned. If it isn't, we can never forgive AP. If we get every stolen dollar back, I vote we give them another chance.

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Getting the money back is only part of what is needed here. Why would anyone in the poker community settle for less than a full explanation and full refund of the funds?

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I will report again when I receive the phone call this afternoon.

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Sorry for any perceived harshness, but this type of compromise does a disservice to everyone that plays poker online. I do appreciate you talking to them and reporting back.

[MyTurn2Raise]

come on...Druff is trying to get alot of money back

quit hating on him

you can say that you disagree with him, but he's just doing what 90%+ of us would do

hell, most of us play poker for a living--we are not exactly model citizens